Only classified CONFIDENTIAL or SECRET?! The fact it was HUMINT means the information is classified. Mis-classifying it at lower levels or not at all does not absolve the employees of violation of security requirements. It is the information first and classification level second as people often mis-classify information. HUMINT is specifically TOP SECRET or above.
CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET are not REL to non-classified sources. People broke the law.
And contrary to your assumption many DOD organizations do use granular classification templates specifying classification level, REL TO and date of declassification.
Does anyone here recall the OUTRAGE when a Republican staffer released Ted Kennedy’s corrupt memos that were on a government server in a public shared folder system?
They called him a “hacker” and a spy.
Red Ted Kennedy was colluding with the NAACP to block some of Bush’s judicial nominees to affect a pending court decision as well as to block Bush’s Hispanic judicial nominees for political reasons.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1138153/posts
Why is Darby a hero, but Miranda a felon?
WorldNetDaily ^ | 5/18/04 | Mychal S. Massie
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1327923/posts
Memogate Prequel The right way to handle a pseudo-scandal.
WSJ ^ | 1/25/05 | WSJ - Editorial
Regular readers of these pages will recall our scoop a little over a year ago on what came to be known on Capitol Hill as Memogate. Our publication of Democratic strategy memos on how to defeat President Bush’s judicial nominees created a stir in Washington, not least because they showed how Senators Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin and others were taking orders from liberal interest groups, even to the point of delaying a vote on a candidate for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until it had heard the University of Michigan affirmative action case.
More than a year later, it’s not over yet. Federal prosecutor David Kelley is conducting an investigation into the “stolen” memos, which were obtained by Republican staffers courtesy of a glitch in the Judiciary Committee’s computer system. Manuel Miranda, staffer to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and former staffer to the Republican Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, was forced to resign.
Meanwhile, a memo of a different ilk has just come to light that puts Memogate into some long-needed perspective. It’s a 1996 letter from Republican Representative Ben Gilman, then-chairman of the House International Relations Committee, to his Democratic counterpart, Lee Hamilton. (See the full text here.)
The letter describes how Democratic staffers, taking advantage of a glitch in the committee’s computer system, had been reading the private documents of the Republican staff for more than a year. Oh—did we mention that they were funneling them to the Clinton State Department? Their antics were revealed when Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot called Chairman Gilman to protest drafts of two memos on Haiti that hadn’t even reached Mr. Gilman’s desk yet...
I don’t think that we are disagreeing here. My point was that the WikiLeaks stuff was all labeled C or S (NOFORN for most of the State stuff) so how come there was HUMINT in there? Because someone was being sloppy in classification which was my point. And yes someone (who had access and was a US citizen) downloaded this stuff and broke the law and should be shot for treason if caught.
As for the front man since he is not a US citizen and did not do this in the US there’s not much you can do to him (at least legally). Don’t much care either way as this is the type of stuff one should expect from foreigner (or foreign powers) that disagree with our “war on terror”. Propaganda and disinformation are tools of the trade, what hurts is that the US basically inflicted this on itself by being so sloppy in handling classified material. It also has provided a valuable service in that most likely the Russians, Chinese, Brits and everyone else has been tapping into this for a long long time, WikiLeaks just exposed how easy it is to do. I would hope that the US takes measures to tighten this stuff up. Well, one can hope.
Lastly, personally I disagree with classifying stuff for CYA purposes which is what the helo video was all about. We should have fessed up about this at the time and made reparations. Would have been a lot better than having it come out like this. In a war zone there’s all kinds of F ups like this, it happens and most (reasonable) people know that and would have accepted it. Now people are wondering well if they covered up this just how much more did they cover up and maybe what the Taliban is saying about them targeting (insert whatever, old, women, babies) is true. Kills our credibility in the future (not that we had that much to begin with).