Washington, D.C., February 11 – In answer to a three-year-old National Security Archive request, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today confirmed that former national security adviser Henry Kissinger has returned to NARA’s custody the 20,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone conversations conducted while serving President Nixon from 1969 through September 1973.
The PBS documentary Bill Moyers Reports: Trading Democracy, which premieres tonight, February 5, at 10 p.m. Eastern time (local times may vary) exposes an obscure provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that has given multinational corporations the power to demand compensation if a law of any one of the three NAFTA countries – the United States, Mexico or Canada – threatens their potential profits. Laws designed to protect the environment or public health, the decisions of states or local communities - even jury verdicts - can prompt a corporation to file a lawsuit.
Washington D.C., 28 November 2001- Today the National Security Archive at George Washington University joined the American Historical Association (AHA) and other scholars and public interest groups in filing suit to stop implementation of President Bush’s November 1st executive order 13,233 which limits public access to presidential records. For a copy of the complaint and related documents, see www.nsarchive.org and www.citizen.org.
Washington, D.C., August 9 – The State Department today announced that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had returned 10,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone conversations conducted while in office from 1973 through January 1977, and spokesman Richard Boucher credited the National Security Archive for prompting the Department to seek this return. “These telcons are a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour verbatim record of the highest-level foreign policy deliberations of the U.S. government during Mr.
Washington, D.C., July 4, 2001 – George Washington University's National Security Archive, the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, today released its first annual "State of Freedom of Information" report, 35 years to the day after President Johnson grudgingly signed the U.S. FOIA into law on July 4, 1966. The Archive study reported that:
Washington, D.C., June 5, 2001 – Thirty years ago this month, President Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times on June 13, 1971 to see the wedding picture of his daughter Tricia and himself in the Rose Garden, leading the left-hand side of the front page. Next to that picture, on the right, was the headline over Neil Sheehan's first story on the Pentagon Papers, "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement." Nixon did not read the story (so he says on tape in his 12:18 p.m. phone call with Alexander Haig).
One of the major primary sources for research on the history of U.S.
Washington D.C.: The National Security Archive today hailed the release of more than 16,000 secret U.S. records on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent overthrow of the Allende government and the advent of the military regime to power. The release, totaling over 50,000 pages of State Department, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records, represents the fourth and final “tranche” of the Clinton Administration’s special Chile Declassification Project.
Washington D.C.: Under pressure from the Clinton White House and human rights groups, the CIA has agreed to release more than 700 documents on covert operations in Chile that the Directorate of Operations had refused to declassify last August, according to the non-profit foreign policy center, the National Security Archive. The CIA documents have already been turned over to the Department of State for final processing and are slated to be publicly released on November 13.
Pending in the Senate is a proposal to enact an “Official Secrets Act” for the United States. Section 303 of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2001, S. 2507, would make it a crime for government employees to disclose classified information to the public. The proposal is unconstitutional. In violation of the First Amendment, it would stifle informed public debate about the most serious matters of national defense and foreign policy.