No secret sauce

A fella can go nuts trying to keep up with the news this afternoon: Manafort guilty on eight counts and Cohen pleading guilty to a bunch of charges which means there will be no trial for him.  Egads!  There is still the scheduled "Make America Great Rally" in West Virginia this evening which may be worth watching, just to see how well Trump spins today's events.  I don't think he will be sticking to his notes and it could be quite the show.

-----

Having gotten that out of the way, Uncle Ken is correct in the benefit of security clearances for former officials.  Institutional knowledge only goes so far and sometimes you have to get the old war horses back in harness to clue the youngsters into what's what.  There's another factor, too.  Once in a while these guys are called in for testimony and have to go digging into the archives to refresh their memories and keep the record straight, which can't be done without the necessary clearances.  There are many valid reasons to revoke those clearances but political bias isn't one of them.

I had a "secret" clearance when I was working in the printing plant on Okinawa and didn't know it until a hush-hush job came in.  This grizzled sergeant came in with a pile of crap and asked me if I had a Secret clearance and I told him I didn't know.  He left and a half-hour later came back and said "You do now, get to work."  The job was some kind of book or report and they blocked off the camera area and darkroom, posted a guard, and all the bad film negatives had to be accounted for and taken offsite for later destruction. I think I may have had to sign something acknowledging my role in the process, swearing myself to secrecy.  The funny thing is that I have no idea what the damn thing was about; when you are making negatives for printing plates you don't have time to actually read the stuff.  It could have been a new recipe for SOS as far as I know; my only concern was that the film was properly exposed.

Some time afterwards I found out that everything in that big job was stuff you can find out through newspapers and in a public library; all the facts and data were readily available to anyone.  It was the analysis of those facts and data that made the report secret.  The film Three Days of the Condor covered it well with Robert Redford's character just another mope reading crap for the CIA and trying to connect a few dots.  I think that's the way it is with most intelligence agencies, very little James Bond stuff and an awful lot of drudge work and eyestrain.