Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Is John Deutch the Right Person to Comment
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_31-2009_06_06.shtml#1243997925
on screw-ups by the US government mishandling secret material and
posting information it shouldn't be posting online?
I can't possibly be the only person who finds it weird that the New
York Times's story about the mistake the US government made in posting
a confidential report on nukes in the US quotes former CIA director
John Deutch to the effect that "screwups happen" with confidential
information? Yet makes no mention at all of Deutch's own phenomenol
screw-ups in keeping CIA files on an unprotected computer at his home,
among numerous other security breaches -- breaches noteworthy mostly
for the attitude of genial contempt with which Deutch held the secrets
of his own agency? [1]Says the Times:
�These screw-ups happen,� said John M. Deutch, a former director of
central intelligence and deputy secretary of defense who is now a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. �It�s going
further than I would have gone but doesn�t look like a serious
breach.�
Here is the CIA Inspector General's [2]report from 1998.
"Going further than I would have gone"? I think I will chalk this up
to a sublimely dry sense of humor on the part of some editor at the
NYT and leave it at that. One can only admire the supreme editorial
self-confidence that allows a newspaper to deliver the punch-line
entirely by indirection -- tacit, as it were.
References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html?_r=1
2. http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/ig_deutch.html
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