My Rules of Bureaucratic Decorum

Unredacted has a post today about what the State Department was hiding from a Freedom of Information Act Request. The answer? Someone's intemperate marginalia:

Having won this game of documentary hide and seek [during a two-year long FOIA request], I had a hearty chuckle, finding it quite funny that 1) a person employed by the Department of State (I don’t know who– are there any graphologists out there?) would write “bunch of crap!!” on a copy of a House resolution, and 2) that the Department of State had tried so hard to prevent the public from knowing it had ever happened.

We can all learn a lesson from this episode. Personally, I stopped writing comments on memos and cables long ago, right after I started doing research in the National Archives. It always made me chuckle to see candid handwritten remarks made on working papers by some long-gone FSO who never realized that one day that document would be in the public domain. Now, I keep my remarks on separate, non-archived, papers. Or better yet, make them orally.

Not that I ever express anything other than the highest regard for our elected representatives, you understand. Or for our President's political appointees, who are never less than exemplary in all their professional qualifications and personal characteristics. I have never seen any reason to speak poorly of our news media and Punditocracy. Or of the many think tanks, NGOs, Beltway Bandits and Grand Army of the Consultancy that live off the taxpayer's dime.

As best I understand the protocol, you are always free to disparage the French and the leaders of some hostile foreign nations, mainly Iran and North Korea. Personally, I do not do so, since I actually have high regard for France, and I think it's bad form to knock foreigners without good cause. That leaves me free to insult Vladimir Putin, since he's a thug with pretensions to grandeur, and Muammar al-Gaddafi, who is sui generis as the Clown Prince of the Middle East. But that's about all, unless you count the United Nations, since that organization is full of blood-sucking parasites and weasels. The same goes for the European Parliament, which is basically the UN of Europe.

And don't get me started on the Chi-Coms. I'll just say that I will go to any expense or inconvenience to avoid buying any product made in the People's Republic of China. I 'look for the laogai label' when I am buying that coat, shirt, or anything else.

I will confess to having had unkind thoughts about @JaredCohen back when he was a government official. But today, @Jared has dried up as a source of parody fodder; he hasn't tweeted anything for five days now, whereas it used to be more like every five minutes. Evidently, he has less free time on his hands at Google than he did when he worked for the State Department.

So to recap my four rules of bureaucratic decorum:

1. It is never appropriate to write down disparaging statements about our elected representatives or their political appointees, with an occasional exception for a really conspicuous blowhard like @Jared.

2. It is rarely in good taste to express criticism of any member of the news media or of a news commentator.

3. Propriety requires the utmost restraint when making remarks about foreign personalities other than Putin and Gaddafi.

4. Feel free to say anything you like about the United Nations and the Chi-Coms.

By following these simple rules, I will have nothing to fear from any FOIA request.

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Wiki-Warm Up (611 Down, 249,389 to Go)

Unredacted points out the depressing fact that:

It’s day five of the wikileaks cable dump and (as of this writing) 611 cables have been released (less than half of one percent of the total 250,000).

To be precise, 611 cables is only .00244 percent of the total. At that rate, it will take EIGHT YEARS to get to the end.

On the brighter side, Unredacted also asked the fascinating question:

Imagine if Prince William [a reference to 08 BISHKEK 1095] and Joe Biden were ever in a room together.

Surely, that fated meeting must have already happened somewhere. Two of the greatest blowhards on the world scene today simply have to have encountered each other at some reception or conference or other function. The poor note taker at that marathon gabfest probably came down with severe tendinitis in his or her pen hand. Would somebody please leak that cable? I'd love to read it the next time I have a free week.

In another post, Unredacted linked to the telephone conversation in which President Nixon was informed by Al Haig of the Pentagon Papers leak. Nixon's reaction was to fire people:

I’d just start right at the top and fire some people. I mean whoever – whatever department it came out of I’d fire the top guy.

Unredacted goes on to say that "In Obama’s case, it would be the top gal, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton." However, that is incorrect, since Hillary is not guilty in this mess. These cables, like the Pentagon Papers, were leaked out of the Defense Department.

Hillary said as much at her press conference yesterday in Manama:

Asked how such a huge leak could have occurred and why no alarm bells went off when a low-level intelligence analyst allegedly downloaded 250,000 classified diplomatic cables, Clinton replied: "The decision was made in the Bush administration to add the diplomatic cables to the Defense Department's special network that was created for that purpose."

While she defended the move as defensible at the time, she emphasized that these policies were being rolled back in the wake of the WikiLeaks crisis, perhaps for good.

"The process was undertaken in order to do a better job of what's called ‘connecting the dots,' because after 9/11, one of the principle criticisms of the government was that the information was stovepiped, that the Defense Department knew things that the State Department didn't know, that the White House didn't know," Clinton explained. "So it was understandable for the Bush administration to say, ‘We need to end the stovepiping and figure out how to have greater situational awareness and sharing of information.'"

Without identifying anyone by name, she then said that it was in the Defense Department, not the State Department, where the leak occurred.

I think firing some senior people would be an excellent response to this disaster, but let's aim before we fire.

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