One or more commenters said they liked it when I explained how things worked on the inside of the government.
For two generations, there have 2.2 million Federal CIVILIAN workers. The paperwork on each of them ranges from a lot to a titanic stack. All of it, back to the first Federal civil servant, has to be KEPT.
Where can they KEEP all that?
I feel funny describing this, but it is true. There are giant caves in Pennsylvania, GIANT ones with huge fork trucks, where those thousands of tons of paperwork are stored. It looks like a giant replica of something out of Indiana Jones.
It’s ALL there, but it not easy to find.
The same info in recent form on hand in DC, as I found when I went in for my clearances and literally a hundred pounds of paperwork on me was on the table behind my Adjudicator. It is now in the Cave.
Let me correct that. As a staff member on the House Select Intelligence Committee and presidential appointee responsible for the clearance of all Federal civilian employees, all of what I WANT to be there is there.
This is called “cleaning your files.”
Naturally people asked me, “How do you know your files are ALL cleared?
Let me begin by giving you a history lesson from WOL on September 11, 2001. Everybody was screaming, “How could all the Intelligence services have let this happen?”
I pointed out, on September 11, 2001, that no one in the entire Intelligence bureaucracy would suffer anything more than a promotion from that catastrophe. I was, of course, right.
I been there, gang. Two of my specialties were Intelligence and real world politics. The Intelligence bureaucracy united behind the slogan, “Let us not concentrate on past errors. Let us concentrate on laying blame for past errors. Let us unite for the FUTURE.” When that line got strained, there as always God’s gift to Intelligence screwups, invoking Top Secret.
We all knew the public would fall for that crap. But believe you me, it doesn’t work that way INSIDE Intelligence. This is a lesson, once again, in always knowing WHY someone says something.
It doesn’t matter in any Intelligence service if you overlook something that gets civilians killed. But if your boss tells you to find out EVERYTHING about someone and you miss something ANOTHER competing agency comes up with, your ass is grass. And the chances are that if YOUR boss is looking for something, THEIR boss is, too.
By an odd coincidence, it happened that I knew a lot of high-level people inside Intelligence, and we did each other favors. One of the more routine favors is to ask a high-level man in several competing agencies to find out everything there is to find out about you. You do the same for them, so they go at it hard.
Not to mention that everything about me was sitting there on a table in my sight six times for clearance. I had top clearance, so it was ALL there.
Back to the check. With their butts on the line, the search on me in several agencies was INTENSE.
My files are CLEAR.
#1 by Dave on 08/01/2007 - 2:30 pm
All bureaucracies, and private sector bureaucracy is just as bad as government bureaucracy (contrary to popular opinion), just love “conceptual frameworks” for ordering their affairs. Of course, these “frameworks” always have an absurd documentation and recordkeeping component.
But the point is the timid desire for “security” is behind all this, disabling any capability for accurately apprehending reality. This leaves a huge opening for bad actors to thrive.
A stray dog has insecurity for its feed. A tame dog trades its freedom for slavery and a collar.
#2 by Pain on 08/01/2007 - 7:29 pm
I imagine that the things you are most proud of are things you had to make sure were wiped first. The stories we would most like to hear are those that would unwipe the files.
I imagine they deal with defending our race.