Why we'll never get a full account of the Iraq war
From the piece:
While writing our upcoming book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, Marc Ambinder and I spoke with J. William Leonard, former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, an agency charged with overseeing the security classification system of the United States. The ISOO, which is part of the National Archives, advises the president on secrecy policy. It works to ensure that information is classified only when necessary for national security, and declassified the moment circumstances allow.
Cheney's office, according to Leonard, took secrecy to excessive lengths -- attempting to classify as much as possible, and often bypassing the system altogether by inventing classification markings. Even documents as ordinary as Cheney's talking points were marked Treated as Top Secret/SCI orTreated as Top Secret/Codeword.
