Tag Archives: foreign policy

Clinton’s Insecurity, More

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is rather well-known for exchanging emails with classified information in them, and for relaying others with classified information in them, via her unclassified, connected to the Internet, personal email server which she maintained in your New York digs.  She’s also well-known for her claim that nothing she handled on that server—which was all of her State Department work as well as legitimately personal emails—was “marked classified.”

I’ll skip over the fact that the emails containing classified information were classified by that content, regardless of any markings or lack of markings, and that it’s a felony to mishandle classified materials in that way or any other, regardless of intent.

Now we know, however, that she has been lying about those markings, too.

[A] 2012 email released by the State Department appears to challenge that claim because it carries a classified code known as a “portion marking”—and that marking was on the email when it was sent directly to Clinton’s account.

Documents are marked classified in accordance with the classification level of the information contained.  There are two types of markings that every document marked classified carries, and these markings identify the fact of classification—again, contrary to what the Left keeps bleating, the documents already are classified simply because they carry classified information; markings do not create the classification, they merely acknowledge it.

One type of classification marking is the marking at the top and bottom of every page of the document and on the document’s cover sheet, if any.  This marking indicates the highest level of classified information contained anywhere in the document (there can be parts of the document with lesser classification, even with unclassified information).

The other type of classification marking is portion marking.  Here, every paragraph is marked with the highest level of classification of the material contained within that paragraph, including paragraphs that are wholly unclassified being explicitly marked unclassified.  Portion marking is more detailed than that.  Here’s an excerpt from a January 2014 federal government training manual, Marking Classified National Security Information, which is part of the training Clinton had signed off as having taken when she acceded to her Secretary of State position:

This system requires that standard markings be applied to classified information….  Markings shall be uniformly and conspicuously applied to leave no doubt about the classified status of the information, the level of protection required, and the duration of classification.
…
A portion is ordinarily defined as a paragraph, but also includes subjects, titles, graphics, tables, charts, bullet statements, sub-paragraphs, classified signature blocks, bullets and other portions within slide presentations, and the like.

Such markings were present in, at the least, that 2012 email.

The “C”—which means it was marked classified at the confidential level—is in the left-hand-margin and relates to an April 2012 phone call with Malawi’s first female president, Joyce Banda, who took power after the death of President Mutharika in 2012.

“(C)  Purpose of Call: to offer condolences on the passing of President Mukharika and congratulate President Banda on her recent swearing in.”

Everything after that was fully redacted before it was publicly released by the State Department—a sign that the information was classified at the time and dealt with sensitive government deliberations.

Elections have consequences.

Update: Grammar, grammar, grammar.  Not always a safe space.

Investigate After All?

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After acknowledging last week that several minutes of video from a 2013 briefing on the Iran nuclear deal had been intentionally cut, the State Department announced Wednesday that Secretary of State John Kerry has ordered an investigation into who ordered the edit.

This comes on the heels of ABC News having caught the White House altering the transcript of President Barack Obama’s (D) press agent, Josh Earnest’s, briefing about another Iran-related matter.

Given State’s (and this administration’s generally) mendacity regarding this sort of thing from the jump, why should we take any investigation State might now undertake seriously?  Why should we believe its outcome to be anything other than a once-over-lightly square filler, or any “miscreant” who might be identified as anyone other than a scapegoat?

Hillary Clinton’s Insecurity

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With her emails, that is.  Only more so.  It seems she exchanged, and was in the middle of exchanges, that were real-time discussions of drone strike permissions in Pakistan.

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side”—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.

Unfortunately, the only thing secret about these discussions was the arrangement between State and the CIA.  They knew their discussions were in the clear because they used weasel-words (instead of encryption).

The vaguely worded messages didn’t mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, officials said.

But they talked around the subjects.

State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials.  It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast, and the US diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.

Because secure communications systems cease operations when the sun goes down.  Sure.  Traveling?  Folks important enough to be in on discussions of this nature have mobile satellite phones on them all the time.

These guys carefully ignore COMSEC considerations when they make idiotic excuses like this.  Which makes the excuses dishonest rather than idiotic.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Mrs Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said.

And one of these guys wants to be President of the United States.  What secrets will she give up from that office, with this knowledge of security?  This knowledge of right and wrong?  What damage will she do to our nation with this level of understanding of the difference at this time that it makes?

Elections have consequences.

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy

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This is what Democrat Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has been like and what President Barack Obama’s (D) foreign policy is like.

  • Compromised national security with her cavalier treatment of our most classified information—and lying about it
  • Failed to protect or rescue Americans in Benghazi—and lying about it afterwards
  • Enthusiastically pushed for the Libya war—and then failing to support efforts to control its aftermath
  • Supported the premature Iraq withdrawal—which threw away our hard-won victory and left Iraq in shambles
  • Failed to deal with the spread of Islamic terrorism
  • Failed to reset relations with Russia—not even bothering to use the correct Russian word on her “reset” button
  • Lost all of our then-ongoing wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Counting Syria, and her BFF’s badly faded and washed out pink line, four
  • Facilitated Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons
  • Failed to deal with the Veterans Administration’s apparent abandonment of our veterans—many of them the very same ones whose battlefield victories her foreign affairs policies have abandoned
  • Ongoing, slow-motion surrenders of the South China Sea to an expansionist People’s Republic of China and of provinces of Georgia and Ukraine to an expansionist Russia

Clinton is loud and proud about wanting more of the same.

Elections have consequences.

False Premises

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Here’s one.

The differences between China and the US over the South China Sea issue have become a matter of concern and even anxiety.  But some of the perceptions in the US and elsewhere about China’s policy and intentions in the area are misplaced.  A pressing task is to understand the facts and China’s intentions correctly so as to avoid real danger and consequences as a result of misinterpretation and miscalculation.

No, this is false.  The pressing task is to make clear to the People’s Republic of China, and to the nations rimming the South China Sea, the facts and intentions of the US.

One problem with false premises is that they contribute to timidity, in outcome if not directly.

The issues in the South China Sea revolve around territorial and maritime jurisdiction.  China believes it is doing nothing more than maintaining and defending legitimate territorial claims and maritime rights.

And they’re getting away with those illegitimate claims, their Nine-Dash Line-based seizure and occupation of the South China Sea, at the direct expense of those littoral nations, our friends and allies, potential friends and allies, and our credibility and very operational capability in that Sea.  That Sea that hosts shipping lanes that carry, annually, world trade worth trillions of dollars in goods and basic resources, including trillions of dollars that underlie the economies of Japan and the Philippines, as well as our own.