Common Sense

I know this thanks to a blogger, Christine Axsmith, who wrote on the Intelink intranet at the CIA. I say wrote because she was just fired and her security clearance was revoked.

On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions, her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.

As a traveler in the classified blogosphere, Axsmith was not alone. Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith’s case but said the policy on blogs is that “postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do.”

They are declining to comment on a blogger, how sad is that? I guess the really sad thing is that the CIA even had a blog.

The day of the last post, Axsmith said, after reading a newspaper report that the CIA would join the rest of the U.S. government in according Geneva Conventions rights to prisoners, she posted her views on the subject.

It started, she said, something like this: “Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong.”

And it continued, she added, with something like this: “CC had the sad occasion to read interrogation transcripts in an assignment that should not be made public. And, let’s just say, European lives were not saved.” (That was a jab at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trip to Europe late last year when she defended U.S. policy on secret detentions and interrogations.) A self-described “opinionated loudmouth with a knack for writing a catchy headline,” Axsmith also wrote how it was important to “empower grunts and paper pushers” because, she explained in the interview, “I’m a big believer in educating people at the bottom, and that’s how you strengthen an infrastructure.”

In her job as a contractor at the CIA’s software-development shop, Axsmith said, she conducted “performance and stress testing” on computer programs, and that as a computer engineer she had nothing to do with interrogations. She said she did read some interrogation-related reports while performing her job as a trainer in one counterterrorism office.

Her opinion, Axsmith added, was based on newspaper reports of torture and waterboarding as an interrogation method used to induce prisoners to cooperate.

“I thought it would be okay” to write about the Geneva Conventions, she said, “because it’s the policy.”

In recounting the events of her last day as an Intelink blogger, Axsmith said that she didn’t hold up well when the corporate security officers grilled her, seized her badge and put her in a frigid conference room. “I’m shaking. I’m cold, staring at the wall,” she recalled. “And worse, people are using the room as a shortcut, so I have no dignity in this crisis.”

She said BAE officials told her that the blog implied a specific knowledge of interrogations and that it worried “the seventh floor” at CIA, where the offices of the director and his management team are.

So, did they think she was an al Qaeda spy? An East German? What? She worked at the CIA and she was writing about CIA stuff on a secure intranet. Even if she didn’t have clearance to access that stuff, what would it matter, you had to have clearance to read the damn thing. She was reading a newspaper, tough, which I’m sure is a capital crime at the CIA. That would explain a few things.

Axsmith said she’s proud of having taken her views public — well, sort of. “I know I hit the radar and it was amplified,” she said. “I think I’ve had an impact.”

I guess that blows the idea that bloggers don’t want to make a difference out of the water.

Of course, the real crime here is that she had a higher readership than me and was blogging on a secure intranet. How is that fair?