Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine / For Immediate Release:
Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced critical new security assistance for Ukraine. This includes the authorization of a Presidential Drawdown of security assistance with more ammunition for U.S.-provided HIMARS, artillery rounds, and anti-armor capabilities essential to strengthening Ukraine’s defenders on the battlefield valued at up to $325 million.
We promised a longer take on the Pentagon “leaks”, and here it goes. Regular readers will probably be familiar with my view on leaked documents in general, but if you’re not allow me to quote my own 2019 article on the (absurd) “Afghanistan papers”:
An awful lot of modern “leaks” are no such thing. They are Orwellian exercises in controlling the conversation […] carefully making sure the “establishment” and the “alternative” are joined in the middle, controlled from the same source.
That’s not to say ALL “leaks” are automatically and ubiquitously narrative control exercises, clearly some are real…but it’s usually pretty easy to tell them apart. In fact here’s a little checklist.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has just charged four members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) for conspiring to act as agents of Russia by using speech and political action in ways the DOJ says “weaponized” the First Amendment rights of Americans.
The Washington Post reports:
Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.
The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.
Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.
Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.
AFP reports that the conspiracy charges carry a sentence of up to ten years, with three of the four APSP members additionally charged with acting as unregistered agents of Russia which carries another five years.
“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen in the DOJ’s press release regarding the indictments, adding, “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”
Looks like the United States has decided to dispense with those freedoms as well.
THE GEORGIA ARMY NATIONAL GUARD plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools and location-based phone surveillance — to persuade teens to enlist, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.
The federal contract materials outline plans by the Georgia Army National Guard to geofence 67 different public high schools throughout the state, targeting phones found within a one-mile boundary of their campuses with recruiting advertisements “with the intent of generating qualified leads of potential applicants for enlistment while also raising awareness of the Georgia Army National Guard.” Geofencing refers generally to the practice of drawing a virtual border around a real-world area and is often used in the context of surveillance-based advertising as well as more traditional law enforcement and intelligence surveillance. The Department of Defense expects interested vendors to deliver a minimum of 3.5 million ad views and 250,000 clicks, according to the contract paperwork.
While the deadline for vendors attempting to win the contract was the end of this past February, no public winner has been announced.
A 21-year-old has been taken into custody for allegedly being involved in the leak of secret U.S. military documents.
Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was arrested on April 13 at a home in southern Massachusetts, about 18 miles east of Providence, Rhode Island.
Here’s what we know about Teixeira.
The so-called ‘just-in-time’ logistics model that stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighters rely entirely on, particularly when it comes to spare parts, would present major risks in a large-scale conflict, according to the top U.S. officer in charge of the program. While that is troubling, it is hardly surprising. Unfortunately, even after years of major problems being readily apparent, the F-35 program continues to face significant supply chain hurdles that could seriously hamper the jets’ ability to perform sustained high-end combat operations against a major foe like China. Here’s why.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the current head of the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO), raised his specific concerns about the just-in-time concept during a panel discussion on April 3, at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference and exhibition. Other U.S. officials, as well as industry representatives and foreign military officers, raised similar and otherwise related points during that talk and during other recent events.
The complexities and ballooning costs of sustaining F-35 fleets have been growing issues for years now.
THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT says it’s identified the leaker who posted dozens of highly classified documents online in one of the most brazen and bizarre intelligence community leaks in years.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that the FBI arrested Jack Teixeira, an Air National Guardsman, on suspicion of unauthorized retention and removal of national defense information.
Earlier on Thursday, The New York Times claimed to have identified Teixeira as the administration in charge of running the social media chat group where the leaks were posted. The Times says Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old enlisted serviceman in the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing, ran “Thug Shaker Central,” a Discord server which has roiled the U.S. national security bureaucracy. The server hosted documents about the state of the war in Ukraine, American eavesdropping on close allies, and a range of other closely held secrets.
The federal government appeared to be aware of the documents’ circulation online only last week, when the Times reported that Pentagon officials had begun an investigation after classified documents appeared on Telegram and Twitter. U.S. officials told the Times that they were looking to speak to Teixeira. The Times claimed to have linked Teixeira to the group, in part, through social media posts.
According to a Washington Post exclusive on the origins of the U.S. military leaks now roiling official Washington and its allies and partners today, there may be an untold number of classified documents still out there, yet to be reported.
The Post talked with two of the members of a Discord (online gaming) group who say the “leader” of their tight knit channel had been sharing with them top secret information gleaned from the secure facility/military base from which he presumably worked for some time, but photographs of those documents started coming “beginning late last year.”
The leader of the group — called “OG” — had been literally writing out and annotating classified documents he had access to in his day job up until then, but then began photographing and posting them “several times a week.” Many were quite recent, including, according to the Washington Post, “eye-level” images of the recent Chinese spy balloon incident in early February.
The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public; some of the text documents OG is said to have written out; an audio recording of a man the two group members identified as OG speaking to his companions; and chat records and photographs that show OG communicating with them on the Discord server. ….
The breadth of the military and intelligence reports was extensive. For months, OG regularly uploaded page after page of classified U.S. assessments, offering a window into how deeply American intelligence had penetrated the Russian military, showing that Egypt had planned to sell Russia tens of thousands of rockets and suggesting that Russian mercenaries had approached Turkey, a NATO ally, to buy weapons to fight against Ukraine.
The Post ascertained that “the transcribed documents OG posted traversed a range of sensitive subjects that only people who had undergone months-long background checks would be authorized to see.”
The photographs eventually made their way onto other online channels beginning in February. The New York Times first reported this on April 6. Most of the first batch of top secret missives were purportedly from the daily briefings that were sent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. The Post, however, reported last night a previously unreported document, allegedly an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, that surmises that even if the Ukrainians make significant gains in any upcoming counteroffensive against the Russians, “Negotiations to end the conflict are unlikely during 2023 in all considered scenarios.”
The original tranche of 53 documents is clearly not the last.
New clues shed light on the identity of the person responsible for the leak of 100 U.S. intelligence documents relating to the Russia-Ukraine war, the Middle East, China, and more. The leaker is a military man in his mid-20s whose primary motivation for sharing the documents was to impress an online group of young men who share his interest in guns, military gear, and video games, according to The Washington Post.
The Post interviewed a fellow participant—a teenage boy—in the Discord server where the documents first appeared. The teenage boy said the leaker goes by the name OG, which is internet slang for “original gangster.” OG was revered as a hero by this online community; he would often share transcripts of confusing and jargon-heavy intelligent reports, annotating them with his own comments, which skewed toward a radical anti-government perspective. The Post reported:
OG told the group he toiled for hours writing up the classified documents to share with his companions in the Discord server he controlled. The gathering spot had been a pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends. The members swapped memes, offensive jokes and idle chitchat. They watchedmovies together, joked around and prayed.But OG also lectured them about world affairs and secretive government operations. He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” the member said, and seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them.
“He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” the member said.
When interest in the transcripts began to wane, OG decided to publish images of the actual documents.
Late last year, a peeved OG fired off a message to all the members of the server. He had spent nearly an hour every day writing up “these long and drawn-out posts in which he’d often add annotations and explanations for stuff that we normal citizens would not understand,” the member said. His would-be pupils were more interested in YouTube videos about battle gear.
“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them.”
The teenager interviewed by the Post says he knows OG’s real identity, and the paper was able to review a video of OG at a shooting range. The teenager expects he will be contacted by law enforcement but vows not to give up OG because “he was my best friend.”
Assuming that these details are accurate, they present a nonpolitical rationale for the leak. Some have suspected that the ideology of the leaker may have been either pro-Russian or pro-Ukraine; the intelligence lays bare the weakness of the Ukrainian military position, and its publication may have been intended either to provoke more sympathy for Ukraine or to bolster a realist view of Russia’s likely eventual victory. But if the Post report is accurate, then it seems that the leaker’s motivations were much more personal: He wanted to impress his internet buddies.
No one but the terminally naïve should be surprised that security services lie – and that they are all but certain to cover their tracks when they carry out operations that either violate domestic or international law or that would be near-universally rejected by their own populations.
Which is reason enough why anyone following the fallout from explosions last September that ripped holes in three of the four Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea supplying Russian gas to Europe should be wary of accepting anything Western agencies have to say on the matter.
In fact, the only thing that Western publics should trust is the consensus among “investigators” that the three simultaneous blasts deep underwater on the pipelines – a fourth charge apparently failed to detonate – were sabotage, not some freak coincidental accident.
Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas. It was an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.
If Washington had been able to pin the explosions on Russia, as it initially hoped, it would have done so with full vigor. There is nothing Western states would like more than to intensify world fury against Moscow, especially in the context of NATO’s express efforts to “weaken” Russia through a proxy war waged in Ukraine.
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