Plan B Forum

Trump on Friday taunted Iran in a tweet re an apparent explosion at one of their missile launch sites. I'm not going to go into whether that was a smart move or not; but the tweet included a satellite image of very high quality. Speculation that Trump had revealed a classified image arose immediately. The NYT piece went on to say:

The president seemed to resolve the question on Friday night on his way to Camp David when he told reporters, “We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do.”

I think this message encompasses so much that is wrong in politics these days. I don't think anyone doubts that the president has the right to declassify any material he wants (although if memory serves, there's a procedure he is supposed to follow to formally complete the process). The question is, is it right to do so? During the Cuba missile crisis, JFK declassified several U2 shots which showed missiles being delivered to Cuba on a Russian freighter. I'm not going to defend Eisenhower's declaration of Cuba as a pariah state which Kennedy supported and which predated the missile crisis by a year or two and set the tone of the cold war for 40 years - but in that context those missiles were plausibly an existential threat and the American public needed evidence that their president had some rationale for his actions.

Trump has the right to declassify anything he wants. But was he right to do so in this case? I think it was an idiotic move, pretty much on a par with his normal behavior. But in a decent society, doesn't one know and observe a difference between one's rights and what's right? It's a shame that we use one word to cover both meanings. But to me, almost the definition of a liberal society (and there's another word which has, politically, two very different meanings) is that one has rights that one chooses not to exercise. And that's what Trump's statement fails to understand.

But in a decent society, doesn't one know and observe a difference between one's rights and what's right?

Decent people should certainly know this (it's the difference between what one "can" do and what one "should" do) but then we're not discussing an even minimally decent person...

In this particular case, while there was certainly no good reason to use Presidential authority to declassify the photo and the motive appears to have been sheer childish spite, ("Oh look, your missile blew up...neener, neener neener.") I have to say that it seems to me that the damage done to national security by releasing it is probably pretty minimal...

I don't think it's really going to come as news to any of our adversaries around the globe (it didn't come as any surprise to me, and I certainly have no intelligence background.) that the United States would be keeping a close watch on Iranian missile launching facilities, and that in the year 2019 we would have the capability to produce satellite photos of this detail and quality. (It's been publicly reported for a while that the US produced far better resolution satellite photos than it publicly released.) This doesn't really look like any kind of major "sources and methods" compromise to me...

That having been said, the damage here comes from just the bad precedent of a President (particularly one as ignorant and reckless as this one) just deciding to circumvent all intelligence protection protocols and declassifying material on a capricious whim...

The next time he does it, the damage could be much worse for US security...