As we noted in The 9/11 Commission Report, complexity and over-classification produced an intelligence apparatus that in many respects “defie[d] public comprehension.” The report was valuable to the American people in large part because it included a tremendous amount of previously classified information—information about the 9/11 plot, the al Qaeda conspirators, and counterterrorism policy and actions in the Clinton and Bush administrations. The job of fully informing the American people is incomplete, however. The commission’s records, including summaries of our interviews and important intelligence and policy documents, are held by the National Archives. Some of those documents and records remain classified and are thus unavailable to the public. Authority to declassify those documents rests with the agencies that created them. Distressingly, little progress has been made by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in encouraging the relevant executive branch agencies to declassify those records and documents. Ten years after the Commission closed its doors, scholars and the general public should be given broad access to these documents, absent a compelling national security justification for withholding a given record.
