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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama plans to deal with a Dec. 31 deadline that automatically would declassify secrets in more than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents by ordering government-wide changes that could sharply curb the number of new and old government records hidden from the public.
In an executive order the president is likely to sign before year's end, Obama will create a National Declassification Center to clear up the backlog of Cold War documents. But the order also will give everyone more time to process the 400 million pages rather than flinging them open at year's end without a second glance.
The order aimed at eliminating unnecessary secrecy also is expected to direct all agencies to revise their classification guides — the more than 2,000 separate and unique manuals used by federal agencies to determine what information should be classified and what no longer needs that protection. The manuals form the foundation of the government's classification system.
Two of every three such guides haven't been updated in the past five years, according to the 2008 annual report of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the government's security classification.
The anticipated timing of Obama's order was disclosed by a government official familiar with the planning who requested anonymity in order to discuss the order before its release. A draft of the order leaked last summer.
The still-classified Cold War records would provide a wealth of data on U.S.-Soviet relations, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, diplomacy and espionage. A Soviet spy ring in the Navy led by John Walker headlined 1985, which became known as "The Year of the Spy."
It took 19 years and a lawsuit for the National Security Archive, a private group that obtains and analyzes once-secret government records, to get documents on the 1959 crisis when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off over control of West Berlin. For nearly two decades, the contested documents were shuttled back and forth among various offices in the Defense Department, then on to the State Department and an unnamed intelligence agency, each conducting a separate declassification review, before the government finally gave some of them up.
Obama's executive order will follow on the president's inauguration day initiatives on open government. On his first day in office, Obama instructed federal agencies to be more responsive to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act and he overturned an order by President George W. Bush that would have enabled former presidents and vice presidents to block release of sensitive records of their time in the White House.
William J. Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, says the classification policies in place under executive orders signed by Bush and President Bill Clinton have protected national security and enabled increased declassification.
But Obama's review is necessary to enhance security and increase declassification "to a level that our open society expects and deserves," Bosanko said.
Obama's executive order "is an experiment, but it just might work," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "By changing the rules about what gets classified, this could lead to a dramatic reduction in secrecy throughout the government." Aftergood obtained a leaked copy of an early draft of the executive order last summer.
The government spent more than $8.21 billion last year to create and safeguard classified information, and $43 million to declassify it, according to the oversight office, part of the National Archives and Records Administration. The figures don't include data from the principal intelligence agencies, which is classified.
"What we're seeking to do is come up with a system that refocuses the finite resources available," says Bosanko.
"Serial reviews" are among the requirements causing declassification delays that can take years to resolve. When a classified document contains secrets from multiple agencies, each agency must review its part, a process that can add years to the declassification process.
In 2000, Clinton gave agencies a three-year extension to complete a review of multiple-agency classified records. When it became clear that the deadline wouldn't be met, Bush in 2003 gave federal agencies a six-year extension.
Declassification spending was cut from an average of $224 million annually in the last four years of the Clinton administration to only $47 million a year during the last four years of the Bush administration.
Today, the problem is not much closer to being solved than it was in the 1990s. Under the terms of Bush's extension, sensitive information in hundreds of millions of pages of historical documents will declassified automatically on Dec. 31 unless Obama acts.
"If the agencies haven't found the sensitive old documents after nine years, that's some indication those records don't deserve being secret anymore," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive.

Obama's order probably will centralize the review process for old records, having all agencies look at the same classified documents at the same time through the new National Declassification Center. Michael Kurtz, who has been with the National Archives for the past 35 years, has been chosen as the center's acting director.

Much of the work of a National Declassification Center probably would be conducted at the National Archives facility in College Park, Md., where many of the documents are housed and many of the agency declassifiers already spend a great deal of time.

Critics say Obama should do more than the upcoming executive order is likely to. They note that Clinton ordered a "bulk declassification" of millions of records from World War II and before; they want Obama to do the same with Cold War-era records.

The premise of bulk declassification is that "we're not going to spend taxpayer dollars to go through these records one by one," said William Leonard, Bosanko's predecessor as Information Security Oversight Office director.

And the planned National Declassification Center, said Leonard, should have authority to decide the status of millions of classified records on its own.

"We shouldn't need multiple opinions from multiple agencies," said Leonard.

But intelligence agencies have resisted surrendering their authority over secrets to an interagency group.

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On the Net:

Information Security Oversight Office: http://www.archives.gov/isoo/

Project on Government Secrecy: http://www.fas.org/sgp/

National Security Archive: http://tinyurl.com/a8dwh

White House background: http://tinyurl.com/ylap898

WASHINGTON – A Palestinian shopkeeper and father portrayed as a terrorist in the movie "Bruno" is suing film star Sacha Baron Cohen, talk show host David Letterman and others for libel and slander.
The lawsuit filed last week by Ayman Abu Aita in U.S. federal court seeks $110 million in damages.
The director and film distributor NBC Universal are named. So are CBS and Letterman's company Worldwide Pants for an interview in which Letterman and Cohen discussed Bruno's encounter with Abu Aita, who is called a terrorist.
In the movie, Cohen plays a gay Austrian fashionista trying to make it big in the United States. To achieve fame, Bruno travels to the Middle East to make peace.
Universal Studios and a Letterman spokesman declined comment.

FRANKFURT (AFP) –
The German trade surplus, a pillar of the eurozone economy, climbed to 13.6 billion euros (20 billion dollars) in October, figures released on Wednesday by the national statistics office showed.

In September, the biggest European economy and one of the world's leading exporters had posted a surplus of 10.4 billion euros.

German exports gained 2.5 percent from September to 74.6 billion euros, the Destatis service said.

Germany, one of the world's leading exporters, has begun to rebound from its worst recession since World War II, thanks in part to renewed foreign demand for the country's industrial goods and chemicals.

Destatis also cited German central bank figures which showed the current account of the balance of payments had a surplus of 11.0 billion euros in October.

The current account is an overall measure of all current payments into and out of a country or region.

News of the country's rebounding economy comes as official figures show that inflation is slowly regaining a foothold in the European nation.

The inflation rate in November was 0.4 percent compared to the previous year, the Federal Statistics Office said, the first time it has been positive since June 2009.

The rate was revised slightly higher from the 0.3 percent preliminary figure published in late November.

Falling energy prices are still keeping a lid on inflation in Germany, however, with prices for household gas nearly a fifth of their price a year ago during the oil price spike.

If energy were stripped out of the calculation, inflation in Germany would be 0.7 percent, the statistics office said.