Typical.
Tag: secrecy
What Are They Hiding About the Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto? Glenn Greenwald (and Others) Want To Know
A short time back, our editor-in-chief said that there had been a school shooting in Nashville, and asked if anyone would cover it. I wrote the first story about it for PJ Media. It wasn’t the first time I had ever written about human tragedy or cruelty. And I have hated doing it every time. I always feel like Judas collecting his 30 pieces of silver from someone else’s suffering.
Be that as it may, the Nashville shooting mattered, and not just because it gave the Left more talking points about the evils of gun ownership. After all, if we are being honest, the Left can come up with talking points about the evils of gun ownership over a skeeball game. What the Nashville murders revealed was the level of disconnect affecting the transgender movement. As did the fact that everyone from the White House on down seemed to be less concerned with the victims and their families than with the transgender community. Also conspicuously absent from the debate has been the incendiary language that that community has used.
Pertinent information seems to be in the manifesto written by the woman who committed the crimes. And that manifesto has been declared off-limits, so it would appear that no one is getting access to it. That includes journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has even enlisted the aid of lawyers to get the manifesto from the Nashville Police Department. But the firms have decided to back out of the effort.
What We Know About Jack Teixeira, Accused Of Involvement In Classified Documents Leak
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.
Great Quotations on Secrets
What is it about a secret — something you’re not supposed to know — that makes it so irresistible? It’s none of your business, so of course you want to know all about it. You think its discovery will be enormously entertaining or shocking or both.
On the other hand, you certainly don’t want your own secrets known, and at night you worry about all the new snooping technology.
The funny thing is, there is a reverse situation: To paraphrase Voltaire — the secret to being a bore is to tell all! When you’re on the phone, don’t leave out a single detail, no matter how dull or irrelevant!
I have fantasies of a CIA interrogator listening in to my gabby old Aunt Kate — who was very thorough when telling all — and being cured of ever wanting to listen in again. This is your secret weapon in the war on privacy.
Bore them to death!
But if you’d rather not, then here is something to talk about that will charm all your listeners whoever they are.
Oops! Deleted Tweet By Israel’s Former PM Disclosed Nuke Arsenal
In a major faux pax in US-Israeli relations, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak acknowledged the existence of the country’s nuclear weapon arsenal via Twitter — then deleted the tweet, presumably after realizing he’d violated the long-standing US-Israeli practice of pretending that arsenal doesn’t exist.
Barak’s Tuesday tweet addressed growing worries about the growing presence of ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious factions in Israel’s government. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and his Religious Zionism party, for example, openly aspire to turn Israel into a theocracy.
Barak wrote:
“In conversations between Israelis and Western diplomatic officials, there are deep concerns raised of the possibility that if the coup in Israel succeeds, a messianic dictatorship — that possesses nuclear weapons and fanatically wishes for a confrontation with Islam centered on the Temple Mount — will be established in the heart of the Middle East.”
Thanks in part to a former nuclear technician’s 1986 revelations, Israel is widely known to have a nuclear arsenal, with one estimate sizing it at 90 warheads. However, it’s never joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It’s just one of only five countries in the world that haven’t done so, along with North Korea, India, Pakistan and South Sudan.
Thousands of Hours of Jan. 6 Video Hidden, Withheld from Defendants, Court Filing Says
The U.S. Department of Justice has withheld thousands of hours of video recorded at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, from January 6 criminal defendants, and U.S. Capitol Police might have held back more than 1,300 hours of security video from a congressional oversight committee, a new federal court filing alleges.
Defendant William Pope contends in an update to a previous court filing that he and others charged with crimes at the Capitol that day need access to what should be more than 152,000 hours of video. That is if Capitol Police preserved it all.
“Americans have historically been skeptical of opaque government processes, and that skepticism has never been more intense than it is now regarding January 6,” Pope wrote in a 17-page court filing before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras.
“Concealment of the Capitol CCTV is fueling public speculation that there is more to January 6 than is being reported.”
Pope, who is representing himself, is seeking full access to the U.S. Department of Justice evidence database so he can use it in his defense.
Pope dissected a declaration from Capitol Police general counsel Thomas DiBiase introduced by federal prosecutors in his case. He also compared it to an earlier DiBiase declaration. In his new filing, Pope calls these documents the “dueling dubious DiBiase declarations.”
“Despite hundreds of January 6 CCTV clips now being public, Mr. DiBiase still believes other footage from those same cameras must be hidden from the American people,” Pope wrote.
Senate Leaves AUMF for Secret Wars in Force
On March 29, the Senate voted to repeal two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, (AUMF’s), one passed in 1991 and another in 2002. The repeal now goes to the House. But those Authorizations are irrelevant to the present; they apply only to the Iraq war. But a third AUMF, passed in 2001, was left untouched. And that AUMF is the only one that has a bearing on the present moment, because it provides legal cover for the many US military operations, open and secret, around the world.
The 1991 and 2002 AUMF’s gave Congressional approval for two wars on Iraq, known, respectively, as Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the hundreds of thousands left dead and the millions displaced as a result of the US wars on Iraq, the Senate repeal should be filed under “too little, too late. But good PR.”
The 2001 AUMF authorizing secret wars left untouched and still in force
The AUMF of 2001, the one untouched by the Senate, is an entirely different matter. Its content and use are explained in a nutshell here:
“The authorization granted the President the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups…. Since 2001, U.S. Presidents have interpreted their authority under the AUMF to extend beyond al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan to apply to numerous other groups as well as other geographic locales. ….Today, the full list of actors the US military is fighting or believes itself authorized to fight under the 2001 AUMF is classified and therefore a secret unknown to the American public.
“The AUMF has also been cited by a wide variety of US officials as justification for continuing US military actions all over the world. (Emphasis, jw)…. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, published May 11, 2016, at that time the 2001 AUMF had been cited 37 times in connection with actions in 14 countries and on the high seas. The report stated that ‘Of the 37 occurrences, 18 were made during the Bush Administration, and 19 have been made during the Obama Administration.’ The countries that were mentioned in the report included Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.”
What does this mean for the present? Here is what Just Security tells us:
“As General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently (June, 2021) testified before the House Armed Services Committee (here at 3:10:45), no current US military operations depend on the 2002 AUMF and thus its repeal would not affect the United States ongoing wars. Repeal of the 2002 AUMF costs the Biden administration little or nothing.
“Where the rubber meets the road on AUMF reform is the 2001 AUMF, the principal statutory authority for US military operations in the war on terror. As General Milley explained, the ‘2001 AUMF is the one we need to hang on to…it is the critical one for us to continue operations.’” (Emphasis, jw)
But as noted above, those “operations” which take place “all over the world” are a secret, unknown to the American people and the world.
The New York Times was optimistic in its reporting of the Senate action, noting that the repeal might be a stepping stone to dealing with the 2001 AUMF. However, in this case the word the Times used was not “repeal” but “replace.” (Obama had once spoken of the need to “refine” it.) General Milley must have heaved a sigh of relief as he read those carefully chosen words. He will be able to “continue operations” well into the future.
DHS heavily redacted Disinformation Board emails despite claiming agency had nothing to hide
When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in “best practices.”
A year later, Mayorkas’ department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from “blowback,” FOIA documents showed.
More than 100 pages of internal communication between the board’s former executive director, Nina Jankowicz, and her staff were released with heavy redactions to the conservative nonprofit Citizens United.
What little is visible makes clear that DHS underestimated the negative reaction the board would provoke and was scrambling to find ways to keep the story from being pushed by “hostile” news outlets.
In the FOIA emails, Jankowicz cited “blowback and abuse” after certain media outlets began describing the board as the “Ministry of Truth” as word spread about its formation.
“There is a fair possibility this could end up on a hostile TV network in the coming days,” she wrote.
Some of the communications show the board’s responses to direct questions posed in a letter from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), such as what language in the Constitution allows DHS to create such a board and hire staff for it.
Other questions included which parts of DHS would be “responsible for monitoring and collecting data” on misinformation and what “specific actions” DHS intended to take to “counter misinformation.” Each answer was redacted by the department.
Nashville Police Refuse To Release Trans School Shooter’s Manifesto
Nashville police will not be releasing the manifesto of the deceased Covenant School shooting suspect, a police spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.
Nashville Metro Police Department (NMPD) announced that they had found “writings” from 28-year-old transgender suspect Audrey Hale’s home Monday that indicated a “calculated and planned” attack, according to an NMPD press release. An NMPD spokesperson told the DCNF Tuesday that the department had no intentions of releasing the documents to the public anytime soon, citing the ongoing investigation into Hale.
“No, we will not be releasing the manifesto during an open investigation,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.
The police spokesperson did not say for certain whether or not the manifesto would be released in the future after the investigation was closed and restated that due to the ongoing nature of the situation, there was no intention by law enforcement to release the documents.
NMPD Chief John Drake confirmed to reporters during a press conference that the shooting was a “targeted attack” and said that he would elaborate on that at a future date.
“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we are going over that pertain to this day,” Drake said. “We have a map drawn out of how all this was going to take place.”
Congressman Claims Alien Tech Is Secretly Being Reverse Engineered By US Government
Recovered UFO technology may be “being reverse-engineered right now,” but we “don’t understand” how it functions, according to a U.S. Representative.
Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett told Newsweek that he believed “we have recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings.”
“I think that a lot of that’s being reverse-engineered right now, but we just don’t understand it,” he continued.
In early February, four objects were shot down over North America in quick succession. The first was identified by the Pentagon as a Chinese surveillance balloon and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. China has stated it was a civilian airship collecting meteorological data.
The Defense Department has not confirmed the nature of the remaining three objects, which were targeted by U.S. fighter jet missiles over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron, Michigan.
Hellbound and Down 
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