Court upholds CIA's power to keep president's daily briefing secret SAN FRANCISCO UC Davis professor had sought access to '60s documents

The CIA's top-secret daily briefings for the president on intelligence information must remain secret, even 40 years later, if the agency reasonably concludes that disclosure would compromise national security, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said a UC Davis political science professor and historian was not entitled to any portion of the CIA's briefings to President Lyndon Johnson for two days during the Vietnam War, Aug. 6, 1965, and April 2, 1968. A lawyer for the professor said those dates were important for his research on the war.

The CIA has briefed presidents daily since the Kennedy administration. The briefings gained new prominence four years ago during a commission's inquiry into the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when President Bush disclosed that the CIA had told him in August 2001 that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the United States.

Of the more than 13,500 briefs in existence, the court said at least 25 have been made public, either accidentally or with the CIA's approval. The UC Davis professor, Larry Berman, argued that those documents showed that historically valuable information could be disclosed safely while sensitive material was blacked out.

The CIA countered that the documents were exempted from public-records laws under a statute that orders the national intelligence director to protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.

The appeals court stopped short of an absolute exemption but said CIA records were entitled to "near-blanket" secrecy under federal law.

In this case, the court said, the agency's information review officer said every word in the two documents must be withheld because they identified the CIA's sources and methods.

"Judges are poorly positioned to evaluate the sufficiency of the CIA's intelligence claims" and must defer to the agency's judgment, Judge Raymond Fisher said in the 3-0 ruling, which upheld a lower court decision.

He also cited the CIA's assertion that disclosure of confidential sources, even from 40 years ago, would make it harder for the agency to persuade potential new sources that their identities would be protected. That rationale might become weaker "four or five generations later," but must be accepted now, Fisher said.

Berman's lawyer, Thomas Burke, said he was encouraged that the court hadn't granted permanent, ironclad secrecy to all such documents. But he said the CIA declaration on which the appeals court relied was a boiler-plate statement that could have applied to any president's brief.

Briefings from the 1960s that have been released contain "a substantial amount of information about governments that no longer exist, leaders that are no longer alive and information that would not compromise sources," Burke said. "We weren't asking for anything that could compromise national security."