A Reading Suggestion
General Hayden, former Director of both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency has ignorantly claimed that the President of the United States has endangered national security, because the memoranda that were just released were marked “Top Secret”. Information in that category would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security.
That definition is contained in EXECUTIVE ORDER 13292 of March 25, 2003, which covers classification. It is an executive order of the Office of President of the United States, who is the ultimate arbiter of security classification. If the President declassifies something, as happened in this case, it is no longer “Top Secret”. Nothing remains classified forever, and these memos should have already been reduced from “Top Secret” to “Secret” based on the normal schedule.
Further, General Hayden should study Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations. which says:
(a) In no case shall information be classified in order to:
(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
These memos were classified to avoid US laws that prohibit torture. The fact that agencies of the US government were torturing people would at a minimum be embarrassing.
2 comments
…since I believe these people are incapable of being embarrassed, we might as well go with Sec. 1.7 (a) (1). Pentagon officials were told repeatedly by specialists and experts, we now know this morning with certainty, that some of the reverse-engineered SERE techniques being taught to interrogators would be and had previously been considered torture under U.S. and international law. We also now know by the timing of events that the memoranda were ginned up after the fact to give the color of law to torture plans that were already essentially being implemented. Hayden’s statement is certainly an understandable ‘CYA’ moment, but it suggests he’s not going to show up on any “Best and Brightest” list anytime soon…
The thing about Hayden is that he was in the Air Force when I was. He and I were stationed at Offutt AFB in Nebraska at the same time, and he may have been in the back of the auditorium when I was briefing SAC for a mission. He had the same training and read the same manuals I did.
He went from SAC to NSA later, but the training and indoctrination he received were exactly the same as I received and he is flat out lying about this. The rules were clear and unambiguous about torture and intercepts. There was no “gray area”, and he knows it.
The basic rules for classification haven’t changed, although Nixon, Carter, Clinton, and the Shrubbery have modified the wording slightly, and changed the people who can stamp something “Top Secret”, the basic order has been the same since Eisenhower.
He is lying, he knows it, and it really pisses me off because he wears an Air Force uniform and was in NSA. We don’t play that crap.
I went through SERE and a couple of other “schools” that made it very clear that this stuff was torture. I was in for the Cold War and Vietnam, so we weren’t playing games, this was training we expected to need, and too many, like McCain, did need. This wasn’t a “game”. The threat of al Qaeda is nothing compared to the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces.