Earlier in his second presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to create a” Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and release all records on Deep State eavesdropping, censorship, and abuses of power”. The saying” Truth and Reconciliation” brings up organizations that were established to investigate crimes committed by communist dictatorships that had toppled them, such as East Germany’s or the South African government’s ex- racism governments. The frame suggests that Trump opinions the overall past generation, from” Russiagate” to the “lawfare” situations entangling himself and his advisers, as the fruit of an illegal plan that threw the rule of law out the window.
This view of recent history, definitely viewed as political by Trump’s competitors, may be tested by the statistics, once they become better known and documented. But the president-elect’s idea that the intricacies of the U. S. state must be more open is long late.
According to Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, who introduced a bipartisan” Classification Reform for Transparency Act” last July, the U. S. government spends$ 18 billion every year classifying information. ” Over-classification”, they argue, “undermines national security by limiting information sharing between national firms”, as in the famous knowledge problems before 9/11. British citizens, you may add, spend billions annually to aid in the government’s covert collection of information.
The classification dragon, which was the result of the United States ‘ growing security equipment during the Cold War, is of questionable constitutional history. The intelligence agencies established to combat the Russian threat spread their tentacles even wider than their predecessors ‘ failed attempts to disband after its departure in 1991, just as foreign military interventions denied citizens a true “peace income.”
No fewer than” 17 U.S. knowledge companies” agreed on alleged Russian election meddling in 2016, which is an undercount, given that the site of the Director of National Intelligence then lists 18. To define roughly three million documents per year, each of these 18 organizations spend on average$ 1 billion each. Do so many strategies actually merit keeping hidden from the public?
None of this compares to the extensive backlog of almost 100 years of papers that the United States government still holds for its records. Thousands of World War II documents remain unreachable, despite the CIA’s claim that the final labeled World War I documents were made public. I learned that many of the documents related to the USSR’s Lend-Lease Aid were just declassified in the 1970s while researching my guide Stalin’s War. I had no idea why information about American generosity had been kept secret in Washington, despite my long experience with Russian archival limitations and the strict security of Soviet files regarding the size of American military and material assistance, which undermines important myths about the” Great Patriotic War,” which the Russian state has just closed its sole Lend-Lease museum.
Most of us anticipate secrecy from Moscow, despite Russia’s current nationalist shift and the country’s recent ban on archival access. However, our individual state should be better than we can vouch for. True, U. S. citizens have the right, under the Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) passed in 1967, to request access to classified government files— but the government can reject these requests under nine “exemption categories“, covering everything from reasonable privacy concerns ( bank and medical data ) and trade secrets to open-ended concerns about “national security” and nebulous “legal privileges“.
The U.S. government has been engaging in so heinous behavior that Congress passed a law in 1992 mandating that all files been declassified by 2017 because of controversial issues like the JFK murder. Although then-President Trump vowed to cooperate and released 53, 000 new data to the government, he postponed more produces, citing “identifiable regional security, law enforcement, and international politics issues”. President Biden released 17, 000 more files, but made a similar statement in 2023 justifying continued classification.
During the 2024 campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unambiguously called for the last JFK assassination files to be released, and President-elect Trump has again vowed to do so, mostly recently in an interview with Joe Rogan. The National Archives claims that “99 % of the Kennedy assassination files” have been made public, but it is amazing that only 1 % of those files remain secret in light of a bipartisan consensus that dates back decades.
What is the U. S. government hiding? The academic establishment cautions against” conspiracy theories” because they are so overtly private, from “grassy knoll” scenarios in the JFK assassination to claims that President Roosevelt knew about the Pearl Harbor attack to more recent controversy surrounding redactions in the 9 / 11 Commission Report. Recency may be justified in the most recent case, but it must be balanced with the demands of the 9 / 11 families for justice and closure. But what live source, or sensitive military secret, could possibly be exposed in JFK assassination documents dating to 1963 or earlier? From the Second World War, which ended 79 years ago? Or Watergate, the main events of which transpired over 50 years ago?
A presidential “task force” of the kind suggested in the Classification Reform for Transparency Act ( which is still awaiting approval ) should be established. Executive Order 13526 of 2009, which was signed by President Obama, established a 10-year cap on the length of the classification period for more sensitive files. But the nine telltale “exemptions” were left in place, allowing security agencies to continue stonewalling — while adding massively to the vault of our nation’s secrets.
We could significantly lower the cost of classification going forward and restore public trust in Washington, D.C. by reducing exemptions to a select few basic categories, such as” sources at risk,” private data of living citizens, military-technological and trade secrets, and shorten classification to a single presidential term of four years ( for example, to stop an opposition party from mining recent presidential files for use in election campaigns ).
Meanwhile, why not declassify all U. S. government files more than 25 years old? Government agencies may still redact personal data, trade secrets, or military secrets if a strict exemption threshold is met, but the files themselves should be opened. The government should bear the burden of classification rather than requiring citizens and historians to submit FOIA applications to get rid of it.
Files should be open to the public unless otherwise specified, not secret by default. We as citizens have a right to know what our government does in our name and our own history.
