Scott Ott's Examiner Scrappleface: Obama to announce unilateral cuts in security leaks
By: Scott Ott
Examiner Columnist
September 22, 2009
News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
In a goodwill gesture before he addresses the U.N. Security Council and the Group of 20 economic summit this week, President Obama will soon announce that the United States will make deep, unilateral reductions in leaks of classified documents, according to unnamed officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the move.
The revelation comes during a week when The Washington Post published details of a secret document on troop levels in Afghanistan, and unnamed "European officials" told the U.K. Guardian that Obama plans to radically reduce U.S. nuclear strength with the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether.
"The United States has led the world in unauthorized distribution of top-secret military and national security information," the president reportedly told senior advisers during a closed-door session in the White House bunker this morning. "We need to get over this rah-rah notion that America is number one in everything. Unnamed officials in other governments find it so offensive."
Sources in the administration released copies of the president's top-secret directive, which orders an immediate 50 percent reduction in leaks, followed by a gradual tapering off, with the goal of establishing the president's "vision of a world without security leaks."
However, the president's objective already faces opposition from anonymous officials in the State Department, Pentagon and executive branch who have "an exalted view of American exceptionalism" that they believe would be hindered by any strategic leak reductions.
"If we unilaterally trim our unauthorized intel dissemination," said one unnamed Pentagon official, "Our enemies will know that any information that does appear in the news is either propaganda or an official trial balloon. The decentralized distribution of our genuine secrets not only proclaims to the world 'We Are Number One!', but it keeps our opponents off-balance because they can never be sure whether its coming from the commander in chief, or from some disgruntled America-hater at Foggy Bottom."
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world's leading family-friendly news satire source.
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