Opening salvo - secrets and gimmicks

Sri Lanka in addition to having floods in two districts, is reeling under the impact of continuing terrorist bombings of buses and trains. Nearly 75 civilians died and 200 have been wounded in the last two weeks. People are distraught as they well know that this is the LTTE terrorist’s common response to battlefield reverses. It is the cost that the nation is being forced to bear to defeat the LTTE as surely we must. Otherwise the deaths and maiming of our soldiers and civilians would have been in vain. Even as relatives, friends and fellow citizens mourned the terrible loss of life and limb and stoically shared the burden of the terrorist horrors throughout the length and breadth of SL, some politicians put on a diversionary show of buffoonery to bring the spotlight selfishly onto themselves.

They exploited the emotional vulnerability of the people to the tragedies by directing their fire on the merciless rise in the cost of living and price of fuel. It is as though those concerns should be given priority over the loss of the lives of so many of its citizens, most of them in the defence of the country. This group has to be cold blooded. To avoid contributing to the effort to defeat the LTTE, the Leader of the Opposition (LoO) found another escape route for him to continue to be left out of battle (LOB). He decided to approach /beguile a section of retired senior military officers to "clarify the meaning of the term military secret (emphasis mine) so as to enable the media to give an accurate report on the present conflict and express their opinion without endangering any pending operations".

Letter to ARFRO –read Generals etc

LoO has written to ARFRO who he says are "a body of distinguished officers with experience of many years of active service with almost all having done their staff college training abroad on all forms of warfare" asking it to let him know what their definition of military secrets is. ARFRO actually consists of Brigadiers and above (Flag rank) officers and does not require them to be trained abroad or for that matter to have qualified in Staff Colleges abroad or in SL. He cites assaults, harassment and intimidation of media personnel where "some sections have been accused of leaking military secrets" as his singular concern. A Sunday newspaper (Not the Sunday Island) on 8th June has published this letter in full. Obviously the LoO could not personally care a fig for confidentiality of his own letters even as he sets his political cat amongst the ARFRO pigeons looking to be enlightened on ‘secrets’. Any reply he gets will also be made public, bringing ARFRO into the line of fire as a partisan group or an ambush victim in case it gives a statement critical of the government. It will be good to know how ARFRO responds. Its members were never simpletons.

Chaos at the Start Line

Sadly but as usual, the LoO has also got his facts hugely wrong right from the start line. The very man he has sent the letter to, General C.S. Weerasuriya, like the other two artillery officers (Wanasinghe and Balagalle) who commanded the army, is not Staff College qualified. This is true also of most of the older members of ARFRO which hopefully does not diminish their ‘distinguished’ status. Therefore LoO’s basic premise must be tossed out. ARFRO is distinguished not because it has some Staff College graduates amongst its members but because it is an elite body with whatever connotations that brings to mind. ARFRO in turn, not deliberately to mock him (LoO), has appointed at least one such non staff college qualified officer to the sub committee which has been tasked to "formulate a response to Wickreamesinghe". It’s like a rugby seven a side team having one or two players who have only played touch rugby, at least according to LoO’s mistaken criteria. This will not, despite all the members not meeting LoO’s criteria, be much of a cerebral exercise for them as imagined by LoO when he believed he could activate ARFRO as a reserve division to fight his safety first campaigns.

Fire base

What is intriguing is that the LoO did not seek the guidance of the Chief Justice, the Attorney General or the forces own Judge Advocate General (herself the wife of the late Major General ‘Lucky’ Wijeratne an outstanding foreign staff college qualified General who was ‘exiled’ for a while during 1989 for pacifying the south without resorting to the brutal methods favoured at the time when LoO was a minister. He was ambushed and killed by the LTTE in Trincomalie in1991). It appears that the reason for needling ARFRO was that the LoO would have them believe they are an "independent body of distinguished officers". Does this gratuitous accolade mean that serving public and military officers are not distinguished or independent and therefore incapable of giving such opinions? Does it mean that these same officers once retired and only if they join ARFRO immediately become ‘distinguished’ and also ‘independent’ whatever position they hold in life and howsoever their careers had progressed when they were serving?. Or did LoO have any reason to think otherwise in picking ARFRO, like for example developing a fire base for taking future if very distant if not improbable targets?

Did he not know that this "independent group" is not going on a voyage of discovery for him as its very meeting place is in an army camp, courtesy the Army Commander? A few of them took to politics (one even contested elections) which the others know, as Field Marshal Montgomery once said, is much more horrible than even nuclear warfare. Did the LoO also not know that the majority of Staff College graduates are from the SL and not any foreign Defence Services Command and Staff College (C&SC) and they can stand on their own with their foreign trained brother officers? The College ironically is at Batalanda which it is believed LoO is not unfamiliar with. Unfortunately in the public mind Batalanda evokes a vision of a house of horrors to millions of SL citizens. It was certainly associated with "assault, harassment and intimidation" and much worse like torture and was certainly not recommended for reporters. But that is not a reason to decry the SL C&SC which has no connection to the other place which was a hellhole.

Military Secrets – Entry Forbidden

A military secret is anything pertaining to the military that has to be kept back, guarded against discovery or observation, unrevealed, hidden, secluded, recondite from the knowledge of those not entitled to know, that which if made known to anyone other than those legally authorized to know, imperils the defence of the nation, its security and safety. Breaches are punishable by law. Thus the size, shape, organization, logistics, order of battle, deployment, operational states of readiness, training, weapons, stores and other equipment, defence policy, strategy planning, tactics and intelligence, plans for maintenance of essential services, locations and strengths of troops are all covered under the Official Secrets Act. Offences under the Act also includes anything that is done to endanger the interests, confidentiality and morale of the SL state, to help the enemy, anything that is capable of causing loss of life or injury, any damaging disclosures, false statements, spying and the harbouring of spies.

Publication of any material that contravenes the above without authority is prohibited. There is no public interest defence for any breach as widely believed and touted. Neither is the publication of anything simply because it is in the "public domain" permitted if it is in contravention of the Act as airily disclosed to that particular Sunday paper by some ‘member’ who should have known better. One of the reasons for this is that what is available from different sources should not be neatly collated and gathered as in a book. This only makes the task of the enemy easier. It is also an offence for anyone in possession of secret information to convey it to anyone not authorized to receive it. Any person, who is not entitled to receive such information and does so, also commits an offence. In other words the despicable tendency of disgruntled senior officers to leak classified info to the media and the media to prostitute itself by using such info for its own selfish purposes is a crime against the state as the officers if not the media concerned very well know. Another person has loftily proclaimed to the same newspaper that "If reportage of that (promotions) is to be banned then laws will have to be amended to make promotions top secret". Clearly he needed to know that, sarcasm apart, only classified info cannot be divulged and also what ‘top secret’ classification covers.

Security Classification

This will not be expanded on as it is unsafe and unnecessary for this exercise, except to state that if it is adhered to, damage to the military and the nation will be minimized. While information is classified, those able to access such info are also restricted access to it not by rank but by their level of security clearance. Security clearance covers a gamut of imperatives including the person’s integrity, loyalty, morality, financial stability, habits, conduct, associates and behavior even before promotion is considered. Military secrets are theoretically well guarded but as the latest breach where a UK army Top Secret document on Iraq was found on the streets of London shows, security even in the best of armies is not 100% fool proof. Even nuclear secrets have been breached - by traitors. Anyone who joins a traitor is himself one.

Infiltration – helping to promote the enemy

The army officers’ promotion policy expose in the ‘Nation’ appeared to be the ‘cause celebre’ that has led LoO to ostensibly seek clarification of what "military secrets" were. Here the media was exploited by disgruntled officer(s) to disembowel the new Army promotion policy, most probably as it affected their own careers. The names of some affected Lieutenant Colonels, all from SL Engineers, were listed as bait by the officer(s) who for their salvation consorted with a carefully selected section of the media. This must have been obvious to anyone who read the article in question. There was no response to this ‘break out’ which made the actors reckless. The following weekend it exploited the ‘break in’ and the struggle was expanded to include the ‘fiefdom" allegation. It was not to obtain relief for any perceived wrong but pointedly to embarrass the Commander of the Army.

They must have known that they were undermining the very army in which they are serving, engaged as it is in some of the toughest battles it has ever fought. Little did they also care to know how the media works. Some media will be merciless, bitterly personal, scurrilous and libelous as it helps circulation. Printing news is not the problem. It is interpretation that does the damage. It will do its best to infiltrate the army with these ‘moles’. Unfortunately some media have done absolutely nothing to help the nation’s war effort at least by misleading the enemy or even denying it information, unlike the enemy’s media. This is in a country where even clergy covertly transport over 100s of kgs of explosive and also rifles for the LTTE. However what the immensely regrettable, shameless and cowardly physical attack on Nation’s associate editor Keith Noyahr has to do with LoO’s ideas of military secrets is intriguing.

The Trojan Horse –Military procurement (scandals)

However most of the information breaches are to do not with military operations but procurement scandals. Apparently an ARFRO member has said rather profoundly that "procurements ….are quite different" to "reporting on troop movements". Was there some one who did not know the difference, say for instance the LoO? He went on to explain that the tender procedures are "transparent" and that the procurement info is in the ‘public domain’ giving the distinct impression that the media can use it. No, the media cannot use something simply because it is in the ‘public domain’ if it contradicts the Official Secrets Act (OSA) This is also an over simplification of the procurements procedure which has from time to time, despite the overt ‘transparency’, led to allegations of massive corruption. Charges against army commanders and senior officers (Brigadiers and above) alike have been touted about which the LoO is not in the dark. Yet little or no punishment for the guilty has been given.

It makes nonsense of ‘transparency’. The accused include some four star flag rank officers who commanded their respective forces. There was one who even got involved in procuring armaments for the enemy by the simple expedient of releasing it from military stocks. LoO was very close to being prime minister then. No one was punished. It would be good to know what that man’s security clearance was. Obviously those who took part in procurement scandals had not been properly vetted; security cleared or qualified but were promoted-for political reasons. Do they become ‘distinguished’ and ‘independent’ when they retire because they were not punished? Some heads of all the Services have been indicted by various commissions, tribunals and courts but not one has been punished as the LoO is fully but passively aware. The silver lining today is that the Tri Service Commanders do not have flies on their backs which may be why they have some unhappy critics within the forces and have become targets for the media. Possibly if the rouges and traitor(s) had been punished then, no media persons would have been "harassed, assaulted and intimidated" now. Amazingly even as the LoO appears like a stalwart defender of the media, waving his hands in street demos as in some dervish like trance, he seems to have forgotten a journalist, one Richard de Zoysa whose garroted, bulleted, spiked and broken body was found by the Bambalapitiya beach when LoO was a minister. His death was a political secret until then. Please don’t cry for me(dia), LoO

Pincer attack -Converging Conclusions

The politician’s innocent looking query also looks like a cunning but futile attempt to compromise ARFRO for his own fell purposes rather than through any concern for the media. The media knows very well what is and not a military secret. The problem for the media is not in following chapter and verse of the OSA but in forgetting or ignoring the importance of the present struggle for the survival of the nation. This has been exploited by the LTTE too. The media has been in the vanguard of ferreting out information on corruption and fraud which deserves the greatest praise but also in some instances unfortunately, like a few military officers, of compromising national security too. This has undermined the security, discipline and integrity of the forces. To paraphrase Churchill at the conclusion of the Battle of Britain ‘Never in human conflict have so few made so many miserable by betraying the nation’. Let’s make sure that while press freedom is safeguarded, the need to protect not only military secrets but the honour, integrity and safety of the nation is not forgotten, like it was in 2002.This is a time for action and it should not be wasted in sending little trial balloons to old and once bold warriors.