So, Rumor has it...

[skjam]

Was listening to Democracy Now, one of the few actual liberal news sources I can find. It seems there's this memo that allegedly had President Bush talking to Tony Blair about his desire to bomb Al-Jazeera for reporting bad news from the siege of Fallujah back in 2004. The existence of the memo leaked, but the actual contents have not been

Comments

[nidoking]

Maybe the British are looking to make a scandal out of it by hiding something innocent. Think about it... if the President orders a secret safe for his office, with his own money, and refuses to disclose the contents even to his trusted advisors, people are going to suspect that he's hiding something. The fact that he really just needs a way to keep his donuts locked up through the morning is irrelevant. The secret memo might as well be a grocery list.

[skjam]

I think it's more the security establishment's belief that "a secret is a secret, dammit!" It doesn't matter how trivial or harmless the actual material is, once it's been stamped secret, it must never ever be revealed. Even if everyone knows the general contents, just not the actual wording.

[nidoking]

Ah, indeed. I know that one quite well. I know of a document that didn't actually contain any classified data, but it was stamped classified, so we couldn't use it in an unclassified environment until someone reconstructed its contents using unclassified sources. That took a while.

We're still trying to get new hard drives so we can install the (identical) unclassified version of a classified program that we use. The drives with the [not] classified software have to be destroyed.