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,The “Secretary of War”, as Hegseth likes to call himself, has decided to keep the video of the strike against the survivors of the first strike against alleged drug smugglers in the “Gulf of America”, as Trump likes to call what the whole World knows as the Gulf of Mexico, classified “SECRET”.<\/p>\n
There are a few things to unpack in this simple statement. For one there is the puerile terminology used by this administration. “Secretary of War”, “Gulf of America” are terms invented by this administration for the purpose of \u2026. what, exactly? These terms reveal a macho mindset of small individuals drunk with the power they think they have.<\/p>\n
The purpose of the US Department of Defense has historically been to defend freedom and democracy in the United States as well as in the Western World (i.e. NATO). A Department of War’s purpose is to do what beyond providing, in Hegseth’s favorite term, “lethality”? The US coastline on the Gulf of Mexico is less than half to that of other countries. Mexico alone has a coast along the Gulf that is 25 percent longer than that of the USA.<\/p>\n
But more concerning than the juvenile antics of these armchair soldiers, is the deployment of the classification system to prevent potentially embarrassing (or criminal) information being revealed.<\/p>\n
When I worked at the RAND Corporation, one of the oldest and most prestigious national defense think tanks in the US, I had to obtain a security clearance as a condition of my employment. I had to learn all the details about the levels of classification, “Confidential”, “Secret”, “Top Secret”, and “Codeword”. I had to learn what information had to be put into these categories and how it had to be handled.<\/p>\n
In practice, however, I had little to do with classified material. I worked mostly with open-source material. Occasionally I needed to access classified material on background, “eyes only”, to better understand US policy, but none of the numerous papers and studies I produced during my many years at RAND had to be classified. I never needed to use a burn bag to destroy any notes I had taken during the day.<\/p>\n
I learned fairly quickly to detect the different reasons for classifying some material. There is, first and foremost, the need to keep operational details from being revealed. This principle was egregiously violated by Hegesth’s revealing details of an upcoming strike in a Signal chat. Then there is the need to keep secret the “sources and methods” through which the US defense establishment obtains information about adversaries. This is by far the most prevalent reason for classifying some material.<\/p>\n
Finally, there is the wish to spare the US government diplomatic or political difficulties and embarrassment. I recall a State Department cable that was classified only because in one sentence the author, the US ambassador to a West African country, referred to two West African countries in very unflattering terms. If it had publicly become known what words US diplomats used when talking about West Africa among themselves, it would have been very embarrassing and could have caused some diplomatic unpleasantness.<\/p>\n
So why does Hegseth keep the boat strike Video classified? The video does not reveal any details of an upcoming operation; the operation is in the past. It does not reveal any “sources and methods” that the previously released video of the first strike has not already shown. So, the only reason for keeping the second video classified must be that it would bring to light details about officials and officers of US behaving in an inappropriate or even criminal manner. This in itself is an admission of malfeasance that must not be ignored.<\/p>\n
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,The “Secretary of War”, as Hegseth likes to call himself, has decided to keep the video of the strike against the survivors of the first strike against alleged drug smugglers in the “Gulf of America”, as Trump likes to call what the whole World knows as the Gulf of Mexico, classified “SECRET”. There are a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}