Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[Ed Jewett]

More Reflections on the State Department's Leaked Cables

Having looked through more of these things, I think there are quite a few nuggets to be found. If you're curious and inclined to search for yourself, this search engine may be of help. I reckon it'll take some weeks, or maybe much longer, to put important pieces of the puzzle together. But bear in mind: these are not the Crown Jewels. Despite their fancy classifications, these are run-of-the-mill State Department telegrams which every day of the week, by the hundreds, land on the desk of an average Assistant Secretary of State.

A bit of background. All foreign service officers have a Top Secret security clearance. Indeed, Top Secret is the highest level of classification within the U.S. government. What confuses people is that there are 'sub-categories' within Top Secret. Those include such things as Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), Special Access Programs (SAP), or other unusual distribution restrictions. Technically, those materials are not more highly classified than Top Secret, but they are limited to a much smaller set of people. Some of the clearances I had, for example, were so classified that even the name of the clearance was classified. Go figure. Anyhow, none of that sort of material was in any of the leaks and, so far at least, none of the leaked cables are even classified Top Secret.
Some of the cables are classified Secret, some Confidential, and some are unclassified. There's little rhyme or reason to any particular cable's level of classification, other than the ego of the officer who assigned the classification, so be aware that important and interesting material may well bear a lower level of classification.
If you read more than a few of these cables you'll get a pretty good sense of a diplomat's paper blizzard environment. It's rough. Indeed, a lot of these cables make really incredibly boring reading. And perhaps it's the warm glow of nostalgia, or self-selected memories, but it seems to me that cables were generally better written when I was at State twenty years ago — I wonder whether a drop in writing skills (if that's, in fact, the case) may reflect a drop in critical thinking ability?
A good rule of thumb: if a cable is difficult to read it isn't worth reading.
[Update: Note State's ostrich response, as well as DOD's, and OMB's. What idiots!]


Posted by George Kenney on December 3, 2010 3:51 PM

http://www.electricpolitics.com/2010/12/....html#more


Writer's brief bio:

"Here's the short version of my bio: I'm George Kenney. I was born in Algiers in 1956, during the battle of Algiers, to a US foreign service family, and I grew up in the states, in Africa and in Europe. I spent way too much time in graduate school at the University of Chicago (MA in Economics) from which, following family tradition, I joined the foreign service myself. I was a tenured, mid-level career officer, serving as Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department headquarters in DC, when I resigned my commission in 1991 over US policy towards the Yugoslav conflict. Subsequently for a few years I was a consultant in residence at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Those were my salad days as a pundit. I had about 60 articles published in mainstream outlets, did hundreds of radio and tv interviews and talk shows, and traveled extensively through the US on speaking tours. In the mid-1990s, however, I came down with symptoms of a hereditary illness — iron overload — which sidelined me for years. With treatment I'm now operating more or less on two cylinders, more or less permanently. C'est la vie... and I'm glad to be alive!"