Editor’s Note: There is a lot going on. Some of the other Narrative on the mutable nature of truth will play out this week. Follow the accounts- all of them- and join us in the merry struggle for power.
– Vic

Reader Comment: “I actually saw an air bedding evolution once. It was on USS Caron in Norfolk. The Chief Engineer decided Engineering berthing has getting squalid. So he ordered air bedding – all mattresses out on deck for a day of sunny natural disinfection. I think it was successful.”

– Retired Reader

Air Bedding

In the Navy in the past sailors would periodically pull their bedding up on deck and let it sit in the sun for the day – it killed the bed bugs and dust mites and helped control various infections.

The idea has merit elsewhere…

There’s currently a bit of a fire-storm in the intelligence community in Washington about the White House’s efforts to release intelligence on the now debunked claims that Russia attempted to support Trumps’ election in 2016. Interestingly, there’s an even bigger firestorm growing around the 2020 election results.

The Intelligence Community (IC) has strongly resisted the White House’s efforts. The Director of the CIA says that any such release would expose “sources and methods” that, once lost, would damage US security. The Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) has also pushed back, voicing the same concerns.

Sources and Methods is a blanket term which covers both particulars of any given piece of information, that is: who is telling you things, and how exactly are you hearing it, whether you’ve bugged the Ottoman Emperor’s bathroom, or have his butler on the payroll, if you will. Obviously, the more specific information is, the more easily can a release be traced back to “the butler” and that source is then lost for good (he may well be “terminal”) and, of course, others who might be tempted to talk to you now will be quite hesitant to talk to you, fearing that they too will later be exposed.

There is also the obvious concern that the other side will “turn” your source and start feeding you misleading information.

All that said, the information needs to be released – all of it, no edits.

Why? Well, as was noted in “Big Jake,” “What you got in that box is too big to keep a secret.” Just so.

Would this damage IC efforts? Yes, but… I have a friend, a career intelligence officer, who likes to point out (along with a host of others, former leaders of the IC, to include former directors of the CIA, former Secretaries of Defense, and former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs) that the IC hasn’t detected a major strategic shift in 75 years.

And, he has repeatedly noted that there’s virtually nothing he has ever read in one of those little rooms in the back of some vault, in a long litany of classified programs with fancy codewords all up and down the margins, that he hasn’t also found in some magazine or newspaper. The IC leaks and has been leaking for decades; it has probably gotten worse in the last 20 years. Further, the Russians and Chinese aren’t stupid; they understand, perhaps to the 99th percentile, how we collect intelligence. Presumably, they have much of the same technology we have.

That doesn’t mean we should just give them stuff, but it does raise some interesting points, and the most important is this:

The IC must operate with the trust of the nation. And right now, probably something close to half the country, those who support President Trump, believe the IC tried to destroy him. Meanwhile, the other half of the country has been ill-disposed to the IC philosophically for most of their lives. The IC isn’t going to make any new friends by playing “I’ve got a secret.” Dragging up “Damage to national security” as their defense will, in the end, probably only make the level of distrust grow worse.

We sit in the middle of a hotly contested election; the IC can either add to that national frustration, or maybe throw a small chip into the pot to try to tamp things down. The IC could lead the way in trying to openly restore some integrity to the process of government. It might even help in ensuring future elections have fewer “anomalies.” The IC might take a cue from the character Big Jake in that same movie, speaking of the box containing the ransom money: “I hate secrets. Never knew one to be kept.”

The trust of the nation, the trust of the citizenry, that the organs of government are operating in their interest, and that the IC is not being used as a weapon against other Americans, is far more important than any secrets – more important than all the secrets.
This is an opportunity for the IC to show some leadership and simply come clean. Will it be expensive in terms of lost sources? Perhaps. But the trend right now is that the IC will be increasingly viewed with a hostile eye by both sides of the political spectrum.

Put simply, the IC needs to stand up in front of the American people – for whom they work, and from whom comes their budget – and “air bedding.” Then, maybe that example might catch on, maybe the rest of the bureaucracies would also “air bedding.”

Copyright 2020 Arrias
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