CIA Docs: Why the White Space?

Long-time spook-watchers are pretty bummed about the CIA's "family jewels" -- especially all of those pages, with big chunks of text blanked out.

"I have now been through the first 150 pages... They are largely a disappointment. A great deal has been whited out," says Burton Hersh, over at the* New York Times' *site. "There appears to be an entire category of activities still classified —
the whole section from pages 8 to 10 is redacted. Given all the illegal activities actually listed in this document, the hidden sections are all the more disturbing," Amy Zegart adds. The Agency even included in the "jewels" a redacted memo -- released 30 years ago, and in greater detail.

So does Langley give any justification for all the redactions and white-outs? Well, kinda sorta. If you know how to look. Luckily for us, ace document-diver Nemo over at Entropic Memes knows better than most.

The only exemption markings anywhere in the release are on the first page - the cryptic notation “(b)(1), (b)(3), (b)(5), (b)(6)”. What does this mean? Quite simply, those are the exemptions the Central Intelligence Agency appears to be claiming for the entire 700 page release. Described in the Freedom of Information Act, those exemptions allow the withholding of certain types of information from release under the FOIA for fairly specific reasons.

Nemo goes through each of those exemptions, and concludes:

the redactions seem to have been made (at best) haphazardly, and in some cases arbitrarily. All throughout is information that could certainly be legally withheld from disclosure under one of the above exemptions, but wasn’t.
Conversely, there are redactions that appear to have no logical basis under any of the four claimed exemptions, nor, for that matter, any other.

In better news, the Nation Security Archive has now made the "jewels" searchable by keyword. But you still won't find the blanked-out stuff, of course.

And here, thanks to AT, is a 1970 report -- classified until last month -- on the Fedayeen, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Fatah.

ALSO:
* CIA Spooked By Domestic Surveillance
* Spooks' "Behavioral Drug" Experiments Exposed
* CIA Secrets: Hypnosis, Mars Missions, and Ed Koch
* UFOs, Laser Weapons, "Screwballs" in CIA Document Dump