Making it Harder to Govern

Some politicians never leave office;  they continue to write, fund programs of their own design, and communicate with their political friends.  Most of them, like Jimmy Carter and his Habitat for Humanity support, or the regular dinners of the Bush seniors, are good things.  It is rare to see an outgoing Administration try to make it harder for anyone to govern after them, at least to the extent we have seen in the last couple of weeks.

Some of these are dangerous, like pardoning a terrorist or prisoners with life sentences, but none are as dangerous as sets of publications this week.  The first is the recently released history of the CIA which has been released way before its time, and seems likely to cause damage to CIA in ways that will not be easy to see for several years when people start putting two and two together and saying "ah ha" .  These are not the 50-year old records of what we did in World War II to beat the Germans.  We don't release this kind of stuff because Intelligence Agencies don't forget and have the records to back that up.  The CIA says it is complying with an executive order signed by President Clinton.  Why we would want to do that the day before this Administration ends is not beyond understanding.

The declassification of this and someone called the Procedures Approved by the Attorney General Pursuant to Executive Order 12333 are making public issues that shouldn't have been.  They are permanently declassifying matters of national security that should be settled and talked about in places that consider the security of agents of our government who have to work for a living.  They always have been.  Now, we get to see them debated in public because they were declassified for all to see and published the day before the outgoing President leaves.  President Clinton and President Obama never did understand classification of information the way the rest of government employees in Intellgence do.  Making something like this open source can't be undone.  The Russians and Chinese can see why we do certain things.  They can see what kind of restrictions our agents have to operate.  They can follow debates about this kind of thing as they go on in open discussions.  They will make governing and intelligence collection more difficult.  Fourty-two pages of every detail of every rule on what can be collected on US Persons in overseas locations.  For whatever reasons, they put their own personal approach to these issues when they make them public, without knowing what national security implications there are after they leave office.