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The National Archives and Records Administration told the Central Intelligence Agency last week that it was withholding approval of a CIA proposal to allow the destruction of the email records of all but 22 senior Agency officials. “NARA intends to reassess the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) proposal for the disposition of non-senior email accounts,” wrote Paul M. Wester, Jr., Chief Records Officer at NARA in a November 20 letter to Joseph Lambert, Director of Information Management Services at CIA. “Based on comments from Members of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a number of public interest groups, we are concerned about the scope of the proposed schedule and the proposed retention periods,” Mr. Wester wrote. Based on a preliminary review of the CIA proposal, NARA had initially recommended approval of the plan, Secrecy News reported last month. (“CIA Asks to Destroy Email of Non-Senior Officials,” October 1.)

But critical comments that were submitted to NARA — from the Federation of American Scientists, Openthegovernment.org and other public interest groups and individuals, the Department of Defense Chief Defense Counsel, and especially from Senators Feinstein and Chambliss, the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senators Wyden, Udall and Heinrich, Members of the Committee — turned the tide and blocked the proposal in its current form. “We will hold a public meeting on this schedule in the coming months to address the comments raise by you and others and to share how NARA is moving forward,” wrote Margaret Hawkins of NARA Records Management Services in an email message today. “This meeting will be announced in the Federal Register and will be open to all commenters and the public.” For related coverage, see: “The CIA Wants To Delete Old Email; Critics Say ‘Not So Fast'” by David Welna, NPR All Things Considered, November 20; “Top Senators Oppose CIA Move to Destroy Email” by Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, November 19; “National Archives: Ok, So Maybe Letting The CIA Destroy Emails Wasn’t A Great Idea” by Ali Watkins, Huffington Post, November 21; and “Furor Over CIA Shake-Up of Email System” by Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service, November 7.

The Central Intelligence Agency said this week that it will post its database of declassified CIA documents online, making them broadly accessible to all interested users. The database, known as CREST (for CIA Records Search Tool), contains more than 11 million pages of historical Agency records that have already been declassified and approved for public release. Currently, however, CREST can only be accessed through computer terminals at the National Archives in College Park, MD. This geographic restriction on availability has been a source of frustration and bafflement to researchers ever since the digital collection was established in 2000. (See CIA’s CREST Leaves Cavity in Public Domain, Secrecy News, April 6, 2009; Inside the CIA’s (Sort of) Secret Document Stash, Mother Jones, April 3, 2009). But that is finally going to change. The entire contents of the CREST system will be transferred to the CIA website, said CIA spokesperson Ryan Trapani on Tuesday. “When loaded on the website they will be full-text searchable and have the same features currently available on the CREST system at NARA,” he said. CIA was not able to provide a date for completion of the transfer, but “we are moving out on the plan to make the transition,” Mr. Trapani said. In the meantime, “The CREST database housed at NARA will remain up and running at least until the website is fully functioning,” he said.

The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. “The CIA informed the Committee that due to CIA record retention policies, the CIA could not produce all CIA email communications requested by the Committee,” the report noted, explaining that the desired information was sometimes recovered from a reply message when the original email was missing. Agency emails turned out to be a critical source of information, a fact that illuminates the Committee’s sharp response recently to the (now suspended) CIA proposal to the National Archives (NARA) to destroy most Agency emails of non-senior officials.

Thus, the gruesome record of the waterboarding of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah “was referenced in emails, but was not documented or otherwise noted in CIA cables.” (This is at odds with NARA’s initial view that “It is unlikely that permanent records will be found in these email accounts that is not filed in other appropriate files.”) The Committee report is also a remarkable demonstration of the congressional oversight function that is all the more impressive because it was performed in adverse, unfavorable conditions. It is striking to see how the CIA sometimes treated the Senate Intelligence Committee, its leadership and its staff with the same disdain and evasiveness that is often perceived by FOIA requesters and other members of the public. Committee questions were ignored, inaccurate information was provided, and the oversight process was gamed.

“Internal CIA emails include discussion of how the CIA could ‘get… off the hook on the cheap’ regarding [then-Committee] Chairman [Bob] Graham’s requests for additional information…. In the end, CIA officials simply did not respond to Graham’s requests prior to his departure from the Committee in January 2003,” the report said. “I am deeply disturbed by the implications of the study for the committee’s ability to discharge its oversight responsibility,” wrote Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) in his additional remarks. “Because it appears from the study that the committee was continuously misled as to virtually all aspects of this program, it naturally raises the extremely troubling question as to whether we can trust the representations of the agency in connection with difficult or sensitive issues in the future.” But minority members of the Committee disputed this characterization: “In reality, the overall pattern of engagement with the Congress shows that the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its activities,” they wrote in their extensive dissenting views. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Committee report was to document and memorialize the fact that agents of the US Government practiced torture. Not “harsh measures” or “enhanced techniques,” but torture.