In looking at today’s news leads I was surprised to find that one of the top stories was that the “twitterverse had exploded” (not necessarily a bad thing) over the fact that Hillary Clinton might have revealed classified information in the third debate. The concern seemed to be that in demonstrating her knowledge of actual Commander In Chief protocols she had revealed classified information – speculation being that it was from an intelligence briefing.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/hillary-clinton-classified-information-debate/index.html
First off, let me say that is utter nonsense. In my book Surprise Attack I cite numbers of open sources – going back to the early 1960’s – that give specific details about ICBM launch times and about the actual sequence of events, along with the timing and protocols required for launch. One of the most often discussed topics in all of those sources and for that matter in the press is the so called “3 AM call” in which the sequence of events from missile strike detection to Presidential launch authorization is within a 15 min time frame and the National Command Authority (President/SecDef) has no more than four to five minutes decision making time.
This scenario has appeared in dozens if not hundreds of fiction novels and stories, over some five decades. If those going to twitter had gone to Google or even Amazon with a word search we could have saved the twitterverse – truly not the best place to go for fact checking.
The good news is that Clinton knows how these things work and the parameters for the CIC in regard to national security at such a level. In Surprise Attack I discuss a series of incidents which demonstrate that a good number of our former presidents and national security advisors really did not know the protocols/constraints and were never trained on such things. Generally the SecDef has had a clue; no Vice President appears to have had any idea of such matters and things only get worse as you go down the down the chain of designated successors.
In terms of a classified reveal, Clinton’s remarks simply show she knows what she is talking about in regard to such matters.
Which I must say is a lot better than most of the commentary that I read in the news articles on the issue. Frankly I was pretty amazed to see that mainstream media folks carrying some sort of national security byline seem to have done a very poor job in addressing the question.
OK, so I’ve attacked the twitterverse and returned to attacking the main stream media – probably enough for the day.
Larry Hancock 
Hi Larry, in my 71 yrs. I have NEVER seen a person attacked more visciously and with less provocation than Sec. Clinton. Nearly all are either lies or just plain wrong. I am so fed-up with this nonsense I could scream. I am convinced that it is merely misogyny and jealousy. What are your thoughts? Carter
Wow, you really want me to put this on the internet Carter? Well I can state that for the record the level of attacks does appear to be at least an order of magnitude greater in respect to Clinton. If you compare her email issues with the truly huge private server issues under the last Bush administration, involving not only private servers used by administration figures but an RNC server, her email thing is mild by comparison. When you compare the Benghazi issue to 2001 and map it to the lack of attention given to the truly major dereliction of duty issues in regard to that – which I detail in Surprise Attack – its amazing to find the history of Congressional committee investigations of her while GWB, Rice and Rumsfeld all got away from any comparable investigation.
At to the reasons, that is far more complex and beyond anything I could put on a blog. It should serve as fodder for hundreds of political science and history thesis papers. But perhaps there is something more fundamental going on – I recently watched the movie Sully (fantastic movie) and it made me wonder if our nation, our media, even us as individuals has gotten to the point where the reality is that there is a preference for character destruction and fault finding. I’ve posted on this elsewhere but Don Henley’s song Dirty Laundry may say it better than any of the graduate papers to come that I was talking about. The public clearly loves “Dirty Laundry” and both the media and the politicians are feeding it to them non stop. Its no longer reporting, its all about gossip and speculation.
The national security specialist whose article I referenced in my post must know Clinton did not leak classified information, if I know it, he knows it. But he chose to craft an article that left it open ended and simply fed the gossip. Which probably illustrates why he is writing for CNN and I’m not when you think about it…grin.
Keep up the good work. Astonishing and somewhat scary times, but I think we can come through it on both sides of the Atlantic if people of good will stand up and be counted.
Thanks Anthony, I remain positive but it is definitely one of those times for standing up and being counted.
Personally I prefer the boring times, but it is what it is…