U.S. Government Security Breach?

Before I get too far into this post I’d like to preface it with a bit of history. The U.S. has seen its fair share of security breaches. Some of these are accidental, while many are the direct result of espionage or treasonous activities. The number of reported security breaches may or may not reflect the actual numbers, but it’s still something not to be brushed aside.

The American people and the American government generally have not taken lightly to security breaches or treason in the past. Guilty parties are often sentenced to significant prison time, life sentences or in some cases execution.

A particularly interesting example of espionage in U.S. history happened in April of 1998. Ex-CIA employee Douglas Frederick Groat was arrested for giving classified information to foreign governments. Most people can agree that this is a bad thing for an ex-CIA employee to do, right? It’s safe to say that it would have been difficult for him to find a jury of his peers. Leaking classified government information is something that simply should not be tolerated by ANY American from any political party, for obvious security reasons.

Where am I going with this? Well, recently there was a big debate on whether or not the U.S. government should open classified CIA documents to the world. How this was even considered is beyond me. Internal affairs should be kept internal if you ask me, especially when it comes to national security documents filed during a time of war. A war that is still going on, might I add.

Obama decided to release said CIA documents to the world. These documents included interrogation techniques, guidelines, etc, for CIA operatives working on extracting highly sensitive information from captured terrorists. These were not U.S. citizens, but radicalized Jihadists in most cases. People who have trained themselves to withstand interrogation techniques for the good of their cause. Their cause, if you didn’t know, is to literally exterminate every person in the world who does not convert to Islam. They now have new training material and intel on their enemies. Did we have to release these CIA documents to the world? No we didn’t. Even if there are things in the documents that raise questions that need to be addressed the international community has no right to have access to our intelligence.

Ask yourself this. If the tables were turned and it was a CIA operative who leaked the very same documents to foreign governments what would be the public reaction? There is definitely a double standard here and quite frankly, I think releasing any highly sensitive CIA documents to the public is absurd. It would almost be better if this WAS a leak. That way we could at least rest easy knowing that the spy would be put in jail and future security breaches would be prevented. Instead we are left asking ourselves the question “What top secret confidential documents will be surrendered next?”