Film [”Secrecy”] Exposes the Seduction of Secrecy
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000002721511&parm1=5&cpage=4
“Mahle describes how the CIA’s Somalia analysts were deprived of intelligence in other parts of the building because they didn’t have a “need to know.” As a result, they were unable to warn U.S. troops that the rag-tag bands ransacking Mogadishu had been trained up by al Qaeda.”
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This vivid and disturbing exposure of the human dimension of the conflict between the government’s duty to keep secrets and the peoples’ right to know deserves a national audience.
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Nor have I met an official who would blithely disclose such a secret, just for the hell of it.
But Levin told me that government officials sometimes disclose secrets inadvertently, because “they haven’t been properly briefed or indoctrinated” on how sensitive certain kinds of information is.
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Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? A government of men, as it were, not laws.
Which is why, of course, we need courts, and leakers, and those who midwife their secrets into print.
“I really resent accusations that we’re not patriots or that we are indifferent to the security of the United States if we publish things that the government says are secret,” Gellman says in the film.
“I think what I do is every bit as patriotic as what a soldier does or what an intelligence officer does. I think that people who look only at security are misjudging what kind of society they’re supposed to be defending,” he says. “And I think ultimately the idea that the president and the president alone can decide what we will know is profoundly un-American.”
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991490
Anthrax preparation indicates home-grown origin
29 October 01
Debora MacKenzie
“Fluidising agent
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For its weapon, say informed sources, the US added various molecules, including surfactants, to the wet spores so that when they were
dried, they broke up into fine particles within a very narrow size range of a few microns.”
Although the New Scientist article talks only about bioweapons manufacturing, the use of surfactants is definitely not something restricted only to bioweapons facilities.
These findings seem to confirm the working hypothesis in two ways: (1) It seems to confirm that the anthrax did not have to come from a bioweapons lab, and (2) it seems to confirm that the silica detected by AFIP was could be trace amounts of a surfactant absorbed from use before drying the spores. Surfactants are wetting agents that lower the surface tension of a liquid, allowing easier spreading, and lower the interfacial tension between two liquids.
The FBI suspects Al-Timimi of accessing this biochemistry information at the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense.