President Clinton takes step toward declassifying documents p.

By: Editorial Staff

PRESIDENT CLINTON HAS taken the first step toward declassifying millions of government documents.
Clinton issued a presidential directive on April 26 ordering a review of the current system of classifying documents, stating that the current system has led to "overclassification."
Clinton's directive was first reported in a May 5 article by Tim Weiner in the New York Times.
According to the Times story, the directive establishes a task force that by Nov. 30 will draft new rules on national security classification.
"It is time to re-evaluate the onerous and costly system of security which has led to the overclassification of documents," Clinton said in a letter to Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Times reported.
Quoting historians and researchers, the Times stated that, if carried out, "the president's order could lead to the release of millions of secret military and diplomatic records, mostly from the Cold War," but many also dating as far back as World War I.
The Times quoted Steven Garfinkel, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, as stating, "It's a huge mountain [of classified documents that exist]. Perhaps billions. The National Archives says it has 325 million pages of classified documents. There are hundreds of millions beyond that."
Garfinkel told the Times that the government has a "finite number of real secrets."
Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter each issued orders aimed at declassifying government documents, but under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush secrecy laws were strengthened.
According to the Times, the majority of official government secrets are created by the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department and the White House, "which together generated almost six million classified documents last year."