Over at TAP Online Spencer Ackerman interviews A.J. Rossmiller about his new book, Still Broken:
Spencer Ackerman: I won't pretend I've finished Still Broken, your excellent memoir/cri de coeur of your experiences as an intelligence officer in Iraq. But what I've read is excellent, and anyone interested in either Iraq or intelligence work will find it fascinating. One thing, though. I'm interested in both Iraq and intelligence work. And you were in Iraq for a whole year, if I'm not mistaken, without leaking to me a single time. Not once. Not even so much as an e-mail I got from you. What did I do to deserve this insult?
Or to phrase the question differently: A lot of people—reporters, progressives, progressive bloggers who report—would have found your experiences in 2005 in Iraq invaluable. A well-timed leak could have cut through the fog of obfuscation put out by the Bush administration. There you were at the Tactical Operations Center, armed with the material that's now in Still Broken, and a private e-mail address. Why no leaks?
Of course, if you answer, "Well, Spencer, I leaked to other people," we're not friends any more.
A.J. Rossmiller: I am, of course, horrified that you haven't read my transcendent tome, but seeing as how you continue to be among the best observers of military and intelligence issues around, I'm willing to let it slide. And your question is an interesting one, one that I haven't been asked before. The answer comes in two parts: First, even if I had wanted to get that kind of information out, I—like, I think, most of the people involved at the analytical level of the intelligence business—wouldn't have had any idea where to go. I became acquainted with the entire set of young D.C. bloggers and journalists after I left the Department of Defense (DoD), not before, and there's no real conception within the machine that anyone is interested in the kind of mundane problems and manipulations that occur when you're in the middle of them. Only when I ruefully described my experiences to others in the world of professional foreign policy did it become clear just how aberrant things were in the intelligence process, which ended up being the motivation for writing the book.
The second part, which is perhaps more determinative, is the fact that even if I had known where to go with information, I didn't have a very good conception of what the rules were regarding talking to reporters (or anybody) about the work, other than, "Don't ever do it." To the best of my knowledge any kind of information transmission had to be cleared From Above, and even if you're simply talking about unclassified information which, of course, everything in my book is, after a lengthy (and costly) DoD review process—it's a scary (and possibly illegal) call to make on your own. The polygraph exams definitely cover whether you've revealed confidential information, and it's a tough thing to ask a young analyst to potentially ruin his career, or worse, by reaching out into the unknown. People at the top know how that stuff works; people at the analytical level do not.
Read the rest (including Rossmiller's take on Kelly Clarkson) here.
--The Editors
