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Symington's subcommittee also uncovered, for the first time, details of secret agreements with Ethiopia dating back to 1960, under which the U.S. has armed a 40,000-man army at a cost to the American taxpayer of $159 million. Although the extent of U.S. arms assistance to Emperor Haile Selassie is still cloaked by security, State Department officials admit that U.S. bombs and ammunition have been used against insurgent rebels and that U.S. military advisers supervise the training of Ethiopian troops. In defense of this agreement, Assistant Secretary of State David Newsom told the subcommittee that disclosures about Ethiopia had not been made because of "the great sensitivity" of the Emperor. Presumably, in State Department thinking, the "sensitivity" of the American public and Congress to this major diplomatic undertaking was of lesser importance.
Too Much "Exdis." Occasionally, the Government's concern for secrecy affects not only the public's right to know but its own efficiency of operation. When officials of the Water Pollution Control Administration flew to New Orleans recently to investigate a fire on an offshore oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, they discovered that the relevant papers had been locked up by the Interior Department's Geological Survey, which was responsible for supervising the drilling. A recent study of the State Department's operations found that too many reports from the field were being marked "exclusive" or "no distribution" ("Exdis" and "Nodis" in State lingo). As a result, so much current information is restricted to senior officials that the judgment of their subordinates is often irrelevant or out of date.
Information gathered at the taxpayers' expense is often kept secret for no better reason than apathy or red tape. When Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University, the noted expert on parapsychology, was asked recently to undertake some research for the Department of Defense, he agreed—but at the same time inquired why an 18-year-old study of his on the training of dogs to detect land mines had never been made public. Apparently, no one had bothered to declassify the material. A more pressing case of bureaucratic ineptitude involves the Atomic Energy Commission, which holds literally thousands of research papers and reports in classified storage. The material cannot be released because the commission cannot hire the personnel needed to declassify it—even though the reports would be of significance for the peaceful development of atomic energy.
The Government's predilection to do as much as possible in secrecy also affects domestic issues of fairly direct concern to the taxpayer. Environmentalists opposed to development of the SST, for example, have had difficulty gaining access to the so-called Garwin report, which is critical of the supersonic transport; the Justice Department claims that the report is a "presidential document" and thus not subject to forced release. Preparation of a national inventory on industrial wastes discharged into public waterways was blocked for seven years by the Budget Bureau under terms of a 1942 law designed to protect business from harassment by the wartime Office of Price Administration.