Washington, D.C., April 8, 2004 - The National Security Archive at George Washington University today called for the public declassification of the controversial President's Daily Brief from August 6, 2001 - discussed at length in today's testimony by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.
Washington, D.C., 12 April 2004 - President Bush on Saturday, 10 April 2004, became the first sitting president ever to release publicly even a portion of his Daily Brief from the CIA. The page-and-a-half section of the President's Daily Brief from 6 August 2001, headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," had generated the most contentious questioning in last week's testimony by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice before the commission investigating the September 11th attacks. Dr.
Washington D.C., 11 March 2004 - The National Security Archive, together with America's leading library and archival associations and four public interest groups, filed a joint amicus brief today in the U.S. Supreme Court case brought by Vice President Richard Cheney to prevent discovery into the makeup of his controversial energy policy task force.
Scenarios of nuclear attacks on the United States, whether by terrorist or state adversaries, have assumed that Washington, D.C. would be a major target. A startling article published as the cover story of theJanuary-February 2004 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes the enormously destructive effects to the Washington, D.C. area if, on a clear day, an adversary exploded, 1500 feet above the Pentagon, a nuclear weapon with an explosive force of 300 kilotons (20 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima weapon).
Washington, D.C. - A nuclear weapon at the "small" end of historic strategic arsenals that exploded over the Pentagon would create a mass fire that would engulf the Washington, D.C. area as far as Capitol Hill, Dupont Circle, and Alexandria. According to a study published this month, the detonation would not only unleash the well-known blast effects and hurricane force winds that would crush the Pentagon and knock over nearby buildings, but the bomb would also generate a "hurricane of fire" that would destroy almost everything within 40 to 65 square miles.
Washington D.C., November 17, 2003 - The oldest Freedom of Information requests that are still pending in the U.S. government date back to the late 1980s, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to the Freedom of Information Act Audit released today by George Washington University's National Security Archive. The oldest still-pending request is a 1987 inquiry from San Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld on FBI activities at the University of California at Berkeley.
Washington D.C., 8 August 2003 - The current Bush administration debate over possibly restarting long-halted nuclear weapons tests in order to develop "mini-nuke" "bunker-busters" may be repeating the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration experience that killed chances for a comprehensive test ban, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 4 - George Washington University's National Security Archive, the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, today released its annual Freedom of Information Act birthday posting, 37 years to the day after President Johnson grudgingly signed the U.S. FOIA into law on July 4, 1966.
Washington, D.C., June 11, 2003 - The Congress is poised to give the National Security Agency a free pass from complying with the Freedom of Information Act for any NSA "operational" files, even though NSA has failed to demonstrate a need for the exemption and the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office are abusing similar provisions previously granted by Congress.
The National Security Archive's experience with the U.S. government's declassification process has been a varied one, as it should be given the great diversity of its declassification requests during more than fifteen years of effort. During the Archive's history, it has seen the classification review and declassification processes at their best, at their worst, and many cases in between.