Nearly four years ago, Federal Air Marshal Robert MacLean received a memo on his unsecured cell phone from Air Marshal Headquarters. The memo outlined a hotel policy change — one that would cut Air Marshal presence from long haul flights to save money. Long haul flights were the flights hijacked on 9/11 and long haul flights were what Congress specified must be covered by Air Marshals when it approved beefing up the program in a post 9/11 world.

Citing national security concerns, MacLean leaked the information to the press. The situation, picked up by newspapers across the country, proved very embarrasing for the Air Marshal Service. They new policy was reversed. MacLean was fired.

Now, MacLean is suing to get his job back. But in a highly irregular move, the government has labeled the four-year-old memo, "sensitive security information" in what experts see as an effort to further penalize MacLean. Associated Press writer Larry Margasak wrote about MacLean's case earlier in the week.  

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is belatedly accusing a fired air marshal of disseminating sensitive information, nearly four years after the officer leaked an embarrassing but routine memo on reducing hotel costs. 

Speaking about the government's bizarre legal strategy, a former Justice department official had this to say:

Victoria Toensing, who established the Justice Department's anti-terrorism unit during the Reagan administration, said the government should never have sent a message that it believed was sensitive without a security designation.

"That's an embarrassment," she said. "The stamp should be on it because it gives people notice not to release the information to the public.

"If it's not on there, I don't know why this case isn't over," she said. "The government ought to turn its attention to something else."

Things like how the TSA (which oversees the Federal Air Marshal Serive) recently lost a hard drive from its headquarters, one that contains identity information on thousands of Air Marshals and approximately 100,000 other Homeland Security agents. On Tuesday, the Union announced it was suing TSA over this egregious security breach. Michael J. Sniffen reports for the Associated Press:

If the data, which was contained on a lost computer hard drive, "were to fall into the wrong hands, false identity badges easily could be created in order to gain access to secure areas," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

"A Department of Homeland Security agency that cannot even shield its own employee data is not reassuring."

The mantra of DHS is do as we say, not as we do. 

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