The United States government routinely classifies documents to protect genuine national security interests. However, the classification system also provides a convenient mechanism for officials to bury materials that would expose embarrassing, unethical, or outright illegal conduct. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have exploited this power to keep the public in the dark about activities carried out in their name.
The following eleven examples span decades of American governance and cover topics ranging from targeted killings and torture authorization to half-century-old historical events and international trade deals.
1. The Legal Memo Authorizing Drone Strikes on American Citizens
The Bush administration handled cases of Americans who joined enemy forces through established legal channels. John Walker Lindh, captured fighting alongside the Taliban in December 2001, was indicted by a federal grand jury and received a 20-year prison sentence. Jose Padilla, arrested in Chicago in May 2002, was initially held as an enemy combatant before being transferred to civilian courts and sentenced to 17 years for terrorism conspiracy in August 2007. Adam Gadahn, who produced al-Qaeda propaganda videos, was charged with treason in 2006.
President Obama took a dramatically different approach by ordering the killing of American citizens abroad without trial. In 2011, U.S. drone strikes in Yemen killed three Americans: Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who became an anti-American militant; Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist originally from North Carolina; and al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman.
The administration defended these extrajudicial killings with a 50-page memorandum produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Attorney General Eric Holder maintained that al-Awlaki’s killing was lawful because he was a wartime adversary who could not feasibly be captured. Yet the actual legal reasoning remains impossible to evaluate because the Obama administration refused to make the memo public.
2. The Hidden Interpretation of Patriot Act Surveillance Powers
Section 215 of the Patriot Act empowers the FBI to compel any person or organization to surrender “any tangible things” during espionage or terrorism investigations — without demonstrating probable cause. Libraries, for instance, can be forced to reveal borrowing records or browsing histories, and are legally prohibited from disclosing that they complied with such an order.
The Obama administration developed a classified interpretation of Section 215 that expanded the law’s reach well beyond its plain text. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who learned about this interpretation through his role on the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly urged the president to declassify it. He warned Americans that when they discovered how their government had secretly construed the Patriot Act, they would be “stunned” and “angry.”
Senators Wyden and Mark Udall of Colorado jointly wrote to Attorney General Holder, cautioning that a dangerous disconnect had emerged between the public’s understanding of the law and the government’s secret interpretation. They argued that meaningful democratic debate about surveillance powers was impossible when citizens had no idea what their own government believed the law permitted.
3. The Sealed Notes from Bush and Cheney’s Joint 9/11 Interview
Rather than welcoming a thorough investigation into the deadliest attack ever carried out on American soil, the Bush administration actively resisted an independent inquiry into the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Public outcry eventually forced President Bush to establish a bipartisan investigative body — the 9/11 Commission — though it received a budget of just $15 million, compared to the $39 million spent investigating the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.
When the commission concluded its work in August 2004, all records were transferred to the National Archives with instructions to begin public release on January 2, 2009. Yet the vast majority of this material remains classified. Among the most intriguing suppressed documents are presidential daily briefings that reportedly contained increasingly urgent warnings about potential attacks by Osama bin Laden’s network.
Equally compelling is a 30-page summary of the commission’s April 29, 2004 interview with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The two leaders insisted on being questioned together rather than separately. They refused to testify under oath and prohibited any recording or transcription of the session. The commission was permitted only to bring a single note-taker, and the summary produced from those notes remains sealed from public view.
4. Presidential Memos Approving CIA Waterboarding and Enhanced Interrogation
Just four days after the September 11 attacks, President Bush signed a classified memorandum of notification giving the CIA broad authority to combat al-Qaeda. That document, however, did not specify which interrogation methods were permissible.
By June 2003, CIA Director George Tenet and other agency leaders grew increasingly anxious that if their aggressive tactics became public knowledge, the White House would deny involvement and let the intelligence agency take the blame alone. Following extensive internal negotiations, the Bush administration produced two memos — one in 2003 and another in 2004 — that explicitly confirmed White House approval of the CIA’s interrogation methods, providing what insiders called “top cover.” Whether President Bush personally signed these authorizations remains unknown, and the memos themselves have never been released.
5. Over a Thousand CIA Files on the Kennedy Assassination
Nearly half a century after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the National Archives and Records Administration continued to withhold more than 1,100 CIA documents related to the case. The agency maintained that these files should remain sealed until 2017, when they would become legally eligible for release — unless the sitting president chose to extend the restriction.
Available information suggests that some of these blocked materials concern the late CIA operative David Phillips, who is believed to have had contact with Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City approximately six weeks before the assassination. The persistent secrecy surrounding these decades-old records has fueled ongoing public skepticism about the official account of the Kennedy killing.
6. The Missing Volume of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs History
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, CIA historian Dr. Jack B. Pfeiffer assembled a comprehensive multi-volume account of the disastrous 1961 American attempt to invade Cuba. The National Security Archive at George Washington University filed a Freedom of Information Act request for this history in August 2005. The CIA eventually released most of the material in July 2011, nearly six years later.
However, the agency refused to hand over Volume V, titled “CIA’s Internal Investigation of the Bay of Pigs Operations.” Despite more than five decades having elapsed since the invasion, a federal district court in Washington ruled that this volume was protected by the deliberative process privilege, which shields internal advisory opinions, recommendations, and deliberations that inform government policy decisions.
7. Presidential Security Directives So Secret Even Their Titles Are Classified
On his final day in the White House, January 20, 1993, President George H.W. Bush issued National Security Directive #79 — a document so deeply classified that its very title remains hidden from the public nearly two decades later. The same applies to NSD #77, issued days earlier, along with four other directives from 1989 (numbered 11, 13a, 19a, and 25a). The “a” suffixes offer a possible clue to their subjects: NSD 13 addressed cocaine trafficking operations in Peru, NSD 19 concerned Libya, and NSD 25 dealt with elections in Nicaragua.
President Reagan issued six national security directives with classified titles during his tenure. President Clinton issued 29 such directives. President George W. Bush produced at least two, presumably in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. President Obama issued at least seven Presidential Policy Directives whose titles the public has never been allowed to see.
8. A 700-Page Military Report Recommending Release of Afghan Detainees
Marine Corps Major General Douglas Stone earned widespread praise for transforming detention operations in Iraq, where his assessment revealed that most American-held prisoners were not actually militants and could benefit from vocational training and rehabilitation programs. His success prompted a similar assignment in Afghanistan, where he conducted a thorough evaluation of detainee facilities.
Stone compiled his findings into a 700-page report submitted to U.S. Central Command in August 2009. Available accounts suggest he concluded that roughly two-thirds of Afghan prisoners posed no genuine threat and should be freed. Yet more than three years after its completion, the report remained classified and unavailable to the public or press.
9. The Vanished Guantanamo Files of Two Suspicious Detainees
When WikiLeaks published U.S. military Detainee Assessment Briefs in 2011, the files covered 765 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. The absence of 14 files raised immediate questions. Investigative journalist Andy Worthington identified two particularly suspicious gaps in the record.
The first involves Abdullah Tabarak, a Moroccan national described as one of Osama bin Laden’s longtime personal bodyguards. During the December 2001 pursuit of bin Laden through the Tora Bora mountains, Tabarak reportedly took possession of bin Laden’s satellite phone to divert American forces away from the al-Qaeda leader. Despite this high-value background, Tabarak was inexplicably transferred from Guantanamo back to Morocco in July 2003 and quickly released.
The second case concerns Abdurahman Khadr, a 20-year-old Canadian captured in Afghanistan who described himself as the “black sheep” of a militant family. Khadr has publicly stated that the CIA recruited him as an informant, first within Guantanamo and later in Bosnia. When the agency attempted to deploy him to Iraq, he refused and returned to Canada. His younger brother Omar was just 15 when captured in Afghanistan and accused of killing American Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer during combat. Omar Khadr spent nearly a decade at Guantanamo before his transfer to Canadian custody in September 2012.
10. Secret FBI Rules for Warrantless GPS Surveillance
In January 2012, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Jones that attaching a GPS tracking device to a vehicle constitutes a “search” under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The decision, however, left unresolved whether law enforcement must obtain a warrant before deploying such devices or whether an agent’s belief that tracking would yield evidence is sufficient justification.
Within weeks, FBI attorney Andrew Weissman revealed at a University of San Francisco symposium that the bureau was drafting two internal memos to guide its agents on implementing the ruling. One memo addressed GPS device usage across various scenarios, including deployment on boats, aircraft, and at international borders. The second covered how the decision applied to the FBI’s non-GPS surveillance techniques.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking publication of both memos, arguing that these internal guidelines would shape surveillance practices not only within the FBI but across law enforcement agencies nationwide — and consequently affect the privacy rights of all Americans.
11. A Trade Negotiation Document the Government Refuses to Reveal
International trade policy rarely captures public attention, which makes the Obama administration’s fierce resistance to releasing a single page of text all the more puzzling. The document in question relates to early negotiations over the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, a trade pact proposed 18 years earlier whose public negotiations concluded in 2005.
The known contents are narrow: the paper outlines the initial American negotiating position on the meaning of the phrase “in like circumstances,” legal language that helps determine when a nation must extend equal treatment to foreign investors compared with domestic ones.
When the Center for International Environmental Law sued under the Freedom of Information Act, federal Judge Richard W. Roberts ordered the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to release the document. The administration defied the order, claiming disclosure could damage national security because all participating nations had agreed to maintain confidentiality until December 31, 2013. Judge Roberts found this argument unpersuasive, ruling that the government presented no actual evidence that publication would harm national security.
The most likely explanation for the administration’s resistance was concern about setting a transparency precedent that could complicate another secretive trade negotiation then underway: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious free trade agreement involving the United States, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, Peru, Vietnam, Malaysia, and potentially Canada, Mexico, and Japan.
The Pattern of Government Secrecy Across Administrations
These eleven examples illustrate a bipartisan pattern of excessive classification that spans administrations and decades. Whether the subject is targeted killings, interrogation methods, historical events, or trade policy, the temptation to use national security as a blanket justification for secrecy has proven irresistible to leaders of both parties. The resulting information vacuum undermines the informed public discourse that democratic governance requires.
This article is based on reporting originally published by AllGov. All factual claims are attributed to the sources cited.
