Exponential Irony

As a young, innocent and ignorant peon in the USN, I found myself needing and acquiring a pretty damn high security clearance.  The military is pretty good about telling you what to do and when to do it and how it should be done.  Unfortunately, the "why" is frequently a parental-esque "because I said so."

A result of this is that my understanding of what might disqualify one for such a clearance was flawed.  Time, experience, scuttlebutt(read: gossip) and observation did a fairly good job of filling in the blanks for me and correcting my fallacious assumptions.

Being a preacher's kid in a family that all but lived at the church, there was damn near nothing in my personal history that could have disqualified me - or so I thought.  Well after I had my clearance, I spoke with others who also had received clearances and was astonished to learn they had admitted to things in their interviews that I had believed would be immediate disqualifications.  They had admitted they had smoked pot, masturbated, associated with felons etc etc.  They got clearances anyway.

While honesty requires me to admit that it took a while to put it all together, eventually I was made to understand that quite frequently it was not the act that was disqualifying.  It was an effort to hid the act that got folk into trouble.  See, if you want badly enough to keep something hidden, you become a prime target for foreign intelligence operatives or even our home grown malintentioned citizens.  They will find out just how badly you want to keep your secrets secret.  OTOH, if you just openly admit to having screwed your wife's cousin, in theory no one can use that information to pressure you into divulging classified information.

And so we get to the ironical aspect of the essay.  If someone wanted a clearance but had had a close and long-term friendship with a known and convicted pedophile, they might choose to attempt to minimize that information.  They might reasonably choose to hide the friendship especially if the individual is no longer in their social circle for whatever reason.  That effort, the choice to hide something negative of significance, would easily be enough to disqualify them for a clearance if the investigator knows of it or even just suspects.

Felon47 would not be able to get a clearance via the path that I used to get a clearance.  However, as POTUS, he has the ultimate national control over access to classified material.  His own access to our most classified information is an irony of near infinite scope.  An individual who could not survive the process I went through is now the national ultimate authority on who gets access to classified information.  I am not of the opinion that him having that power has been good for the nation.  

I am guessing that Putin, Orban, Netanyahu and associated dictatorial asswipes are pretty comfortable with it.  I am hugely disappointed that so many of those I served with and those who were protected by my service, are so willing to turn our national secrets over to one who demands complete loyalty while offering no loyalty whatsoever to anything that is not money or power.

I feel the urge to remind everyone that the USA is by no means the only nation with an intelligence apparatus.  While POTUS is the ultimate classifying authority in this nation, he has no authority whatsoever over the information generated by and classified by other nations.  Whether or not “we” feel like it is justified (and for the record, I do), those who would normally share their intel with this nation are being a lot more circumspect.  Rather obviously, that does not make our nation more secure. 

If the foreigners should suspect that others in the misadministration have adopted the Dear Leader’s casual attitude about intel from other nations, for their own security they MUST stop sharing with the USA.

The final shoe to drop may never actually drop but the potential is too juicy to ignore.  Those who have shown themselves to be fine with the manner in which this misadministration handles classified information regardless of the source, could quite feasibly find themselves no longer able to get clearance once some level of sanity is restored to our political system.  That potential does the heavy lifting of letting me sleep comfortably.