Secrecy vs. Content

In the Paul O'Neill flap (Rocket Man is on the air now with Mike Rosen debuking his claims), O'Neill, as much of the press, is focusing on the leak/non-leak, of classified information. This is secondary to the fact that the documents don't say what he claims they do. It's the same misplaced focus being placed on the leaked Democratic Judiciary Committee documents. The documents themselves in one case are exculpatory in the extreme; in the other, they convict their authors of malice. In both cases the content is far more important than their secrecy or release.

In the case of the Democratic papers, secrecy is useful for working purposes. But nobody's life it at stake, and if staffers can't be trusted to usea shredder properly, maybe they need to go back to the Tom Daschle Staffer School for some refresher courses in deniability. Even in the case of the Iraq papers, they're two years out of date, and clearly overtaken by events.

But the story the papers actually tell is either too complex or too disturbing for the press to handle. Secrecy is so much easier to understand. But so much more irrelevant.