Friday, April 14, 2006

Incompetence alert

This week's most underreported story comes out of Afghanistan, where "classified" information is available for sale on the streets of Bagram, just outside the main gate of a U.S. military base.

This week, an NBC News producer, using a hidden camera, visited the bazaar and bought a half dozen of the memory drives the size of a thumb known as flash drives. On them, NBC News found highly sensitive military information, some which NBC will not reveal." Earlier, the Los Angeles Times had published what indeed appeared to be sensitive material.

"This isn't just a loss of sensitive information," Lt. Col. Rick Francona (ret.), an NBC News military analyst, said. "This is putting U.S. troops at risk. This is a violation of operational security."

Some of the data would be valuable to the enemy, NBC related, including names and personal information for dozens of interrogatorsm and interrogation methods; and IDs and photos of U.S. troops. With information like this, "You could cripple our U.S. intelligence collection capability in Afghanistan," said Francona.

Wonder which entry-level plebe will get court martialed for this?

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