Declassified briefing from 1973

Click here for the document
(Acrobat format | 36 pages | 3 meg)

"Briefing presented to Chief of Staff, US Army, 17 May 1973"

>>> While looking through a listing of reports held by the Defense Technical Information Center, "Overview of the Army's Chemical and Biological Materiel Program" (classified as "Confidential") caught my eye.

I filed a FOIA request for it, and the chief counsel at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground has declassified it, with a heavy amount of redaction. (Click to see the cover letter.) Fifteen of the 31 pages comprising the report's main body are fully blanked out. Eight other pages are partially redacted, up to half the page.

Significantly, it looks as though a mistake in the public's favor was made: One of the pages that should've been censored in its entirety is completely exposed. Page 21 of the report (which is page 22 of the PDF file) contains a handwritten note indicating that the high b(2) exemption applies to the entire page, yet - unlike every other page with that notation - it is free of any redaction.

Thus, we get to see a page of still-restricted material. And guess what? The information it contains is completely innocuous.The chart indicates expenditures for combat-support research, development, test and evaluation over 30 years ago: fiscal years 1968-74. The text on the page briefly mentions a flame-rocket launcher and a rubber-coated grenade from 1972/3, plus a little bit about munitions in Vietnam. Based on this overzealousness, it's hard to believe that half the report deserves to be censored. And, looking at the big picture, it offers another piece of evidence that the classification system is broken (in the government's favor).

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