During the VP debate there
was a very short exchange - and like everything in the debate involved cross talk
– where Mike Pence told Timmy let me interrupt you Kaine that had either of
their sons (both Marines) done what Shrillda the Hutt had done with state secrets
on her unsecure private server they would be court martialed. Timmy the cross talking bore flatly said “that’s
absolutely false”.
Of the many steaming piles
of BS Timmy I can’t stop talking left on the debate stage that was one of the
bigger more steamy piles. First off in
congressional testimony Jimmy the fixer Comey said other government employees
should not try what the Hutt actually did.
Second there was recently a Navy sailor sentenced to a year in the
cooler for taking pictures of a Navy sub to "share with his grandson some day" and
then tryed getting rid of the phone that contained them. Third any “grossly
negligent” action by a Marine dealing with national security most certainly
would be a Courts Martial offence. Last, how
is what the NSA contractor just arrested for stealing a highly classified
computer code any different from what the Hutt did?
Jimmy the fixer hangs his
hat for not recommending an indictment against the Hutt on the fact that the
Hutt had “no intent” to compromise national security. I’m pretty sure in the Marine Corps the “gross
negligence” part of the crime in handling national security is as big a crime
as the compromise of that information. I
was once lectured at length and had to sign a “re-education form” when I left a
piece of classified material on my desk in a room that was cleared for open
storage. In other words there was no
violation of any security rules and zero chance of a compromise as the “violation”
occurred behind what we called the “hard line”.
No one got behind the hard line, unless they were cleared for the level
of the highest classified material contained therein.
Okay I’m not as innocent as
I make it out. One, I knew the rules and
mistakenly violated them. Second, clearance
does not equal a “need to know”. In
other words not only do you have to have the requisite clearance to the
material you have to have a need to know the material. By leaving the material out and available to
anyone walking by, the second part of the security test was compromised.
The need to know was the
perplexing thing about the Bradly Manning case.
Why did an E-nothing have such broad access to so much classified
material? He clearly had no need to know
much of it. He may have worked in the
vault where much the material was logged and stored. I don’t know.
But the point of this long
winded meandering word spaghetti is that security of classified material was taken
very seriously by the Marine Corps. Had
I been “grossly negligent”, say put the material in a brief case, actively subverted
measures to prevent unauthorized removal of the material across the hard line
and took the material home or on a trip to work on it, akin to what the Hutt
did and what drug dealers refer to as "smuggling", I most certainly would have been court martialed. Intent may have played into the sentencing
phase of the trial, it certainly would not have played any part in the guilt or
innocence phase.
With regard to the sailor
going to jail. I do not what his “intent”
was. It doesn’t matter. He may have been clandestinely passing the
info to a mole somewhere. Who knows? That’s why the sailor had to be rung up. That’s why Shrillda the Hutt and partners in
crime should have been rung up by the FBI.
Instead the FBI became a facilitator of the crime and then, when it
destroyed the evidence of the crime, an accomplice.
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