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To illustrate, here's a screenshot from page 52 of the "Postwar findings about Iraq’s WMD programs and links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessment", with the text transcribed here:

(U) Conclusion 1: Postwar findings do not support the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Information obtained after the war supports the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research's (INR) assessment in the NIE that the Intelligence Community lacked persuasive evidence that Baghdad had launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program. The ISG found that, following the Gulf War, aggressive UN [...]

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1 Answers1

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This is a classification indicator to implement portion marking. See the NSA SIGINT style manual. Under "classification," it says to classify each paragraph. And under "parenthesis," it says they are used to "set off paragraph classification."

The CIA describes:

  • (TS) for Top Secret,
  • (S) for Secret,
  • (C) for Confidential, or
  • (U) for unclassified.

"The marking will be placed after the paragraph number, or before the first word of the paragraph in the absence of paragraph numbers."

While portion marking and the above scheme is mandated for executive agencies, it seems that for consistency, the Senate Select Committee took the same approach.

Jen
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