In September of 2000, Phil Coyle, then the Director of the DOD’s Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, testified in front of Congress about the national missile defense plan. In his testimony he was critical of the plan and included 50 recommendations on how the system should be tested and improved. Though the Congressional committee voted unanimously to enter Coyle’s report into the public record, it took 8 months of wrangling for the DOD to deliver that report to Congress, and when it did so the report was marked “For Official Use Only.” Recently, Representative John Tierney of Massachusetts asked the GAO to prepare a report on the condition of missile deployment with an eye toward Mr. Coyle’s recommendations. This report was immediately classified by the administration, and even after the GAO separated the report into classified and unclassified sections the information upon which the report was based was classified after having been in the public domain since Mr. Coyle’s original testimony.
» Too Many Secrets: Overclassification as a Barrier to Critical Information Sharing Transcript of a hearing before the House’s Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations
» Greely Role QueriedBackground information on missile defense testing at Fort Greely in Alaska.