Vietnam War Crimes Working Group Files - Declassification and Access

Declassification and Access

In 1990 Kali Tal, the editor of a small-circulation journal called Vietnam Generation, was tipped off to the existence of the Vietnam Working Group records by an archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration. She sent in a FOIA request and eventually received access to some of the records in 1992. After viewing them, she wrote a brief article about their extraordinary content in a Vietnam Generation newsletter, but did not have the resources to pursue the matter. The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by the Freedom of Information Act, and relocated to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, where they went largely unnoticed. Nick Turse, a freelance journalist, discovered the archive while researching his doctoral dissertation for the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. He managed to examine most of the files, and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages — representing roughly a third of the total — before government officials removed them from the public shelves in 2002, stating they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.