About Government Secrets

In the Army, I had a clearance and had to handle sensitive stuff. Sometimes I cranked out reports that were sensitive. What matters here is not the secrets, but protocols that aren’t secret in themselves.

When I wrote a report, I had to be very careful to get the formatting perfect, and had to use the official jargon. My talent as a writer meant nothing; it had to follow all the proper protocols and preferred wording. It was Army-speak — dull, boring, a limited vocabulary, and somewhat obfuscated by all the peculiar grammar.

Stuff was always being improperly disclosed. Possibilities: There are accidental disclosures. There are people removing materials from their proper secure location for whatever reason. Sometimes they used it improperly; sometimes they passed it onto third parties (spying). Leaks are a wholly different kind of thing. In my experience, nothing was ever leaked that hadn’t been approved by someone. The approval might be official, but often enough, it was tacit. It was always with the purpose to deceive the public.

The deception might be in a limited hang-out, keeping back critical context (omission), so that the public misses the point. Sometimes it’s “secret” stuff that’s been cooked up to be partly false — i.e. there were flat out lies included. You should keep in mind that some material is false because the intel folks are downright incompetent. You just cannot imagine… Sometimes the materials are false because the superiors want to be told what they already believe.

More than once it was my job to cover up wrongdoing. It wasn’t a matter of merely hiding under secrecy some embarrassing thing, but lying into the record when I wrote what I was told to write. I can’t count how many times I was required to withdraw an accurate report of what I saw, throw it away, and write something else and sign it.

Keep all of that in mind when you hear in the news that something was leaked.