20 Years of Truth-Seeking: THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE

My friend David Corn of The Nation, on his blog today, has a well-deserved 20th Birthday tribute to the National Security Archive, an indispensable tool for journalists  and the public founded in 1985 by investigative reporter Scott Armstrong (right) and other journalists and progressive foreign policy researchers. In my work as a journalist, I've offen profited from the help of NSA's director, Tom Blanton (left), and the other fine folks who work there. From 1-5 PM EST Today, C-Span will broadcast a tribute to NSA hosted by Bill Moyers, and it will be repeated this weekend.(an MP3 podcast of Moyers' speech will be available after the event.)

One of its most recent interesting offerings is the expose of links between the U.S. government, the CIA, and drug traffickers in Guatemala, by that excellent journalist Frank Smyth (photo left, now Washington rep of the Committee to Protect Journalists.) The NSA has issued a "greatest hits" list of the government documents it has obtained in its two decades of relentless digging and Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, including:

* Hundreds of photos of flag-draped coffins (right) containing the remains of US  troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the Pentagon fought to keep secret.

* The January 25, 2001 memo that terrorism czar Richard Clarke sent to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, warning that top Bush administration officials needed to immediately come up with a plan for dealing with al Qaeda.

* The briefing notes for Donald Rumsfeld's 1984 meeting with Saddam Hussein, when Rumsfeld, acting as an envoy for the Reagan administration, was to tell Saddam that the Reagan administration's public criticism of Iraq for using chemical weapons would not interfere with Reagan's effort to forge a closer relationship with Saddam.

* An August 6, 1986 entry from Oliver North's notebook that indicated North (right, in  his mugshot after his arrest) had met with then-Vice President George Bush in the midst of the Iran-contra affair.

* The log book of a US Navy destroyer that revealed that on October 27, 1962--in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis--this ship dropped depth charges off the Cuban coast and almost hit the hull of a Soviet submarine carrying a nuclear warhead. The crew of the sub, believing war was at hand, considered firing the nuclear weapon but did not.

* Documents from CIA and FBI files that showed that Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban militant who has sought US asylum, was at two planning meetings for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people.

* Guatemalan army intelligence documents and US intelligence documents that indicated that the CIA was assisting the Guatemalan military in the 1980s as that military was killing thousands of civilians.

* Documents that revealed that Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state in 1976, supported the Argentine military dictatorship's crackdown of dissent that led to the deaths of tens of thousands.

* The CIA inspector general's scathing review of the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, which was kept secret for nearly four decades and which blasted CIA secret operations as "ludicrous or tragic or both."

* A 1967 CIA memo (see Document 27 by clicking here) that revealed that the CIA had tried to implant listening devices in cats and train them to approach targets. The memo noted that the "work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it," but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation forces us to conclude that for our...purposes, it would not be practical." The first wired and trained cat had been released near a park and ordered to eavesdrop on two men sitting on a bench. On its way to the target, the cat was run over by a taxi.

Corn writes that, "Without the National Security Archive much of the secret history of the United States--and other nations--would remain a secret. Is this a puff piece? Certainly. There is no better institution in Washington than the Archive. The work it does is actually something a government could and should do. It's not too hard to imagine a federal openness advocate who would muscle individual federal agencies to release information about past and present activities. But governments tend to be rather reluctant to reveal to the public--the people they ostensibly serve--inconvenient and troubling secrets on their own. Consequently, a bunch of smart people dedicated to the public interest have been gainfully employed for two decades. The public here and abroad knows more about key historical episodes than it would otherwise thanks to the their toils. It is a pity there is such a critical need for the National Security Archive; it is a blessing for journalists, historians and citizens that the Archive exists." To which I can only add, Amen! and long life to the NSA. You can visit the NSA's excellent website and archives by clicking here, sign up for their mailing list of new discoveries, use its search engine, and get acquainted in detail with fascinating chapters of our country's hidden history that officialdom didn't want you to know about.

HOW TO INCREASE NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION: The Columbia Journalism Review has a neat story just out on how SOME newspapers are increasing their circulation while the bulk of dailies are losing readers. CJR's Cindy Cooper profiles Colorado’s Greeley Tribune, a 25,000-circulation daily that's winning new readers with long stories and series about complicated social issues.  Read Cooper's piece by clicking here.