http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2010/11/17/show-me-the-missing-documents-years-after-crucial-documents-were-released-by-president-clinton-they-disappear-from-a-public-special-collection/
Show Me the Missing Documents! Why are US Documents about the Murder of Jesuit Priests Disappearing? November 17, 2010 tags: El Salvador <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/el-salvador/>, National Archives and Records Administration<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/national-archives-and-records-administration/>, National Security Archive<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/national-security-archive/>, Defense Intelligence Agency<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/defense-intelligence-agency/>, Central Intelligence Agency<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/central-intelligence-agency/>, United States <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/united-states/>, San Salvador<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/san-salvador/>, Central America <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/central-america/>, Library of Congress <http://en.wordpress.com/tag/library-of-congress/>, Jesuit Priest<http://en.wordpress.com/tag/jesuit-priest/> by Emily Willard Twenty-one years after the murder of six Jesuit priests, their house keeper and her daughter in El Salvador [*November 16, 2009 posting*<http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/right-to-justice-in-el-salvador/>], related documents released in a public collection by President Clinton in 1993 have been re-classifiedand even disappeared. Two years ago, members of the human rights community filed a criminal case in the Spanish National Court against the 14 former Salvadoran military officers allegedly involved in the massacre. As a part of the evidence introduced to the court, the National Security Archive provided copies of declassified U.S. government documents and expert assistance in interpreting the documents. <http://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/pages-from-letter-to-pres-clinton-asking-for-release-of-documents.jpg> The 1993 Congressional Request for President Clinton to release the documents. In effort to help Stanford Professor Terry Karl and National Security Archive Analyst Kate Doyle to provide expert witness testimony on the documents related to the massacre, Archive staff decided to revisit the original collection of the El Salvador Human Rights documents released by the U.S. The documents were released by President Clinton in November of 1993 and August of 1994 *upon congressional request*<http://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/letter-to-pres-clinton-asking-for-release-of-documents.pdf>, following the March 15, 1993 release of the United Nations Truth Commission Investigation, *From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador<http://www.usip.org/files/file/ElSalvador-Report.pdf>. *The special collection includes documents from various U.S. government agencies including the Department of State (DOS), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the U.S. Army*.* Many of these documents were included the National Security Archive collection, *El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980-1994*<http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/collections/content/EL/intro.jsp> *. * *The Search Begins* In September 2009, my colleague visited the *National Archives and Records Administration* <http://www.archives.gov/index.html> (NARA) to do a preliminary review of the documents in the El Salvador human rights collection. I completed a follow-up visit where I more closely reviewed the documents and found that the collection included only the State Department documents from the collection, with the exception of a few folders labeled Non-State. The majority of the papers in the Non-State folder were actually withdraw sheets. (When a document is re-classified, it is removed from the file and replaced with a withdraw sheet which provides a small amount of identifying information, a tracking number and the date the document was re-classified). I worked with several archivists in the NARA reading room, and we were unable to locate the rest of the Non-State documents in the collection. The collection was supposed to include at least 939 CIA records, and 916 Department of Defense records. These were obviously missing. I consulted with National Security Archive Analyst Kate Doyle about the possible location of the remaining documents in the collection. She recalled an obscure collection of El Salvador documents in the *Hispanic Reading Room * <http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/> of the *Library of Congress*<http://www.loc.gov/index.html>. Upon visiting the Library of Congress and after receiving assistance from a very helpful staff member, I was able to find many of the missing Non-State documents, including several binders of a thousand or so pages of CIA and DIA documents. The collection at the Library of Congress had a finding aid that included reference to many other Non-State documents, including some from the National Security Agency (NSA), the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the United States Southern Command (Army). These three sets, however, were not physically present in the Library of Congress. I asked the Hispanic Reading Room staff member and he said that they were not on the shelf, and they must have been lost. *Lost?* *Where could they be?* We decided to request all of the missing documents by filing various Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests because we had the withdraw sheets from NARA, and the finding aid table of contents which listed the missing documents at the Library of Congress. *This is where things get strange * <http://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/pages-from-el-salvador-part-ii-1-oasd-missing-doc-list-sample.jpg> There's a paper trail...But no documents. On March 17, 2010, I returned to NARA to make copies of all of the withdraw sheets in the Records relating to the United Nations Truth Commission compiled 1980 1993** collection*, one of the two which I had previously reviewed in October 2009, and my colleague had previously reviewed in September 2009. *I placed a request to see these documents, however my request was denied, saying that the documents were restricted. I explained to one of the archivists at NARA that I had seen these exact documents back in October, only a few months before. He looked in the system and said that there was no record of my pull slip for the documents (proof that I requested and received them in October), and that I had never seen them. I then produced a photograph I had taken of one of the restricted boxes back in October, again explained that yes, I did in fact see the documents, and that I needed to see them again. After nearly an hour of looking into it, he came back with his supervisor and explained that it was a mistake, that I should have not seen the documents, they are restricted and that they would have to be re-reviewed before I could see them. He claimed that NARA must have accidentally misplaced my pull slip. Unfortunately I did not have physical proof (such as a photograph or copy of a pull slip) of my colleague seeing the documents in September 2009. As all U.S. archival researchers know, its highly unlikely that *both* my colleague and I were accidentally given restricted documents. When I was able to finally review the boxes several weeks later, there had been nearly 100 documents removed and replaced with more withdraw sheets. *A Catch 22?* The MDR requests I filed for the missing documents which could identify are slowly being processed by the agencies. In one strange occurrence, the Office of the Secretary of Defense responded that I should send an MDR request to the Library of Congress which does not even have the legal authority to declassify documents. Sometimes I cannot help but feel that the agencies who created these documents are trying to entrap me into a Catch 22, so they can skirt their legal obligation to make these documents available to the public. So lets quickly review: President Clinton released a special collection of documents in 1993 and 1994. As Doyle explained in her previous post, the extraordinary collection of documents, already heavily censored, goes through a *re-classification *process in 1999, reclassifying and making secret hundreds of pages which were once open to the public. Then, at some point since 1994, the collection was split up; the DOS documents are housed at NARA, while the CIA, DIA, and other documents are floating in an obscure, unpublicized, nearly unknown-about collection in the Library of Congress. And the Library of Congress collection is missing hundreds of documents from various agencies. As if that werent enough, part of the collection at NARA underwent yet *another *reclassification process in March of 2010. So why are documents that were *released by the president of the United States with pressure from the U.S. Congress in response to a United Nations truth commission* missing? Do the CIA, DIA, and U.S. military have something to hide about the massacre of Jesuit priests, a woman, and a child? 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