A Marine at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton pleaded guilty to passing top secret documents along to L.A. police and counterterrorism officers — but says he did it out of a sense of patriotism.
Sgt. Gary Maziarz said bureaucracy was preventing military and civilian agencies from working together, and spirited more than 100 classified documents out of the base and into the hands of an L.A. detective and an intelligence analyst at a Colorado command center.
The San Diego Union Tribune reports that the extent of the inter- agency spying may be far more profound — reaching back to the early 1990s — and indicative of a deep disconnect between U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.
Experts also told the newspaper that the spying case reveals the growing role of the U.S. military in domestic security, and “confirms that U.S. officials believe al-Qaeda is active in the United States.”
Source:
“Marine took files as part of spy ring”
San Diego Union-Tribune, October 6, 2007