From: Michael Yon

Q:  WikiLeaks:  Post-WikiLeaks reaction.  What’s your sense on whether the information-sharing climate and environment created after 9/11 to encourage greater cooperation and transparency among the intelligence communities and the military led to these three massive data dumps?

And how concerned are you now there may be an overreaction to clamp down on information dispersal because of the disclosures?

A: SEC. GATES: One of the common themes that I heard from the time I was a senior agency official in the early 1980s in every military engagement we were in was the complaint of the lack of adequate intelligence support.  That began to change with the Gulf War in 1991, but it really has changed dramatically after 9/11.

And clearly the finding that the lack of sharing of information had prevented people from, quote/unquote, “connecting the dots” led to much wider sharing of information, and I would say especially wider sharing of information at the front, so that no one at the front was denied — in one of the theaters, Afghanistan or Iraq — was denied any information that might possibly be helpful to them.  Now, obviously, that aperture went too wide.  There’s no reason for a young officer at a forward operating post in Afghanistan to get cables having to do with the START negotiations.  And so we’ve taken a number of mitigating steps in the department.  I directed a number of these things to be undertaken in August. Read the rest of this entry »