There's Secrecy, and There's Expediency

In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general's office issued a report slamming the department's failure to consolidate a dozen government watch lists containing information about suspected terrorists. The lack of a reliable master list, the report said, slows efforts to find terrorists trying to enter the country or plan an attack.

At least that's what the report seemed to say. When it was released, entire pages were blacked out, ostensibly for security reasons.

But recently, the Washington-based National Security Archive found a surprise in its mailbox: a mostly uncut copy of the report. The editor of a legal publication had requested an unedited version of the 48-page report under the Freedom of Information Act two years ago. By the time the government handed it over last month, the requester, Daniel Kowalski of Bender's Immigration Bulletin, had lost interest. So he mailed the report to the archive, an independent institute that collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the FOIA. Its library, containing hundreds of thousands of once-secret notes, memos and reports, illuminates many of history's most significant, and clandestine, decisions and events.

"So many of these secrecy stamps look like Nixon's madman theory in operation," said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. "If everybody thinks you're just not rational, that keeps them off balance, whether they are your fellow bureaucrats, your outside critics, or even your international criminals and terrorists."

Often, secrecy-related edits aren't about national security -- or madness -- as much as they are about convenience. Although some of the redacted information is truly sensitive, some is merely embarrassing to the government. Other cuts reflect the bureaucratic fact that it's easier to keep information secret than to risk releasing too much.

Several portions of the 2004 report seem to bear that out. It took two years to get, but here's Page 26, in its edited and restored forms. The problems the report describes, by the way, persist.

-- Elizabeth Williamson