Obama Delays Release of Historic Military and Intelligence Reports

Despite pledging to expand governmental transparency, President Obama has granted an open-ended extension to agencies for releasing millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year.

The documents date from World War II to the early 1980s and cover foreign relations, intelligence activities and military operations with the exception of nuclear weapons data.

The Boston Globe reports Obama delayed the release of the historic documents because his administration has been unable to prod spy agencies into conformance with agencies "engaged in turf battles over how documents should be evaluated" and have reviewed only a fraction of the materials to determine if their release would jeopardize national security.

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OSS Files Opened: Julia Childs Was a Spy?!?!

Before she became a famously untidy television chef, Julia Child had a secret career as an American spy, winning praise for her attention to detail as she managed the flow of classified communications from remote posts in Ceylon and China during World War II.

Long before he appeared on screen as a lunatic general in "Dr. Strangelove" and a corrupt cop in "The Godfather," Sterling Hayden was parachuting into fascist Croatia as a secret operative for America's fledgling espionage service.

And decades before he was named CIA director, William J. Casey was running clandestine operations for the agency's predecessor -- the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS -- from its European headquarters in London.

The U.S. government pulled back the covers on these careers in espionage and thousands of others Thursday, granting public access for the first time to previously classified personnel files of Americans who served in the OSS.

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An Interesting Persepctive From An Historian...

In today's Post:

Giving Americans back their history may not rank with ending the war in Iraq or balancing the budget, but it should be high on the to-do list of the next president. Our declassification system has broken down. Historians are waiting an average of seven years for replies from presidential libraries to their Freedom of Information Act requests. The White House cannot locate millions of e-mail records created during the months immediately before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The problem goes far beyond the Bush administration or its immediate predecessors. Tens of thousands of pages of previously declassified top-secret documents that I read and photographed two years ago at the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard, while researching a minute-by-minute narrative of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, were closed to researchers in March pending an indefinite security "review." The ostensible reason for pulling the records is the 1999 Kyl-Lott amendment that requires the rescreening of millions of documents for supposedly sensitive nuclear secrets. But it is difficult to explain why the Navy waited nearly a decade before acting.

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