Memorial Day, 2011

First, today's fall from grace award goes to the anonymous hackers who attacked various PBS Web sites because Front Line had dared to broadcast a show on Wikileaks that fell short of adulation. This is precisely why my contempt for Julian Assange and his minions remains strong. Freedom of information means nothing if its self-appointed defenders pick and choose what information shall be free.

The local Memorial Day show followed much the same script as in past years. This town has a three-stop parade. The first stop is the harbour, where the town remembers those whose gave their lives at sea, navy, merchant marine and privateer: there are long memories here, and it wouldn't do to leave the privateers out of our thoughts. The main event, which I take in, is at the Memorial Park downtown. This is the one dominated by a sombre Civil War obelisk, which bears more names than all the other memorials combined.

This the beginning of the Civil War sesquicentennial. If we manage to get through the next four years without starting another one, perhaps we can use the time to recognise the seed of what the war started, and to settle some things that were far from settled at the centennial.

Against this background, I was disappointed in our keynote speaker, a young Marine reserve officer raised in Marblehead. There is a lot of material to draw from here. We did not especially need a political sermon strongly tinged with Tea Party rant. Although that the town has a decidedly Republican cast, I detected an uptick in shuffling and shifting in the crowd. Not the place, old man.

Forty years ago one would not have predicted that veterans' organisations would have been inherited by veterans of my generation. Then, I would have predicted that those organisations would wither and die rather than treat Vietnam veterans on equal terms. I have never forgotten or forgiven that. I will show up at such events but that is as far as I'll take it. But here we are, old men and women, and the older men and women of World War Two and Korea are dying at a prodigious rate. We are the old ones: may the fates grant us one insight denied to veterans of "the greatest generation." What Holmes called "the incommunicable experience of war" unites us all. We are related to the deeps of time, far past Thucydides, before Marathon. May we be fair-minded and generous to those who are behind the guns today.

Bottom rail on top, Julian

When you're Don Quixote, life kind of sucks, sometimes. Early on in Julian Assange's tilt against the windmills of western politics, I wondered what would happen if somebody began to leak his little secrets.

Well, now we know: or at least, we're beginning to find out. It is hilariously hypocritical, and rather what one would expect. How dare they!! The name of this game is that Don Julian gets to criticise everyone, but nobody gets to turn the tables on Don Julian.

This would be sharper still if the media who enabled Wikileaks in the first place (you know who you are) were capable of showing some spine as the tale of his Scandinavian amusements unfolds. Some are...that is, some are still able to smell news and go after it. Others are being, well, craven.

I'm working my way through the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography, whose unexpurgated version is appearing as he intended a century after his death. At one point, he expands on the amount of time, energy and hot air devoted to the sensations of any particular moment, sensations which aren't likely to merit more than a footnote when the histories come to be written.

Not long ago, the pundits hinted that Wikileaks would be a game-changer. Now we perceive a self-inflicted shift, and perceive prescience in Twain. If we really expected a sea change, we would need an instrument as powerful as the Internet, but a mastermind less weak than Don Julian.

Something to say about WikiLeaks

Oh hell, why not? Everybody and his dog has, so far.

The difference, in my generation, may be that I actually held a Top Secret clearance. For excellent--though now declassified--reasons. My day job, so to speak, in the Navy was in communications, at a time when the Cold War was really, really cold. It seemed plausible then that a screw-up could end with the incineration of the planet. So, even as far down the food chain as we were, people in my division took the security part of our job very seriously.

I never worked so hard to keep my native curiosity in check. For instance, at irregular intervals during every watch, we would receive cryptic--though not encrypted--secret messages. I knew enough to know that they referred to the several classes of Soviet submarines active in the Atlantic and to nautical plots with a certain consistency. It certainly seemed as if we knew when any given Soviet submarine exited into the open Atlantic, give or take a few minutes of time and a minute or so of latitude and longitude. I also knew that excess curiosity on the topic might ensure that my next tour of duty would be in Leavenworth.

Now we know how that worked. So deeply ingrained are the habits I acquired then that I won't dwell on that knowledge here. Assange and his compeers strike me as the sort of arrogant assholes who simply grab at information without any thought for consequences. indeed, the Swedish sex crimes charge seems of a piece with the whole thing. It is another play of the "laws are for little people" thing, another instance of the utter failure of the Western left, and the American left in particular, to maintain a sense of perspective. Successful revolutions use privileged information to overthrow governments. People who play at revolution use it to get onto TMZ.

What can we say though of the people who feed information to such parasites? More, what can we say about those who were supposed to be watching the people who handled the information? We had no flash drives in 1970. Indeed, we had no computers that could be transported in anything smaller than an 18-wheeler, but our supervisors knew enough to see that we had no parallel opportunity to remove information from a classified space. Now, it seems that an sufficiently motivated Pfc or GS-2 can walk into work with a 16 Gb flash drive and download the works. I could not have done such a thing at any of several employers or clients I've worked for, even if I had wanted to.

There was also a fairly well-understood priority for classifying information, and that seems to have eroded over the years. Secret messages--of the sort processed by peons like me--were serious business. Top Secret messages, of a sort I handled but never decrypted, were deadly serious. It does seem now as if any piece of diplomatic cattiness gets rocketed to the top echelons of secrecy, to the detriment of the entire concept. If the peons don't understand there's a value in silence, whose fault is it? Theirs, or their superiors, who can't tell an indiscretion from a real security risk?

It has been hilarious this week watching the actual diplomats make fools of eager-beaver broadcast journalists as all this has unfolded. One quoted a senior diplomat of an affected country as saying "never mind: you should see what we say about you." Only people like Assange, with that singular combination of arrogance and naivete, would think that their more newsworthy disclosures are news at all. Only the current crop of broadcast journalists would be their enablers. The trouble is that these two lots, between them, may also disclose items like the one I mentioned, of no consequence to them but of considerable military value, and never know it. And that sort of information can and should remain secure. You should not do magic you do not understand.