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President Obama created by executive order Tuesday a National Declassification Center to oversee efforts to make once-secret government documents public. The order comes as part of Obama's promise to push government to err on the side of disclosure as it tackles the need to keep certain information from the public. In a post on the White House blog, William H. Leary, the senior director of records and access management at the National Security Council, writes that the effort is aimed at shifting the burden of defending secrecy to the government.

Quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG MONDAY, JUNE 29TH, 2009 AT 1:14 AM The Declassification Policy Forum Posted by Jesse Lee Over at the Open Government blog, Martin Faga, Acting Chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board, invites you to be a part of the review of declassification policy. Read his introductory post, then read Board Member Herbert Briick’s outline of the kinds of questions they will be looking into and give them your input.

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/foreign_policy/ THE AGENDA • FOREIGN POLICY THE AGENDA FOREIGN POLICY President Obama and Vice President Biden will renew America’s security and standing in the world through a new era of American leadership. The Obama-Biden foreign policy will end the war in Iraq responsibly, finish the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, secure nuclear weapons and loose nuclear materials from terrorists, and renew American diplomacy to support strong alliances and to seek a lasting peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Afghanistan and Pakistan Afghanistan: Obama and Biden will refocus American resources on...

The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information...

Democrats Suggest Double Standard on Leaks White House Aides' Actions Are Cited By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, April 24, 2006; Page A02 Key Democratic legislators yesterday joined Republicans in saying they do not condone the alleged leaking of classified information that led to last week's firing of a veteran CIA officer. But they questioned whether a double standard exists that lets the White House give reporters secretly declassified information for political purposes. "I don't know this woman and I do not condone leaks of classified information," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Permanent...

Bush Was Right About Iraq's Quest For Uranium By John Leo In a surprising editorial, The Washington Post deviated from the conventional anti-Bush media position on two counts. It said President Bush was right to declassify parts of a National Intelligence Estimate to make clear why he thought Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. And the editorial said ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson was wrong to think he had debunked Bush on the nuclear charge because Wilson's statements after visiting Niger actually "supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium." In the orthodox narrative line, Wilson is the truth-teller and the Bush...

PRESIDENT BUSH is piously opposed to leaks, unless he's the person doing the leaking. The president has now acknowledged that he authorized the leak of a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq to bolster his case for the invasion of Iraq. In retrospect, the administration now says much of the information in the top secret report was faulty. But that's another story. Before Bush declassified the report, it included caveats and dubious assumptions that should have given him pause. But they were conveniently ignored in his rush to go to war. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said...

An embarrassing move this afternoon from CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In his now-famous court filing in which he said that former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby testified that he had been authorized to leak portions of the then-classified National Intelligence Estimate, Fitzgerald wrote, "Defendant understood that he was to tell [New York Times reporter Judith] Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium." That sentence led a number of reporters and commentators to suggest that, beyond the issue of the leak itself, the administration was lying...

Lost in the brouhaha over President Bush's "leak" of "classified" information is the real reason for the outrage: The "leak" proved that Joe Wilson was a liar. Among the things that bothered us in this affair is that it's deemed first-rate, Pulitzer-worthy journalism when a major newspaper prints classified information that our enemies find useful, but when the commander-in-chief authorizes the release of declassified material to defend his administration's position it is treated as a betrayal of the public trust, if not an impeachable offense. When the New York Times last December revealed that the National Security Agency listened in...

The most important thing is whether Scooter Libby’s actions were legal. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s April 6 article about the Libby court papers pretty much follows the Democratic Party talking points – i.e. Bush leaked classified information. The article states, "President Bush authorized Vice President Cheney's former top aide to divulge classified intelligence information to a reporter in an effort to defend Bush's decision to go war against Iraq, according to the aide's testimony in court papers made public yesterday." Yet, on page 24 of the court papers, it unqualifiedly states, “he (Libby) understood that only three people – the President,...

 Did the lead editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post that defended the President’s authorizing the declassification of a secret NIE report on Iraq WMD misstate the facts surrounding the Administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence?The entire left wing of the blogosphere believes so. Jay Rosen believes so. Even Tom McGuire, still doggedly carrying his lantern in daylight looking for one honest man in the Fitzgerald prosecution, believes so.Certainly the figure at the center of the firestorms believes so. Three years ago, Joe Wilson was a nobody, an ex-Ambassador just trying to start a new business venture using his extensive contacts in Africa...

It’s certainly not often that a conservative can say this, but today’s editorial in the Washington Post entitled “A Good Leak” represents a bold and almost unprecedented demonstration of support for President George W. Bush by one of America’s leading liberal newspapers. Frankly, I had to check and double-check the web address while pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.Yet, there it was: “PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear...

PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.

WASHINGTON, April 7 — That President Bush authorized an aide to disclose classified intelligence on Iraqi weapons, as asserted in court papers, comes as no shock to official Washington. The leaking of secrets has long been a favored tool of policy debate, political combat and diplomatic one-upmanship. "We've had leaking of this kind since the administration of George Washington," said Rick Shenkman, a presidential historian at George Mason University.

FOR THE LEFT, “FITZMAS” CAME YESTERDAY. A court brief filed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald states President Bush and Vice President Cheney declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, allowing I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to defend the administration in interviews with the press. In a typically mendacious sleight-of-hand, the Left has conflated this with the outing of non-covert CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame, intimating this “proves” Bush named her to “punish” her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV. Although Fitzgerald’s brief actually has nothing to do with the Plame leak – which he has never been treated as a crime –...

APRIL 6--A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that President George W. Bush authorized him to leak information from a classified intelligence report to a New York Times reporter. Details of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's testimony were included in a court filing made yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is prosecuting Libby for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements in connection with the probe into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. According to Fitzgerald's filing, an excerpt of which you'll find below, Libby, 55, testified in 2003 that...

by Mark Finkelstein April 8, 2006 When things got a bit testy this morning between 'Long' Jim Pinkerton and 'Short' Ellen Ratner on Fox & Friends Weekend's eponymous 'Long & the Short of It' segment, Pinkerton proposed a peace plan that other warring parties might well wish to adopt: "let NewsBusters.org sort this out." The bone of contention was the substance of just what information it was that President Bush declassified - some would say leaked - that Scooter Libby is in turn alleged to have provided to the press - presumably in the person of Judy Miller of the...

Dems' Falsely Attack The President For "Leaking" Information That Was Declassified Legally And Appropriately (3 years ago). FACT: The President And The Vice President Have The Authority To Declassify Information: Vice President Cheney: "There is an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and it, obviously, focuses first and foremost on the President, but also includes the Vice President." (Fox News' "Special Report," 2/15/06) "Cheney Was Referring To Executive Order 13292, Issued By President Bush On March 25, 2003, Which Dealt With The Handling Of Classified Material. That Order Was Not An Entirely New Document But Was, Instead, An...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence agencies have been secretly removing from public access at the National Archives thousands of historical documents that were available for years, The New York Times reported on Monday. The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the CIA and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton, the Times said on its Web site.

The High Cost Of Openness By Notra Trulock April 26, 2002 The Energy Department recently declassified its fifth report to Congress on "inadvertent" disclosures of classified nuclear weapons information. For the past three years, classification experts have been scouring millions of pages of supposedly declassified government documents dumped into the public domain under the Clinton administration’s misguided openness policy. They have uncovered a gold mine of nuclear warhead secrets that, according to an Energy Department assessment, "would aid an adversary in obtaining a weapon of mass destruction." In 1993, citing the end of the Cold War and the "rapidly changing...