(This article was originally published by Newsmax on July 7, 2016, written by Dr. Peter Pry. It has been republished with permission from the author.)
“Loose lips sink ships” was a phrase featured on posters during World War II, reminding military personnel that leaking even seemingly innocuous confidential information, like the departure date of a ship, could have disastrous consequences.
Leaking secrets and top secrets could have much graver consequences.
Using Intelligence Community parlance, “sources and methods” could be compromised — meaning unique national technical means for collecting intelligence, or special intelligence programs, or human agents, or all of the above, could be endangered.
Loss of secret and top secret “sources and methods” could cost many lives, could lose a battle or a war, could do incalculable harm to national security.
Understandably, Congress wants to know why former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s compromise of confidential, secret, and top secret documents, by breaking the rules and communicating these on non-secure systems, is not prosecutable.
But there are more important matters, potentially more profoundly injurious to U.S. national security, Congress should be investigating. Beyond the most sensitive top secrets, there is a category of state secret that constitutes the crown jewels:
Technically the views and thought processes of the president and his administration may not be classified, unless formally written down in a classified Presidential Decision Directive or State Department Memo, and may even be a matter of public record.
These most crucial of all secrets, that were compromised by Hillary Clinton, may be termed “ultra-secrets” after the World War II code-breaking project that penetrated the mind of Hitler and his General Staff. According to books like “The Ultra Secret” and other studies on breaking Nazi Germany’s Enigma cipher, compromise of this highest-level intelligence had catastrophic consequences for Hitler’s war effort.
For example, knowing Germany’s Ultra-Secrets enabled the Allies to:
- Win the Battle of the Atlantic.
- Defeat “Desert Fox” General Erwin Rommel in North Africa.
- Successfully execute the D-Day invasion that ultimately won World War II in Europe.
Whereas Hitler tried to conceal his ultra-secrets with the super-sophisticated Enigma cipher, Hillary has been posting our nation’s ultra-secrets on unsecured emails that even a Romanian hacker allegedly could read.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state, the U.S. has suffered an astonishingly bad series of foreign policy reversals everywhere in the world.
Have the bad guys been reading Hillary’s mail?
Congress — as an urgent national security high priority — needs immediate access to Hillary’s 30,000 emails and should conduct an investigation on what she disclosed, when she disclosed it, and whether the information could have any relevance to, for example:
- Russia annexing Crimea, destabilizing Ukraine, threatening NATO, and cheating on the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
- China committing acts of cyber warfare against the U.S. government, militarizing and attempting to annex the Western Pacific, and cheating on sanctions against North Korea and Iran.
- North Korea developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, making repeated nuclear threats and cyber attacks against the United States.
- Iran supporting terrorism, destabilizing U.S. allies, and developing long-range missiles, all in flagrant violation of the “new relationship” that was supposed to result from President Obama’s nuclear deal.
- ISIS launching increasingly destructive terror operations worldwide, including in Europe and the United States.
If the bad guys know from Secretary of State Clinton’s emails that she and the Obama Administration are “weak sisters” who will not respond to the above, and other provocations, it could explain much about the failure of deterrence, and the rising tide of tyranny and chaos in the world.
Congress should also investigate whether Hillary Clinton really is an isolated case, or if the illegal use of unsecured private emails is a deliberate and widespread practice by “the most transparent administration in history” to keep Congress and the public in the dark, and evade Freedom Of Information Act obligations, even at the expense of national security.
Strange that President Obama and the numerous high officials on Hillary’s email chains never questioned or criticized the secretary of state’s use of a non-government email address to conduct official business.
Perhaps not coincidentally, officials in the Internal Revenue Service and Health and Human Services have also been caught breaking the rules and using private emails to discuss controversial official business.
Maybe Obama’s enthusiastic support for Hillary’s presidential aspirations through the email scandal is because he too has something to hide.
The next president should rescind President Obama’s Executive Order 13618 that reorganized President Reagan’s National Communications System (NCS), moving the NCS out of the White House and subordinating it to the Department of Homeland Security, where it has in effect disappeared, leaving the nation without technical leadership for protecting against electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cyber threats.
Bring the NCS back to the White House to provide adult supervision to executive level communications security.
Peter Vincent Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. He served in the Congressional EMP Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA. He is author of “Blackout Wars.” For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
