Government records experts on Tuesday decried a lack of transparency and a culture of "overclassification" at federal agencies that in some cases impedes national security goals.
The experts at a Heritage Foundation event said thousands of documents declared "top secret" by agencies in the name of national security often only serve to push a policy agenda and shield it from public scrutiny.
Thomas Joscelyn, a journalist and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, cited the classification of records from Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, and Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound as examples where the government withheld information from the public to promote a particular narrative of events.
Initial media reports on the documents from bin Laden’s compound indicated that al Qaeda’s sprawling networks continued to plot terrorist attacks against the United States and that bin Laden "remained an active leader," Joscelyn noted.
President Barack Obama sought to alter that narrative when he campaigned for reelection last year by claiming al Qaeda was "on the path to defeat."
The Obama administration has since only released 17 documents out of hundreds of thousands of files from bin Laden’s compound to perpetuate that narrative, he said, despite the president’s pledge to conduct more transparent counterterrorism operations.
Joscelyn said the government’s classification of more than 400 immediate threat reports from the bin Laden documents was "certainly within their purview."
Yet "you’re still in the hundreds of thousands of files realm" with documents that have not been disclosed and could be used by the public to hold the government accountable, he said.
Additionally, the George W. Bush administration’s initial reluctance to release more information about the detainees at Guantanamo backfired when the prisoners’ attorneys exploited an "information vacuum" to promote false information about their clients to the media, he said.
Charles Stimson, senior legal fellow and manager of Heritage’s National Security Law Program, said the "default" option of classification for agency workers would not change until the training infrastructure is improved.
"When you’re a senior government official, you don’t get a training program; you don’t get a video. You sit at your desk, figure out where the bathroom is, and there’s a security officer who reads you your security protocols," he said.
"There’s no institutional incentive to declassify."
Joscelyn differentiated the government’s efforts to advocate an agenda through classification with Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked documents revealing broad government surveillance of U.S. phone and Internet data.
Snowden, and others like WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, merely seek to push a different agenda that still denies full information to the public, he said.
"These are antigovernment activists who are trying to control the narrative," he said.
"Too often the initial narrative that those groups want to push forward catches."
Both Stimson and Joscelyn agreed that the Obama administration could do more to foster a culture of transparency, such as appointing independent entities to review classified documents at dozens of agencies that stretch back for decades.
"If President Obama really wanted to have the most transparent administration in the world, he could have it," Joscelyn said. "It’s that simple."