28 July 2010
Leaks
The amount of classified information released over the last week by the helpful people at Wikileaks is breathtaking. In fact, the whole thing laves me breathless.
Three days ago, the website posted over 91,000 reports written by soldiers and intelligence officers describing what the site calls “lethal actions” involving US Forces in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2010.
The reports do not generally cover top secret or sensitive compartmented intelligence. The operators of the site have that sanctimonious smirk you would expect. They cloak themselves in the notion that principled leaking, which they support, makes for better democracies.
In principle, of course I agree. I do not trust any government- mine or others- to act in any interest but its own. But when only one government is actually free enough that a prospective leaker is confident that the heavy hand will not pound the midnight door and drag them out to be shot, what is the consequence?
Even Britain has the Official Secrets Act, which makes leaking of classified information a real crime with real consequences.
In our current construct, only the US military winds up getting hurt. Politicians can be tossed out of office, but retain their health. Our kids in the field can be blown to pieces, and I am sure young jihadis are pouring over the unit information, gleaning tips on unit tactics and patterns of analysis. There is no more clear means of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and that is treason in my book.
The sanctimony of Wikileaks doesn’t stop there. The sire claims to have delayed the release of “some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source.” They claim they will eventually get the information out with “occasional redactions” as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.
By that, I assume they mean the balance of power will have shifted to the assholes who are murdering our troops and Afghan civilians.
I went to bed cranky and woke bolt upright at the sudden silence in the unit as power tripped offline, as if an IED had knocked out the power.
(USS Midway Berthing Compartment, restored. Courtesy Midway Museum)
It took me back to frame 38 on the 01 level of Ma Midway, my first ship. I had been thinking of it all day, after the surprisingly casual ceremony in which my son swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
A lot of my pals put emphasis on the connecting word about the enemies. It was introduced as a consequence of the Late Unpleasantness Between the States, and there are other words in the oath that make it perfectly clear that serving officers are not permitted to identify those domestic enemies on their own.
I thought about that and my son’s prospective involvement in the great machine as I padded down the hall from the bedroom. Old habits die hard, and I replicated the actions of long ago, when I would swing out of the rack and gingerly feel the deck below to ensure it was not white hot from unseen flames below, and if not, find my flip flops and pad out of BK4 and down the linoleum-tiled passageway where I could feel the thick rubber covers on the buttons on the breaker box and punch it to re-set.
With luck the air would move again, and things would be fine. There are no breaker boxes in Big Pink, or at least not in the fourth-floor passageway.
I have always liked the windows open, and ship living made me just a little more painfully alert than normal, but the sudden silence always gets me up. Cool and moving air is the only answer for me. Sometimes we would sleep in the catwalk if the CASREP could not be addressed by night-check.
Leo the Big Pink Engineer is a cracker-jack, even if he is an Air Force veteran. He is a short but powerfully-built man with salt and pepper hair and a ragged mustache. He is from Puerto Rica, which is useful in dealing with the all-Hispanic crew of Bug Pink Porters, and understands preventative maintenance, and the monthly board meeting tomorrow will talk about the back-up generator issue.
Leo managed to get one of the two main power circuits in the building that runs the kitchens to provide power from the existing inadequate generator in the basement, even when a pipe bursts somewhere and shorts out the main bus.
That also happens when the squirrels gnaw through the insulation on the pole on the service drive north of the building in the Spring and Fall and explode themselves in brilliant rodent plumes when their teeth make contact with The Juice.
He took over the plant from Kelly, the lazy son of a lazy man who between them had reigned over the pipes and pumps since the building was new. Nothing had been done to prevent decay. If Big Pink were a ship, she would have sunk at the pier from her own vast weight. The hot-water risers were rotting and the electrical bus was in serious overload, never having been intended to deal with the proliferation of personal electronic devices.
The two factors combined to cause a depressing regularity of outages. Consequently, before we stopped the leaks and the we lost power with depressing regularity, the static equivalent of the building going Dead in the Water. There is nothing worse than these boxes without air moving, the stillness overwhelming.
Strong and expensive action was taken. A special levy was raised on the backs of the owners, Leo was hired, the riser pipes replaced, and things got better, even if the grid sometimes still imposes its whims on us like last night. We can move on to downstream problems.
They are debating the elevators, and with the population of elderly on the upper floors, the requirement to have them operable even when The Juice is gone so they can be evacuated if necessary. They are talking about work-arounds, and half measures, which includes the idea that Leo should maintain a diesel generator on the roof to power a single elevator car.
Last meeting he almost swore in exasperation at the prospect that his crew would have to haul fuel to the roof, and establish a monthly maintenance plan to fire the thing up to ensure that it works.
The obvious answer is to replace the existing back-up generator with one that would power the garage doors, the kitchen circuit to the units and one or two elevator cars, but this is a democracy, even if in a small way.
I contemplated staying up and getting an early start on things, since the computer could work on back-up, even if my brain now exists partly in the cloud of the internet. Suddenly the 60-cycle hum of life came up and the night-light on the stove hood blinked on. Power restored. I went back to the rack, and felt the cool air wafting from the convector unit under the window.
I thought about my son, and the assholes who take it upon themselves to release classified information, and the assholes who place bombs in markets to kill innocent people. Then I slept for a while, but I dreamed of explosions that had no sound, and did not wake up rested.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!