Now we read that this about Sandy Berger:
President Clinton's national security adviser removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency's internal watchdog said Wednesday.
These were codeword, i.e. Top Secret documents. Berger’s penalty was a $50K fine and loss of security clearance for three years. To those of us who, for the same offence, could have lost our jobs and gone to jail, this is a wrist slap.
Here is a question for the 2007 Intelligence and Ethics Conference: We know that RHIP (Rank has its Privileges). But when the laws are unevenly enforced, why should any midlevel person even bother to try to be ethical?
The short answer is that each of us is responsible for our own actions. When we start taking inventory of the failings of those above us we can get demoralized and not act when we should.
Here is a story that I would love to believe is true. ABC Radio National from Australia gave us an account of the war scare - the series of events in which a Soviet alert code named RYAN and US nuclear readiness exercise Able Archer 83 led us towards the brink of nuclear war. (I don’t think anyone knows for sure.) Here is ABC Radio National’s Tom Morton on the reason we did not go over the brink:
Now you may be wondering by now – if the Soviets really got that close to pressing the button during the Able Archer exercise in 1983, what was it that stopped them? Well, the ultimate answer to that question lies in the former Soviet military archives in Moscow – archives which are still closed both to Russian and to foreign researchers. But (historian) Vojtech Mastny thinks we can draw a tentative conclusion from what we do know from the archives of the former Warsaw Pact allies such as East Germany. The fact that Able Archer didn't end in nuclear holocaust is probably down to some anonymous KGB analysts in Moscow who decided that the evidence that NATO was about to launch a first strike just wasn't strong enough. In other words, it may be that the world was saved by middle management.
Could it be that a few faceless bureaucrats in Moscow saved the world by simply doing their jobs and added a link to the chain of events that led to the end of the cold war?
None of us knows how important our job is in the greater scheme of things. We should not let the unethical actions of those above us demoralize us. We need to simply do our jobs as well as we can.
Another thought: Does anyone know what was in those documents that led Sandy Berger to take the risk of removing them and hiding them under a trailer?
NOTE: This post linked to Beltway Traffic Jam for 12/21/2006.
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