Las Vegas Sun

May 2, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Politicians don’t respect secrecy

Apparently, respect for classified material has degraded since I was stationed at the Army Chemical Center 60-some years ago. Fifteen minutes before the end of the workday, we a began putting everything in locking file cabinets, and we were expected to leave the building immediately. We never asked work details of those in another work group and work details within a work group were often treated as “need to know.”

Today, we are confronting the mishandling of classified documents by a president and two vice presidents, and we have a congressional committee that wants to compound the problem by having access to the documents, not appreciating that having more with access to such documents serves only to increase the security risk. Far better would be that they spend their time analyzing the problem and proposing solutions. This, however, would be more difficult, lacks publicity, and would do little for their political future.