'Secrets' Perplex Panel

Aftergood cited the "secret" stamp on Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba's report of "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" inflicted on Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Carol A. Haave, deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security, said most misclassification was unintentional, resulting from misunderstanding or failure to declassify data that are no longer sensitive. She said a weakness, particularly for anti-terrorism efforts, was that those who collect intelligence determine its classification.

"Collectors of information can never know how it could best be used," Haave said. "We have to move to a user-driven environment."

Leonard, the Archives official, said another obstacle to sharing anti-terrorist data as the Sept. 11 commission envisioned was that federal law divides the authority for writing the rules that govern secrets. The CIA director has authority to protect intelligence sources and methods, the Energy Department has power to write regulations to shield nuclear secrets, the Pentagon has control over classifying NATO data and the National Security Agency can define eavesdropping communications secrets.

"All these variations have nuances that impede cooperation," Leonard said.

Aftergood, who is fighting in court to declassify the overall budget for intelligence agencies, argued that declassifying that total "could break the logjam" of overclassification. That was also recommended by the Sept. 11 commission.

Leonard said a 2000 law created a public interest declassification board to recommend release of secrets in important cases, but the president and Congress never appointed members.

For the curious: The CIA classified for 20 years longtime Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's preference for pisco sours, according to subcommittee staff members citing previously classified documents published by the National Security Archive, a private anti-secrecy institute at George Washington University.

And a CIA employee made up a story of a terrorist plot to hijack Santa Claus and inserted it into classified traffic. "So, apparently, the fact that CIA had a sense of humor was classified," said subcommittee counsel Lawrence J. Halloran.