Shooting down the Star Wars myth

When Wikileaks “Scoops” NARA on Their Own Publicly Available Documents, It’s Time for Agencies to Fully Embrace Effectively Digitizing All-Things FOIA On Monday, Wikileaks “released” the “Kissinger Cables,” (also called the Public Library of US Diplomacy or PlusD) a fascinating collection of 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic correspondences from the mid-1970s. The cables are easily sifted through thanks to the sleek, high-powered search function Wikileaks built for their “release,” making the collection all the more appealing to document hounds. As a result, documents that would likely have fallen through the cracks if not for the interest generated by all-things Wikileaks are receiving much deserved attention and are producing some very important revelations. The only problem is, Wikileaks didn’t “release” the cables. A side-by-side image of the NARA and Wikileaks search functions. As a frequent FOIA requester, it seems to me that Wikileaks’ portrayal of US declassifiers acting somehow sinisterly does a disservice to the National Archives and Department of State, two of the better FOIA agencies. Like this: Like Loading...

New START Ratification: Seeing the Bigger Picture » FAS Strategic Security Blog By Hans M. Kristensen Kevin Kallmyer at CSIS has an interesting recap of a recent debate between Paula DeSutter and Mort Halperin about the New START Treaty. Ratification of the treaty is held up in Congress by a handful of Senators who (mis)use questions about, among other issues, verification to extort billions of dollars to pet nuclear modernization projects at the expense of greater U.S. interests. During the CSIS debate, Mort Halperin provided an enlightening anecdote about how to judge whether ratification of the treaty is in the U.S. interest. How do you decide whether a Treaty is in the American interest in relation to verification? Check out the full debate at the CSIS web site. This publication was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and Ploughshares Fund.

The FOIA Project | Freeing information through public accountability Senate Approval of New START Moves Nuclear Arms Control Forward » FAS Strategic Security Blog By Hans M. Kristensen The Federation of American Scientists today applauded the Senate’s ratification of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) between the United States and Russia. The Senate voted 71 to 26 in favor of ratification of the treaty. The approval of the treaty is a victory for common sense and an impressive achievement for the Obama administration in overcoming stubborn opposition from Cold Warriors to modest nuclear arms reductions. New START does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead, but it reduces the limit for how many of them can be deployed on long-range ballistic missiles and heavy bombers. The United States and Russia possess more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and will continue to do so when the treaty limit is reached seven years from now. This publication was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and Ploughshares Fund.

Poland risks Russia's wrath with Soviet nuclear attack map | World news Poland's new rightwing government yesterday risked a damaging confrontation with Russia when it published a Warsaw Pact map showing detailed plans for Soviet nuclear strikes against western Europe. Poland threw open the doors of its military archives to show how most of Europe would have been laid to waste in a nuclear conflagration between east and west. Dating from 1979, when presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were discussing detente, the map showed how Warsaw Pact forces would have responded to an attack by the Nato alliance. A series of red mushroom clouds over western Europe show that Soviet nuclear weapons strikes would have been launched at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium if Nato had struck first. Standing next to the fading map in Warsaw yesterday, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, said: "The objective of the exercise on this map is to take over most of western Europe - all of Germany, Belgium and Denmark."

New START and Missile Defense » FAS Strategic Security Blog I have not written here on the New START treaty, in part because everything that can be said has been said, well, almost everything…see below. The treaty is in no way revolutionary. I don’t think Reagan would bat an eyelash at it. Yet, while there is widespread bipartisan support for the treaty, including almost all the leading defense specialists from former Republican administrations, there is also some opposition to the treaty, with the Heritage Foundation having taken it on as a cause. Some of the critiques are truly bizarre, such as the treaty does not address Russian tactical nuclear weapons or North Korea. (On that last point, would one of the critics please sketch out how we would have included North Korea in the negotiation?) The one issue that opponents consistently latch onto is the supposed limits on missile defense. In the treaty proper, there is language that prohibits putting defensive missiles in offensive missile launchers.

The SOLO File: Declassified Documents Detail 'The FBI's Most Valued Secret Agents of the Cold War' Tim Weiner on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, April 9, 2012. Washington, D.C., April 10, 2012 – The "FBI's most valued secret agents of the Cold War," brothers Morris and Jack Childs, together codenamed SOLO, reported back to J. Edgar Hoover starting in 1958 about face-to-face meetings with top Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders including Mao and Khrushchev, while couriering Soviet funds for the American Communist Party, according to newly declassified FBI files cited in the new book by Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012). For more on Enemies, see last night's broadcast of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, featuring Tim Weiner, and the reviews by The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. FBI Director J, Edgar Hoover's most valued secret agent was a naturalized citizen of Russian/Ukrainian/Jewish origins named Morris Childs. Researchers have been requesting these documents for years, and with good reason. – William Burr

New START Treaty Has New Counting » FAS Strategic Security Blog By Hans M. Kristensen The White House has announced that it has reached agreement with Russia on the New START Treaty. Although some of the documents still have to be finished, a White House fact sheet describes that the treaty limits the number of warheads on deployed ballistic missiles and long-range bombers on both sides to 1,550 and the number of missiles and bombers capable of launching those warheads to no more than 700. The long-awaited treaty is a vital symbol of progress in U.S.-Russian relations and an important additional step in the process of reducing and eventually perhaps even achieving the elimination nuclear weapons. Yet while the treaty reduces the legal limit for deployed strategic warheads, it doesn’t actually reduce the number of warheads. The major provisions of the New START Treaty are: These limits don’t have to be met until 2017, and will remain in effect for three years until the treaty expires in 2020 (assuming ratification occurs this year). .

Nixon Fixation Pushes Professor to Listen to All Tapes Richard Nixon is always on Luke Nichter’s mind, so much so that the history professor was chatting about the 37th president’s European policies while his wife was giving birth. Nichter has spent the last decade listening to almost 3,000 hours of secretly recorded White House tapes of Nixon being Nixon, unvarnished. He has come to know Nixon’s views and locution so well that he finds himself subconsciously finishing the 37th president’s sentences. The result of his obsession is a new book, “The Nixon Tapes,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to coincide with the 40th anniversary today of the president’s resignation from office. Nichter is one of a handful of researchers who have listened to almost all the tapes that have been released by the National Archives. “The thing about Nixon is that at some moments he’s just as bad as his worst critics say,” said Nichter, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University, Central Texas, in Killeen. Avoiding Watergate Dean’s Book

Declassified State Department Cables On Al Qaeda-Linked Cell in California | INTELWIRE.com | Terrorism news and analysis, investigative reports and exclusive documents | By J.M. Berger, author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go To War In The Name Of Islam, Al State Department cables obtained by INTELWIRE describe Ayman Al Zawahiri's trip to California in 1995 and the activities of an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist cell in Northern California. The general outline of the cell's activities has been previously reported in newspapers and in Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam. The documents, obtained from the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, detail the trial of a group of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operatives captured in Egypt and Albania, with the latter being deported to Egypt. Because of this, the trial became known as the "Returnees from Albania" case. One of those tried in the case was Khaled Abu El Dahab, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lived in California with the notorious Al Qaeda infiltrator Ali Mohamed. Dahab was arrested in Egypt. Click here to read the full documents According to the cables:

“Anti-Duvalier Haitians might seek revenge, even after 20 years.” Baby Doc Duvalier, President for Life. Even before Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the US Ambassador to the Dominican Republic warned that Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s return to Haiti would be “unhelpful.” A February 2006 cable –published on The Guardian’s website– quotes the Foreign Minister of the Dominican Republic telling the US Ambassador that, “Anti-Duvalier Haitians might seek revenge, even after 20 years.” Today’s hot documents show why. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 220, which stated, “The flight of Jean-Claude [Baby Doc] Duvalier from Haiti has created an opportunity to break the pattern of Hatian history.” According to a 1970 US Interdepartmental National Security Study Memorandum, “Many of [Papa Doc's] acts have seemed deliberately calculated affronts to Western human values.” From National Security Study Memorandum Study 70 -- Haiti. Papa Doc initially won power with the backing of poor, lower-class Haitians. Like this:

Previously Classified Documents On Srebrenica Massacre And More | INTELWIRE.com | Terrorism news and analysis, investigative reports and exclusive documents | Edited by J.M. Berger, Al Qaeda terrorism expert, documentary maker, author, special subjects in If you support government transparency, but don't support the indiscriminate release of classified information, forget Wikileaks and check out the documents below. The PDF binder linked below contains 2,000 pages of previously classified State Department documents on the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, considered a turning point in the Bosnian civil war. The documents include real-time descriptions of the chaos at Srebrenica and U.N. efforts to manage refugees from the town, where Serbian forces killed thousands of Bosnian Muslims. All documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. INTELWIRE Srebrenica Dossier These documents were obtained during the course of reporting Sarajevo Ricochet, a documentary about the Bosnia war, including new information about Srebrenica and about the activities of Islamic extremist networks in Bosnia during the war.

On Morning of 9/11 Rumsfeld Warned of Ballistic Missiles, Not Terrorism Rumsfeld inspects a ground based interceptor missile at Fort Greeley, Alaska. On the morning of 11 September 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with Republican lawmakers to make his case as to why they had to fully support President Bush’s Missile Defense Program in the upcoming defense budget. According to recently declassified talking points from the breakfast meeting, Rumsfeld argued that the Republican congressmen must act to “defend ourselves, our friends and allies against the real and growing threat of ballistic missiles.” One of Rumsfeld’s arguments bemoaned that: “The United States spent approximately $11 billion last year on counter-terrorism efforts, nearly twice last year’s missile defense research costs.” As the meeting was coming to a close, Rumsfeld recalled that “someone walked in and handed [me] a note that said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.” The 2003 response to the snowflake listed eleven house members whom Rumsfeld met with. Like this:

What's a Louis-Philippe commode? - By Daniel Engber California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham resigned on Monday and pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and accepting millions of dollars in bribes. Included in his haul of illegal gifts was an 1850 Louis-Philippe commode purchased from an antique store—along with another 19th-century commode—for $7,200. A pretty nice chest of drawers. French furniture styles are categorized by political epoch. Louis-Philippe ruled France with the support of the bourgeoisie. The plain design and relative ubiquity of Louis-Philippe commodes make them far less valuable than those of earlier periods. Got a question about today's news? Explainer thanks Dan Garfink of French Accents and reader Matt Teper for asking the question.