Incompetence
The Wrecking-ball & the Tongue-tieds - Part 2
A short Field Note for today, as I’ve spent most of this Sunday morning reading an extraordinary piece of journalism in The New York Times.
For your consideration, three suggestions for your Sunday afternoon…
1. Read this revealing new history of the present War in Ukraine, from Adam Entous in the Times. It is deeply well-sourced, analytical reporting. I expect it will someday merit a place on our bookshelf alongside the “Pentagon Papers” from 1971 and “The Long Telegram” from 1946.
2. Let’s reflect then on that ridiculous Signal scandal of the past week, and the dangerous incompetence of the clown-car that’s in currently charge of U.S. international affairs - calling the shots on war, abandoning our postwar allies, and careful coddling of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s all connected.
3. Note how, as late as this very Sunday morning, no one in the wrecking-ball White House or the tongue-tied Congress considers the Signal scandal dangerous or reckless enough for them to comment at all. They condone incompetence with their silence - and try to ignore it as Trump does, hoping it will go away. No one is taking responsibility.
Tell me loose-lips don’t sink ships, or in this case Air Force fighter pilots put at serious risk by a clueless U.S. Secretary of Defense.
This is how the world ends. We deserve better.
Exactly, Keel. This event did put pilot’s live at risk. I personally know an Air Force officer who was punished for a much less egregious leak of much less important classified material. Any of us who had put future attack information into a public site would be court martialed. As an Air Firce Second Lieutenant in 1967 I held several Top Secret “codeword clearances” and worked inside a classified vault. We were not even allowed to say the “codeword names” to anyone who did not hold that clearance, much less anything about the actual intelligence information. When I retired in 2008, I was debriefed on all the clearances I had at that time and told I could not ever tell anyone any of the information I had learned from it. I have never told anyone anything about it. These not ready for prime time officials have no business being in their confirmed positions.
Mr. Hunt-
There’s a line in “Cat Ballou” (1965) where John Marley as Frankie Ballou exclaims, “I’m not running a dude ranch for misfits and unemployables…”. I’ve been quoting that line a lot lately.
Keep up the good work.