The appointment of former Central Intelligence
Agency director Michael Hayden to the Public
Interest Declassification Board(PIDB) and former
senator Warren Rudman to the CIA’s External
Advisory Board (EAB) will ensure less openness
in the intelligence community and more obduracy
in the CIA.
The late senator Daniel P. Moynihan created
the PIDB in the 1990s to reduce the “torment
of secrecy,” which denied important information
on national security to the American people.
The EAB was designed to deal with the complexities
of managing the CIA and to improve the access
of intelligence information to the Congress
and the American people. Hayden and Rudman have
a cold war preoccupation with secrecy and have
never been known for improving access. Sen.
Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is responsible for the
Hayden appointment; CIA director Leon Panetta
appointed Rudman.
As Steven Aftergood, the editor of Secrecy News
noted, Hayden is “not well known as a
classification critic or a proponent of declassification.”
As director of the National Security Agency
(NSA), Hayden instituted the warrantless eavesdropping
program that violated the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment
of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful
seizures and searches.
In defending warrantless eavesdropping at the
National Press Club in January 2006, he argued
that the Fourth Amendment did not stipulate
the importance of “probable cause,”
which of course it does. Hayden also conceded
that he relied on advice for the program from
White House lawyers and never considered consulting
the legal staff of NSA.
Soon after arriving at the CIA as director,
Hayden began an unprecedented investigationof
the Office of the Inspector General, which had
been critical of the CIA’s renditions
and interrogations programs. Hayden even targeted
the statutory inspector general of the CIA,
John Helgerson, who had recommended the creation
of “accountability boards” for CIA
officers, including former director George Tenet,
involved in 9/11 intelligence failures.
The failure of the chairmen of the congressional
oversight committees to come to Helgerson’s
defense made it extremely difficult for the
IG to do his job and he announced his retirement
seven months ago. The White House and the CIA
have still not named a replacement for Helgerson,
which is particularly damaging in view of the
high-level investigations of CIA detentions
and interrogations programs as well as the numerous
secret prisons or “black sites”
established after 9/11, which would benefit
from an aggressive Office of the Inspector General.
In addition to naming Rudman to the EAB, Panetta
has made the former senator the director’s
special advisor on the Senate Select Intelligence
Committee’s (SSCI) special inquiry of
past practices in detentions and interrogations.
Panetta has his own review group within the
CIA on these practices, but has prominently
placed current members of the National Clandestine
Service (NCS) in the group. The Rudman appointment
and the use of NCS officers does not augur will
for genuine openness with the Senate inquiry.
The NCS has been a major player in the culture
of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction
of the 92 torture tapes that has been investigated
by the FBI for nearly two years.
By placing Rudman as an intermediary between
the SSCI and the CIA’s review group, Panetta
has ensured himself that the most damaging information
on detentions and interrogations will never
see the light of day. Rudman was the most active
member of the SSCI in trying to block CIA officials
from testifying against the nomination of Robert
Gates as CIA director in 1991.
Rudman actually branded those few individuals
willing to come forward as “McCarthyites”
in an effort to marginalize their testimony
and to make sure additional witnesses would
not testify or submit written affidavits against
Bob Gates. There is ample evidence, moreover,
of Rudman’s strong, even bellicose, partisan
politicking over the years.
One of the greatest unknown scandals within
the intelligence community is the over-classification
of government documents in order to keep important
information out of the hands of the American
people. It costs billions of dollars for government
and industry to classify documents, with several
million individuals in the government and private
industry having the right to classify information.
Government vaults hold over 1.5 billion pages
of classified information that are more than
twenty-five years old and, thus, unavailable
to scholars and researchers, let along the general
public. Documents are typically classified to
hide embarrassing political information, not
secrets. Greater respect for openness might
have prevented the policies that led to the
torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the
CIA’s network of secret prisons, and the
CIA’s detentions and interrogations programs.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy and adjunct
professor of government at Johns Hopkins University,
is The Public Record’s National Security
and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years
with the CIA, the National War College, and
the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of
Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Copyright 2009 The Public
Record
