Extensive and damning!
'Bina.
| QUOTE |
| TRACKING CIA OVERCLASSIFICATION "What should Congress and the people do about an intelligence service they cannot trust?" asks author Thomas Powers in a searching essay in the latest New York Review of Books (12/16/04, not yet online). The basic untrustworthiness of the CIA extends beyond fateful matters of high policy, such as whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, to the most mundane details of classification policy. Clearly, there are innumerable aspects of intelligence that are properly and necessarily classified. But just as clearly, CIA habitually overclassifies, whether from an abundance of caution, or out of bad faith, or simply due to error. One recent instance of erroneous CIA overclassification was spotted by arms control analyst and blogger Jeffrey Lewis. He noted that a table of historical Chinese nuclear weapons tests that was censored in a recent CIA publication, Tracking the Dragon, was published in full in another intelligence document. He provides copies of both for the reader's comparison. See "Tracking the Dragon: Unneccessary Redactions" by Jeffrey Lewis in his blog ArmsControlWonk.com, November 26: http://tinyurl.com/3wwmt |