Annie Jacobsen, the author of a new book on Area 51, was interviewed on “The Daily Show” last night and, among other things, she mentioned that back in the '90s the Clinton administration had to petition some government agency to find out about goings-on there. Supposedly a lot of the activity at Area 51 was on a “need-to-know” basis and, well, whoever ran the show there felt the president didn’t need to know.
This reminded of the scene in “Independence Day” where the president, played by Bill Pullman, tells Judd Hirsch’s character that Roswell is a myth and that Area 51 doesn’t exist, only to have one of his military advisers tell him otherwise.
But it did make me curious, are there government secrets that the president doesn’t have access to, and if so who makes those decisions?
Granted some of the other stuff Jacobsen said set off my bullshit meter big time (like how the flying saucer that allegedly crashed at Roswell, might have been a Soviet spacecraft piloted by midget cosmonauts). But, she did seem more credible than your garden variety conspiracy theorist (not saying much, I know, but still) and like I said, the question about the president having to petition a government agency for information did pique my interest.
And for those who are interested here is the interview:
There are certainly classified projects the President does not know anything about. The sheer number of such projects makes it virtually impossible for any one person to track them all. That is not to say that the President could not learn/be told about a particular project if a need arose…or perhaps even upon inquiry (I do not know about that).
For example, when I was in the military, I filmed quite a few classified missions. The President was not informed of my activities on a daily basis. Some of the classified information I had access to included the ranges/destructive capability of certain munitions. The President has no need to know those things, and probably has little interest in the technical details. He needs/wants to know if we can kill a target. Which weapon we use doesn’t matter from his perspective, so long as no special weapons (nuke/chem/bio) are involved.
Well, obviously it’s humanely impossible for any one man to keep up with every single going-on of the federal government. But let’s say for whatever reason he wanted to learn about the technical details of those weapons, could he do so?
Yes, of course. Barring insubordination, he’ll get the information he wants. It would usually involve sending an official cable to the originating agency asking for them to release the information to the White House. And they’ll certainly comply. In the vast majority of cases, however, it just takes a staffer looking for readily-accessible info. Most of it is already out there for cleared people to find.
“Petition” in your OP sounds like a formal request through proper channels. Nothing sinister or underhanded about having official records of proper requests.
I think I’ve said this before, but: having a Top Secret security clearance doesn’t immediately allow you to show up at any facility you want and demand access to privileged information. Even in the world of secrets, everything is classed as “need to know”. If you don’t need to know the information to do your job, it will not be released to you.
And that being said, there’s very little secret information I can imagine for which the President couldn’t plausibly come up with a reason he needs to know.
Barring confidentiality issues (e.g., a Va patient’s post-discharge confidential medical records, the contents of a sacramental confession to a chaplain, information provided his counsel by a defendant in a court martial), there is literally nothing an Executive Branch agency knows that the President cannot know. As Oakie notes, there’s a great deal he happens not to know, by virtue of not smothering him in details. (Obvious example: the snowplow maintenance records for last winter at a northern air base. Things are classified under his derived authority – he has the right to literally any information the government has, except, of course, information provided to a government employee in confidence in the course of his/her official duties.
It’s also easy to imagine that various secret branches of the government are doing things that they would prefer not telling the President about, unless and until they worked out successfully.
We know that the CIA and others have go into the loony bin many times, from psychic experiments to LSD trials to outfitting bats with bombs. I’ll bet that when the presidents read about them decades later they wondered what other nutty things the vastness of the government hid.
Similarly, the run-up to the Bay of Pigs operation was inaugurated by Eisenhower and Kennedy wasn’t informed until it was time to make a decision about whether to proceed. Even if one president knows, the next may not. And absolutely nobody knew what dirt the FBI had on anyone, including Kennedy, while Hoover ran it.
I’m just expanding on what others have said. The government is far too big for a president to be told everything about everything, because that would occupy him fully until his own term ran out. But there is nothing that anyone can legally keep from him.
Illegally, though? Does he get told everything about everything when he asks? That’s the interesting question. Hoover is a known precedent for saying that the answer is no. It has to happen, for reasons of blackmail, political leverage, sheer embarrassment, and that wonderful phrase “plausible deniability.” But if there are aliens at Area 51 or elsewhere, the president has been told.
It is perfectly clear and incontrovertible that the President is in charge of what goes on in the Executive Branch. The Constitution says so.
How the government keeps secrets is a matter that is primarily regulated by a series of Executive Orders. In short, the “need to know” is based on a Presidential order, and as the chief executive, there is no higher authority in government on who can determine need to know. All classification authority derives from the President, so barring a “can God make a burrito so big that He cannot eat it” type of metaphysical question, of course the President is entitled to knowledge of all classified information.
This is the important point. In the US, secrets classified by executive-branch agencies (DoD, DoE, CIA, etc) are classified on the authority of the President. The President can withdraw the classification or authorize new people to access it at any time.
This leads to a different question: are there any state secrets classified by a non-executive authority? For example, are there Congressional secrets, that only members of Congress (and their staff) can access?
There are plenty and there are none. Plenty: think anything they discuss with their lawyers. None: anything officially in the “secret” classification scheme is governed by the executive.
What about all the documents that are “sealed” for x number of years? Can he get a look at that stuff? Does sealed mean nobody gets to look at it or just that the information isn’t publicly available during the period?
Presumably President Clinton’s petitions were honored and he was made fully aware without the need to reclassify the data - so the answer would be “no” - it wasn’t too secret for the president to know about.
“Need to know” and “entitled to know” are 2 different things. If nothing very important or unusual happened at Area 51 then President Clinton would not have a “need to know” any of the details. If he asked for the info then he would be given it because he is entitled to know.
However the petitions read, scope and chain of custody would have to be firmly established before the petitions could be honored.
It strikes me that there must be investigative information, gathered by Congress or GAO in exercise of the oversight function, that the Executive would not be permitted to see.
Of course there are legislative branch secrets. Arm-twisting by Chairman Smith to get Congressman Jones to cosponsor the biofuels bill despite the opposition of ConGlomCo, which is headquartered in Smith’s district. The surprise tax amendment that will be revealed at just the right moment to catch the opposition unaware. The tactics that the Senate Minority Leader would use if the Majority Leader does away with the filibuster. The draft bill that the Committee on Nonsuch is working on that will only be made available to the public and the Executive Branch 24 hours before the markup session.
But these secrets are not classified. They are just secrets, like trade secrets or other proprietary information. And the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to Congress.
Aren’t there secrets that the President is not informed of for his own protection, to keep him distanced from unsavory activities in case they should be discovered? Or have I been reading too many spy novels?
Perhaps an unanswerable question, but anyone in the Executive Branch who would withhold information from the President intentionally would be doing something that clearly undermines and violates the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution, that the President holds all executive power.