And out of curiosity, int he first paragraph of his speech did Ron Paul call Obama a neocon? Or is he saying that neocons form a shadow government and Obama is not really a national leader? (Which, knowing some of the wackier things Paul believes, could be what he means).

Executive Order 12958, issued by Bill Clinton in 1995, gave just 20 officials, including the President, authority to classify documents as top secret. Sounds good, huh? Yeah, but it allowed those 20 to delegate their authority to 1,336 others. As it turned out, that derivative authority was eventually handed to some 2 million government officials and a million industrial contractors (per a 1997 bipartisan congressional report).

Yeah, um, do the math. To paraphrase The Incredibles ... when everything is secret, nothing is.

To classify as secret or top secret? Unless my initial reading was wrong, nothing in these releases through Wikileaks has been rated higher than secret.

Top secret. And from what I understand, there may be top secret documents yet to be released by WikiLeaks. Bradley Manning, the army intelligence analyst who downloaded the cables, did so from both the SPIRNet system (garden variety secrets) and from JWICS, the system used to transmit top secret documents.

In any event, I think going, within 2 years, from 20 people to 3 million people authorized to classify documents as top secret means many more things have been classified as top secret than can possibly be kept under wraps.


Meanwhile, the focus seems to be on Assange, with a subsidiary focus on the leaky state of U.S. intelligence - but where's the focus on the content of the leaks? All this blaming the messenger and the source security stuff is weaksauce, imo.

It seems to be deflection, deflection and working. I'd have to agree that the previous leaks about Iraq and Afghanistan didn't cause this much of a stir because the military didn't have nearly as much ability to scream bloody murder.

Reports spread by a Holocaust denier associated with Wikileaks.

Ah, well then... I knew it was too good to be true.

Obviously, the CIA caught him up in a jewypot. They fall for it every time.