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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (22502)	6/28/2006 11:00:14 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541582

Yes I had a Top Secret clearance for 13 years. I never saw anything I thought the world desperately needed to know, or anything that represented a potentially illegal operation. But I never handled intel stuff; they keep public affairs and the spooks far apart, thank goodness. I think classification is a barrier to release for the clearance holder. What he decides to do as a matter of conscience, and the risk of prosecution he runs as a result, is up to him. I don't think there is any barrier to publication apart from the editor's judgement as outline by the Keller piece I posted. When I was in the Balkans, if I had come across something about the US directly arming a group that was conducting ethnic cleansing, I would have deemed that worthy of a leak. A USG program that is causing direct harm to people could rise to that threshold in many cases. I suppose anything you see done by people above you that you consider grossly illegal or unconstitutional could qualify. I always despised our support for Savimbi and UNITA in Angola in the late 1980's but it was common knowledge. My biggest frustration was our not bombing the Serbs in 1992 when it could have stopped much of the bloodshed. But journalists broke the death camp stories and Clinton and Christopher sat on their butts waffling anyway. So I can't recall ever confronting the dilemma myself.