United States and Canada

Washington, D.C., 1 October 2004 - Secretary of State Henry Kissinger berated top aides for State Department efforts in 1976 to restrain human rights abuses by military dictators in Chile and Argentina, according to newly declassified transcripts of Mr. Kissinger's telephone calls ("telcons") posted on the Web today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "This is not an institution that is going to humiliate the Chileans," Kissinger told his Assistant Secretary on Latin America, William D. Rogers, on the phone, after a U.S.

Since it was first created in 1960, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)--the U.S. plan for nuclear war--has been one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy. The essence of the first SIOP was a massive nuclear strike on military and urban-industrial targets in the Soviet Union, China, and their allies. To make such an attack possible, U.S.

The U.S. included so many nuclear weapons in its first missile-age plan for nuclear war that top military commanders called it a "hazard to ourselves as well as our enemy," according to newly declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Under the first Single Integrated Operational Plan, prepared during 1960, a Russian city the size of Nagasaki--devastated in 1945 with a twenty kiloton bomb--would receive three 80 kiloton weapons. President Dwight D.

Washington D.C., 9 July 2004 - The CIA has decided to keep almost entirely secret the controversial October 2002 CIA intelligence estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that is the subject of today's Senate Intelligence Committee report, according to the CIA's June 1, 2004 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the National Security Archive. The CIA's response included a copy of the estimate, NIE 2002-16HC, October 2002, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, consisting almost entirely of whited-out pages.

Washington D.C., June 24, 2004 - The United States Supreme Court today remanded to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals a case concerning the application of a federal open government law to the Energy Task Force chaired by Vice President Cheney in 2001.

"All of those up and down the chain of command who bear any responsibility must be held accountable for the brutality and humiliation they inflicted on the prisoners and for the damage and dishonor that they brought to our nation and to the United States armed forces, which is otherwise filled with honorable men and women acting with courage and professionalism to bring stability and security and reconstruction to Iraq." -- Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich), Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing May 11 2004 "There must be a full accountability for the abuse of Iraq detainees and important quest

Washington, D.C., May 26, 2004 - Five years after the National Security Archive initiated legal action to compel the State Department and the National Archives to recover the transcripts of Henry Kissinger's telephone calls from his "private" collection at the Library of Congress, the National Archives today released approximately 20,000 declassified pages (10 cubic feet) of these historic records, spanning Kissinger's tenure under President Nixon from 1969 to August 1974 as national security adviser and also as secretary of state beginning in September 1973.

Washington D.C. May 12, 2004: CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described "coercive techniques" such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The Archive also posted a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney warning that U.S.

Washington, D.C., April 30 - A federal judge's dismissal last month of a landmark open government case was based on two factual misconceptions and deserves re-opening, according to court filings last week. The lawsuit challenges President Bush's Executive Order 13,233 that gave former Presidents and their heirs (as well as former Vice-Presidents for the first time) indefinite authority to hold up release of White House records. The National Security Archive and other plaintiffs in American Historical Association, et al. v.