Keeping it secret

The Senate is so concerned about leaks of classified intelligence information that they have proposed a bill which would allow only a few people at each agency to speak to reporters on “background,” or condition of anonymity; require notice to the Senate and House intelligence committees of authorized disclosures of intelligence information; and permit the government to strip the pension of an intelligence officer who illegally discloses classified information. At the same time the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation into intelligence leaks.  Now they're just gathering information, they are not accusing anyone of breaking the law.  They've interviewed people in the White House, NSA, CIA and Pentagon.

One problem in all this - beyond the Big Brother similarities - is the sheer number of classified documents.  Back in 2004, 15,600,000 documents were classified.  How many are really "secret"?  I wonder how many documents are being classified annually now.  Tom Kean, the chair of the 9/11 Commission, said, “The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public.”

Classify this!

I guess if we’re at war we have to expect a rise in an emphasis on secrecy, which, among other things, means an increase in the number of classified documents. But, we seem to be going overboard in creating classified documents. Since 2001, the number of classified documents (according to an obscure federal agency called Information Security Oversight Office) has almost doubled. Guess how many documents were classified last year? 15,600,000, the classification of which cost us over $400 each for a total of $7.2 billion in one year.

Blaming this phenomenal rise on 9/11 doesn’t wash with Tom Kean, chair of the 9/11 commission. As the commission found, the problem re 9/11 was lack of sharing of information, not leaks of sensitive information. A quote from Kean: “The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public.”

With any bureaucracy you do get weird things happening. Some examples:

the CIA is in court to prevent their budgets of the 1950s and 1960s being revealed. Wasn’t it a different world in the 1950s? Wasn’t Russia the bad guy? Wasn’t it a very different CIA?

The Defense Intelligence Agency deleted a comment that Pinochet was interested in fencing, boxing and horseback riding and that he was a conservative. Vital information that!

The Justice Department blacked out a few lines from a published Supreme Court decision. Duh!

Even the head of the Information Security Oversight Office complains about some of these inanities, “I’ve seen information that was classified that I’ve seen published in third grade textbooks.”

Somehow I don’t feel any safer knowing that we’re paying good money so someone can play spies.

She's gotta be kidding us.

A quote from Hillary's press conference yesterday, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.” I'm under the impression that she used only her personal email, not her government one. It defies credulity that in four years she never sent a message about "classified material". She admits that more than 30,000 emails were government related and not one contained "classified material". This in an era when the government classified more than 80,000,000 documents in one year.

Another Reason to End the War on Drugs

Okay, so the DEA is wasting our money by chartering planes for the Director when they have plenty of planes available. The war has only increased violence and corruption, weakened our security, wasted untold amounts of money, etc. The DEA seems to have a mission to find ways to waste our money, particularly if they can do it under the guise of national security. Witness the latest fiasco of the aviation division of the DEA. They bought three untested planes that for some reason had been grounded by another agency. After ten months of 'operation' the DEA has grounded the planes and is trying to sell the parts.

The DEA purchase of these plans was not part of the normal budget; it was part of the classified budget, the budget under which the CIA and who knows who else operates. There is no real review of this budget, yet it is not our smallest budget by any means. An interesting question is who decides what goes into this classified budget. The planes were to be used for drug surveillance. Should they be part of the classified budget?

Sorry, it's classified information

If you've read this blog more than once, you know that I think the government has too many secrets. Sure, there are things that should be classified. But, we have over 1,000 government organizations making sure we don't get classified information. The government has little faith in the American people or they use the secret classification to cover their mistakes.

The government is even monitoring judicial opinions to make sure we are safe; ProPublica has a lengthy article examining one instance of this. The article is a little dense, but it is clear that the government massaged the public record and deleted an opinion in the case of one of the forty-eight detainees who are "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution". (Does that last phrase mean they are innocent of the charges?) They then edited the opinion and re-published it. One problem - they deleted that portion of the opinion which directly contradicted the details of the government case. A second problem - there was no indication of the editing, which, if I read the article right, is a violation of judicial ethics.

I must confess that I feel much safer knowing that the government is making sure I don't learn of things the bad people are doing or saying and the efforts we use to combat them. And, I appreciate the efforts they are making to spend our money in these tough times.

It's classified until I need to use it to save my hide

How does one square Libby's contention that Cheney told him that Bush ordered the release of classified information to Judith Miller with Bush's promise to take appropriate action if he found out that classified information was leaked?

In many cases it really is harder to maintain a lie than to admit an embarassing truth.

"He knows what his intentions were"

"He" being George W. Bush as we were informed by Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, when responding to questions as to why the offices of the Vice President and President are exempt from the executive order requiring all parts of the executive branch to submit to the oversight of an independent office with regard to the handling of classified information. Most people would think that the offices of the Vice President and President are parts of the executive branch. Bush apparently intended that they would not be so considered.

The 'loss' of thousands of e-mails would make one question the adequacy of the White House's protection of classified material.

The Vice President filed the necessary reports in 2001 and 2002 and the stopped. Was that because the Iraq war began in 2003?

I cannot continue this conversation. It is classified now

For the past six years the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has been reporting on our financial activities there plus the progress of the Afghan Forces. We learned such things as the number of Afghan soldiers and police officers in uniform, how much we were spending for weapons and gear for Afghan forces, the cost of teaching Afghan soldiers to read and write. We could judge progress or the lack of it. That information will no longer be published for the masses (taxpayers), it is now classified. The reason being it could endanger Afghan and American lives.

Big Brother agrees!

Keeping Secrets

In the current NY Review of Books, Garry Wills asserts that the fundamental legal case, U.S. v. Reynolds, which is used as the basis of many security claims by our government is, in fact, based on a lie by our government. In the four years, 1977-2001, the government cited this case sixty-two times as justification for withholding evidence from the courts. Yet, no less a legal scholar and Solicitor General than the late Erwin Griswold wrote, "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification, and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another."

The Reynolds case concerned a crash of an Air Force Plane in 1948 in which nine died, five soldiers and four civilians. The widows of three of the civilians sued the Air Force and, as one would expect, their lawyer asked for a copy of the Air Force report on the accident. The request was never granted as the Air Force argued all the way to the Supreme Court that the report contained classified information. Rather than proceed when the Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court, the Air Force settled with the widows for almost as much as the widows were asking; there was an important proviso that the widows would release all claims against the government.

Although the case continued to be cited as precedent, the report was never released to the public until in 1996 the Clinton administration decided to declassify documents determined originally to be restricted, as the Reynolds report was. Enter two people and the Internet.

Michael Stowe established a web site, Accident-Report.com, which, for a fee, offered copies of the reports recently declassified. At about the same time, the daughter of one of the civilians who had been killed in the crash, Judy Loether, was trying to find out information about her father whom she had never met. Stowe and Loether connected and the report became public.

And, as Griswold wrote, the accident report was covered up because it demonstrated incompetence on the part of the Air Force. There were no heat shields for the engines, thus the engines overheated and this was the primary cause of the accident. Also, escape routes were blocked or very difficult to use.

Yet, the Reynolds case is still used to deny us the right to know just what our government is doing to protect its arse.

Some Basic Questions re NSA

ProPublica asks five basic questions that have yet to be answered:

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long?
It’s not entirely clear.

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?
That’s classified.

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?
It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism?
It's not clear.


So, how does Prism work?
In his statement Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect “foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”
That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.

Hospital Mergers

There is a preliminary agreement for Partners Health Organization, a non-profit group that owns Mass. General Hospital among others, to acquire the hospitals on the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. The deal will likely be good for the islands as the quality of medical care should improve.

The deal should be very good for Partners due to the arcana of Medicare reimbursements. Both island hospitals are classified as "critical access" in Medicare terms. They are the only hospitals in the state so classified. For some strange reasons if a state has hospitals in this classification Medicare bases its reimbursement to the other hospitals in the state on a national figure. And, as we well know, Massachusetts is not a cheap state in which to live. By removing these two hospitals from the critical access category, Partners and other hospitals in the state will see their Medicare reimbursements rise. It's expected that they could rise by as much as $250,000,000.

The Captain, The Chaplain, The Muslim

The name James Yee probably has vanished from your memory, but the 2003 accusation that a Muslim chaplain in the US Army was a traitor may not have so vanished. James Yee, third generation Chinese-American, West Point graduate, Army chaplain and converted Muslim, was the accused. He has written a book, "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire", about his experience as an American accused of being an Al Qaeda operative.

Yee's life as a Muslim chaplain in the US Army started out on a very high note; he was held in such regard by his superiors that he was trotted out to give interviews to NPR, MSNBC and other media outlets. Yet, after being arrested he was held in solitary confinement for 76 days and, until the day of his discharge, was prevented from speaking publicly by a gag order. While in custody, he was strip-searched. Further, his married life was destroyed by the Army's claims - very likely made of whole cloth - that he was an adulterer and pornographer.

He writes of "forced cell extraction" of the Guantanamo detainees. In these exercises six to eight MPs in riot gear were used to immobilize a detainee in his cell and move him to a maximum security unit. According to Yee and many others Guantanamo is on a war footing in line with the apparent military belief that the camp might be infiltrated by Al Qaeda by land, sea or air. I guess infiltration from within was added when they arrested Yee.

The serious charges (including espionage) were dropped within a month after Yee's arrest, but he remained in solitary. The charge of mishandling classified documents was dropped when the prosecution could not prove he ever possessed classified documents.

This seems to be another blot on the American way of war.

CIA vs. Senate

The Senate Intelligence Committee spent four years and $40,000,000 to create a 6,300-page report on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program. The report castigated the program, charging that the CIA misled the Bush administration and Congress about the use of interrogation techniques that many experts consider torture. The report is still classified although the Senate gave it to the agency for vetting more than a year ago.

The problem now is that it looks like the CIA monitored the computers used for the report. This is probably the case, as the CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency.

A pastime as a cop

You may have heard of the Oklahoma reserve sheriff's deputy who mistook his revolver for a taser and killed a suspect. It turns out that the sheriff's deputy is a 73-year-old insurance company executive, who is a member of the Tulsa County Reserve Deputy Program. Several members of this program including Bates are wealthy and have donated vehicles, weapons, and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office. They are allowed to serve as police officers, although they are not compensated. They are classified as “advanced reserves,” meaning they “can do anything a full-time deputy can do”.

I find it quite bizarre that this program would allow sometime past retirement age to have an active role in arresting people.

I'm not a Trump fan

But that doesn't mean that I think everything he says or does is bad. The CIA has been wrong before, particularly during the Cold War. And their current statement says only that the leaks were “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” Plus, the United States was “not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government.”  So, he has some direct basis to be skeptical.

Could the CIA essentially be following the military's lead relative to the power of Russia? We have been extremely profligate in our military spending largely to defend against Russia. Andrew Cockburn points out that "The Navy has therefore been promised a fleet of twelve ballistic-missile-launching nuclear submarines, loaded with newly developed missiles, at an estimated price of $100 billion. The Air Force will acquire 642 new ICBMs at a supposed cost of $85 billion (a price tag that will, like that of the naval program, inevitably increase). In addition, the Air Force is getting a long-range nuclear bomber, the cost of which it has brazenly classified with the excuse that such details would reveal technical secrets to the enemy. The shopping list also includes several nuclear warheads that are essentially new designs. Meanwhile, command-and-control systems are being developed for an array of satellites (costing up to $1 billion each), whose purpose is to make the business of fighting a nuclear war more manageable."

Ignoring the rules

Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA, is having a hard time working for the government. He is not exactly open nor fiscally conservative. Now, the GAO has ruled that his construction of a secret phone booth had to be authorized by Congress because it cost more than $5,000. Furthermore, the need for such a booth is questionable as the EPA already has a sensitive compartmented information facility to handle classified information on a different floor of its headquarters.

This makes no sense

In Michigan parents of handicapped children who receive state aid are classified as home health care workers. As such, they are considered state workers and, by default, members of the state workers union, SEIU. Every month, the state sends $30 per child to the union for union dues. Remember we're talking about parents taking care of their kids. Why should they be considered state workers? They do not get a salary from the state. They have no manager to whom they report. They don't earn a vacation from their job. In any sort of rational world, they are not state workers. Yet, they have been making their monthly payment for five years now. To top it off, they get zero union benefits.

It is possible that other states, such as Connecticut where I now live, have adopted a similar 'rule'.

Only in America.

Our bridges are not in good shape

The NY times has introduced a new feature, Retro Report, which looks at past stories in the light of the early 21st century. The first article is about the 2007 collapse of the I-35W Bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Thirteen people died. Nearly 150 others were injured. Many vehicles fell into the river. The problem was there from the day the bridge was completed in the 1960s.

I've written about our deficient infrastructure often. But we're still not spending the money we need to. Of 607,000 bridges in this country, more than 65,000 are deemed “structurally deficient” by experts. Some 20,000 bridges around the country are labeled “fracture critical,” which means that the entire structure could collapse should a single critical component break. At least 8,000 bridges fall into both of those categories. Most bridges are meant to last 50 years; those classified as structurally deficient are, on average, a good deal older than that.

When will we learn?

Summary of the Senate Report on Torture by Us

1. The C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed.

2. The C.I.A. interrogation program was mismanaged and was not subject to adequate oversight.

3. The C.I.A. misled members of Congress and the White House about the effectiveness and extent of its brutal interrogation techniques.

4. Interrogators in the field who tried to stop the brutal techniques were repeatedly overruled by senior C.I.A. officials.

5. The C.I.A. repeatedly underreported the number of people it detained and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques under the program.

6. At least 26 detainees were wrongfully held and did not meet the government’s standard for detention.

7. The C.I.A. leaked classified information to journalists, exaggerating the success of interrogation methods in an effort to gain public support.

From the NY Times

Keeping it secret

With all the commotion about classified documents, it's good to know that the government actually also declassifies documents.  Of course, the declassification does not have to be done until the documents are 25 years old and we have almost 3,000 people classifying and only 70 declassifying documents.  We spend over $11 billion classifying and $9,000,000 declassifying.  The backlog simply increases.  It's good to live under an administration which "is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government."  What if the administration weren't so committed?