The case for declassifying 9/11 records

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently ordered the release of more than 170,000 pages of city records about the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. This release, the first in a series of planned disclosures, shows how opening decades-old records, including those that expose government wrongdoing, is in the public interest. Political will to expand such efforts elsewhere is crucial.

Thousands of 9/11 survivors and victims’ families in Lower Manhattan have fought for more than two decades to hold foreign entities liable for the terrorist attacks — only to find that one of the biggest obstacles is their own government. While successive U.S. administrations have promised closure for victims, critical records remain classified 25 years after 9/11, delaying justice and accountability.

The executive order governing classification, EO 13526, mandates that most historical records must be automatically declassified at 25 years, unless they meet certain strict criteria.

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In theory, this means the records of the defining national tragedy of this century should start becoming public on Dec. 31. In practice, the declassification system is so ineffective that millions of pages are all but certain to remain hidden in agency archives from Quantico to Langley for years, possibly even decades, whether or not they require continued protection.

This impedes justice on multiple fronts.

In the Southern District of New York, for example, thousands of people have been fighting since 2002 to hold a variety of defendants — from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to members of Al Qaeda — responsible for the attack. They have been impeded in part by the Justice Department, which has aggressively invoked the state-secrets privilege to block the release of records discussing, among other things, whether Saudi officials aided the hijackers when they arrived in the United States in 2000. While a Biden-era executive order forced the partial declassification of some records relevant to this case, many interagency communications and witness interviews remain heavily redacted or fully classified.

To be clear, reviewing millions of pages for declassification is a monumental undertaking. But the executive branch has a road map of where to start.

At Guantánamo Bay, enduring secrecy has complicated the prosecution of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several co-conspirators. The military commission has dragged on for nearly 25 years, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, in part because the government’s evidence was obtained from the CIA’s torture program. Although classification rules explicitly prohibit keeping records classified to conceal violations of law, including torture, the federal government has withheld records from the agency’s black-site prisons for years, ultimately prolonging proceedings. In doing so, the government prioritizes its need for secrecy over ensuring the commission’s tribunals proceed at a reasonable speed toward justice.

To be clear, reviewing millions of pages for declassification is a monumental undertaking. But the executive branch has a road map of where to start. In a recent letter to President Donald Trump, the Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee established by Congress to advise the president on classification matters, urged him to prioritize two high-value sets of records.

The first is the 7,000-word master summary of every President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, concerning Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Afghanistan presented to Bill Clinton or George W. Bush between 1998 and 2001. The 9/11 Commission compiled this definitive record of what senior U.S. leadership knew about the threat Al Qaeda posed before the attack, and the document is classified top secret. While one pre-attack presidential brief was released in 2004 (“Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US”), at least 40 other PDB items on the escalating threat remain classified. Declassifying the commission’s summary could help fill the void and might undermine some of the Justice Department’s state-secrets claims.

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The second suggested set of records consists of the 9/11 Commission’s unredacted closed-door interviews with key Clinton and Bush officials, including former CIA Director George Tenet, national security advisers Condoleezza Rice and Sandy Berger, and senior National Security Council official Richard Clarke. While some of the commission’s other interviews have been released, declassifying this batch of records would help construct the most honest assessment of what officials knew and when they knew it. Continuing to withhold these records impedes analysis of the intelligence failures that allowed 9/11 and, equally troubling, creates a breeding ground for distrust and conspiracy theories.

Although the summary and the closed-door interviews have not reached the 25-year mark, having been compiled by the 9/11 Commission in 2003 and 2004, releasing them would help promote public understanding of the attacks and government intelligence. It could also help dismantle agency pretexts for withholding the older, underlying intelligence.

How the current administration will proceed is unclear, given its mixed record on transparency and declassification. Trump has ordered declassification reviews for records that interest him on topics as diverse as JFK assassination records and Amelia Earhart. But the Trump administration has also made it harder for the public to access government data information by deleting information from agency websites, refusing to preserve records and failing to effectively administer the Freedom of Information Act.

There is no indication that Trump plans to release these important 9/11 records, even though the former chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean, warned in 2004 that “Three-quarters of what I read that was classified shouldn’t have been.”

Although Kean was referring to 9/11 documents, his assessment could apply to the bulk of federal classified records. Widespread overclassification has been the norm for decades, thanks to both well-intentioned efforts to safeguard secrets and deliberate attempts to evade transparency. The result is that the system today teeters on the edge of dysfunction.

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This crisis is fueled in part by the absence of meaningful oversight of agency classification programs, resulting from the judiciary’s excessive deference to agency secrecy claims, Congress’ reluctance to enact statutory fixes to the system, and few enforcement mechanisms within the executive branch. The status quo is further exacerbated by insufficient funding for the National Declassification Center at the National Archives and Records Administration and NARA’s inability to override unnecessary secrecy claims. These all combine to make automatic declassification illusory, even on such important topics as the 9/11 attacks.

The 9/11 Commission’s most critical finding was that a “failure of imagination” across successive administrations blinded officials to the gravity of the threat. By keeping these records concealed, the complete intelligence picture remains shrouded, inhibiting our ability to protect against future threats. If Trump doesn’t act on the advice of the Public Interest Declassification Board, then Congress must take charge. It could replicate the model of the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, establishing an independent civilian-led board with the authority to override agency classification claims. If it acts, Congress should also double NARA’s budget to ensure that it has the technology needed to review and declassify large volumes of records, and grant NARA the authority to declassify other agencies’ records.

Our history belongs to the public. The records of a national tragedy that scarred millions should not share the same fate as the JFK records — buried in government vaults until all the survivors, witnesses and investigators are gone.

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