Super Bowl Update

One can argue about the adverse impact of the WikiLeaks info dump on U.S. diplomatic relations, and about the bizarre system that allows a U.S Army enlisted man access to such a treasure trove of U.S. State Department secrets. What is not disputable, however, is the potential damage to high-level information sharing within the U.S. Government that might result if the State Department and other government agencies now decide that henceforth they will keep their sensitive information to themselves.

This is particularly risky if it should adversely affect the sharing of counter-terrorist information. Perhaps the biggest lesson learned from the 9/11 attacks is that information sharing between the FBI and CIA was not all that it should have been prior to the attacks. Clearly, the suicide attacks, themselves, were events that fell between jurisdictional cracks among the agencies of the U.S. Government charged with protecting us.

The 9-11 plot was hatched in the Middle East, Hamburg, Germany and Spain – for whom intelligence gathering is the jurisdiction of CIA. But the plot was designed to take place in New York and Washington, where, in most instances, jurisdiction shifts to the FBI. Nothing illustrates any better than 9-11, how critical it is that there be air-tight sharing of intelligence information between CIA and the FBI.

However, the 9/11 Commission, subsequently reported that, in several important instances, critical information had not been shared in a timely way between these agencies before the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The report resoundingly concluded that, on questions of counter-terrorism, the U.S. Government needed to create a more efficient information-sharing environment; making it clear that, in the interest of greater national security, the silos that protected info all the way to the top would have to come down. Need-to-know would have to be replaced by need-to-share.

Congress responded to the 9-11 Commission’s conclusion by passing the Intelligence Reform and Ant- Terrorist Act of 2004, creating the National Counter-Terrorist Center and charging it with tracking terrorist activity. By all accounts, a real start has been made in intelligence sharing within the purview of the Center. Lifelong habits of compartmentalizing information within a single agency have been altered to permit a degree of information sharing, if, by doing so, it seems a terrorist attack could be prevented.

Knowing the way the U.S. Government reacts to an event like Wikileaks, however, it would not surprise me to see some backsliding from this laudable effort to share intelligence information. I note, for example, that the State Department is trying to withdraw its sensitive diplomatic traffic from full distribution to the Department of Defense. This, I suspect, is just the opening salvo. I expect to witness further diminution of info-sharing.

Maybe this is really what Mr. Assange is all about? He knows that the reactions to revelations about what U. S. diplomats really think about Prime Minister Berlusconi are small potatoes alongside a break-down in info-sharing on counter-terrorist issues.

Let’s hope our government keeps its wits about it on this set of issues.



--Fred Hitz teaches at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He retired from the CIA in 1998, where he last held the position of Inspector General. Mr. Hitz currently lives in Charlottesville.

"Earmark," in its Congressional sense, didn't get respectable as a term until 2009. That was the year it made the Merriam-Webster dictionary, defined as "A provision in congressional legislation that allocates a specified amount of money for a specific project, program or organization."

Given the recent attempt in the Senate to ban earmarks entirely, I think it's safe to say they are a controversial practice. I mean, who doesn't remember the furor over Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere, famously supported in 2008  by then-Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the same time her running mate, John McCain, was vigorously lambasting the practice?


Over the weekend, Tom Graham sent me a link to an editorial from fredericksburg.com, whose title is "Earmark system has its benefits."  (FYI, Virginia Senator Jim Webb voted against the ban; Virginia Senator Mark Warner, for it.)


The fredericksburg.com editorial makes some good points.

While bad earmarks get a lot of attention . . .is there such a thing as a good earmark?

It doesn't seem to be quite so black-and-white.

After all, even as members of Congress use earmarks to send money home, the projects the money pays for are often beneficial, creating jobs or infrastructure or protecting the environment.

For example, one of the earmarks Webb supported was for VRE trains and other equipment. Others were for mental health and substance-abuse programs, improvements to Interstate 95 and other roads, and to address water issues in Southwest Virginia. Webb and Warner both supported earmarks for the Dulles rail project, while both of the senators and several state congressmen all have supported earmarks for military and defense projects in Virginia.

Senator Webb makes the point (according to the editorial) that earmarks give elected officials a say in spending that would otherwise be controlled by non-elected officials.

So, is it earmarks that raise voters' ire, or simply their implied sneakiness, the lack of transparency in how they are created?

Well, if it's the seemingly opaque quality of the practice, more than the practice itself, that bugs you, Jock Friedly (pictured right) is your new best friend. He's the guy who (in 2006) launched LegiStorm , a website "dedicated to providing a variety of important information about the US Congress."


According to a 2009 article in The Washington Post about Friedly, LegiStorm . . .

 . . .offers a trove to keep the snoopiest snoop occupied for hours -- bank accounts, investment portfolios, trust funds, even information about spouses. Wondering why so-and-so cruises to work in a Beemer? Aha, that's why: His wife's a big-shot partner at a law firm. It's all there in the reports.

And LegiStorm also offers an extremely searchable database of all earmarks inserted into legislation by all members of Congress. 

It seems to me the choice re earmarks is clearer now: We can go ahead and take an uninformed stand for/against the practice of Congressional earmarks. Or we can spend some time poking around LegiStorm and see whose pockets in our state are being filled by whose earmarks.

Are the earmarks promoted by our own elected officials creating jobs? Addressing transportation problems? Or are they building expensive bridges we don't need just to make some rich bridge-building campaign contributors even richer?


And while we're at this, we can poke around other parts of LegiStorm and easily learn a whole bunch of other financial facts certain Senators and Representatives would just as soon we not know.

Thanks to the internet, and sites such as LegiStorm (and WikiLeaks?), the dirty laundry of our government doing its business is more and more visible for our personal viewing pleasure. It seems to me the ball is now squarely in the voter's court: If we don't know what's going on, it's probably because we haven't taken the time to look. If we do know what's going on, and we don't like it, what's stopping us from arming ourselves with all this available information and throwing the bums out of office?

Information is power. And there's a lot of both sitting right there in our computers!

This morning as I sat down to post WMRA's first Facebook question/comment of the day, it was with the knowledge that there were potentially 500 million other people out there doing the same thing.

I was not surprised to learn that Facebook had passed this milestone. The site works so well on so many levels -- FB can inform and invite discussion (which is what I hope the WMRA page does), it keeps our mobile population connected, and it can be simply silly and fun.

Anyone else remember the hula hoop craze of 1958 when 20 million Whamo hoops sold in six months? It pales in comparison, doesn't it? And the Beatles had only sold a paltry 100 million albums by February of 1965.

There may be all kinds of concern about FB and privacy, but there's absolutely no argument that FB is a huge part of our internet life in this, the Internet Age.

What I used the WMRA Facebook page for this morning, however, was to post about something that is anything but fun; WikiLeaks' posting of what the New York Times calls "The War Logs:" 6 years (2004-2009) of leaked classified documents that fill us in on what's going on in Afghanistan.

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press

Now, good luck getting onto the WikiLeaks site, itself. I tried and failed all the time I was writing this blog post.  The site, my internet provider told me, was too busy. But despite my American propensity to think I need to know everything right now, I'm willing to wait my turn on this one, because I need time to think and there's a lot of information out there posted by reliable sources who have been able to access the site.

 For example, the Wall Street Journal writes this morning,

There appears to be evidence of war crimes in the leaked documents, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a news conference in London on Monday according to the Associated Press. "It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime. That said ... there does appear to be...."

And then there's disturbing information about Pakistan as reported in the New York Times:

. . . [Leaked documents] suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

It strikes me that it's one thing to rant about suspected dark deeds in this ugly war; it's another to have them detailed on our computer screens by, it appears, those who have first-hand knowledge of them. We now have to stop ranting and start thinking, assessing, and, most importantly, reading. It is, in some ways, yet another end of innocence. "National security" in a sense protected us from having to deal with all this difficult information.

There's a lot more on this story out there on the internet this morning, and it's not just about the documents, themselves. There's White House National Security Adviser James Jones' strong statement about "national security," condemning WikiLeaks' release of the documents as "irresponsible." Yet, the "Greenslade Blog" of the British newspaper, The Guardian asks:

Do we believe factual reports by US soldiers about the killing of civilians is worthless? Do we really think that hard information about the increasing strength of the Taliban should be covered up? Is it of no consequence that there is new and more obvious evidence about Pakistani and Iranian aid for the Taliban?

Do we believe? Do we really think? Is it?

Well, please, please, please don't answer that. Yet.

Last week's news kerfuffle was caused by the misuse of a Shirley Sherrod speech by He Who Shall Not Be Named (yes, that conservative blogger, who's been named enough, already) and the administration's subsequent overreaction to it.  It was fueled on the internet, in large part I would suspect by us 500 million FB users reacting too quickly to what we read on the internet.

I hope we learned from this disaster that we need to take time to be informed before we form our opinions. And to shy away from the opinions of those who do not appear to be reliably sourcing their material.

So, may we all have more than our customary patience while we wait in line at WikiLeaks. Might I suggest amusing yourself on Facebook, chatting with friends about how long they've been waiting . . .

Note: I just went back to insert a link to WMRA's Facebook page and realized I had done what I just blogged against doing: I had solicited an immediate response from you to the WikiLeaks story. So, I've dope-slapped myself, and I do promise to try to do better.