What Everybody Gets Wrong About the Pentagon Leak

Since the drama around the Pentagon leak has developed, I’ll give my own thoughts on it, and dispel some myths that I see frequently repeated. There seem to be two camps of commentators: people who think this leak is real, and people who think it’s a fake. I think it’s real. For convenience, this post will be in a Q&A format.

Also check out the accompanying video on my YouTube channel, if you’d like something to listen to:

What are the basic facts?

Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira is accused of leaking classified Secret and Top Secret material to his Discord group (the leaked documents themselves I talked about here). Apparently, the New York Times and Washington Post took it upon themselves to do the FBI’s job for them and discover the leaker’s identity.

Right from the beginning, I suspected the person responsible for the leak is a conservative gun enthusiast. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out, there were personal possessions in the background of the published photos.

Why would a low-ranking airman have access to such sensitive materials?

Because military staff work involves a lot of people and even a low-ranking person has at least some access. This is the most frequently cited reason for people doubting the legitimacy of the leak, and I think it’s silly. Has everyone forgotten about Chelsea Manning?

There are two factors involved in a person’s access to classified material. 1) He must have the appropriate security clearance, and 2) he must have a “need to know.” Accessing military documents is really no different in concept or execution as in a civilian company. There are physical files, but the vast majority of information is digital, accessed on a secure network and stored in share drives. To access a specific file requires credentials, both for the network (by logging onto a computer) and privileges to access the folder you’re attempting to open. As I explained in previous posts about the leak, military staff is broken up into different departments or sections, like personnel, intelligence, operations, logistics, etc. So a person working in, say, intelligence (J2) isn’t going to be able to access files from finance (J8). He might be granted access to other work sections’ files, like operations, if he can justify why he needs it and is approved.

In Teixeira’s case, he is apparently an IT specialist (J6), which means theoretically he could have access to everything.

Why would a reservist have access at all?

This is a common misconception about how American reserve components work. All these components have full time staff, and it’s very common for a reservist to work full time his entire career. It is also common for a person to take temporary full-time assignments and deployments, both within the USA or someplace overseas. I did this both as a National Guardsman and as an Army Reservist.

Look, bottom line, these are daily update briefings that involve a lot of different people and there’s only so much that can be done to reduce the number of people that can access the information. And ultimately, any effort to reduce the possible audience wouldn’t have mattered because the accused leaker is an IT specialist, so would have had access regardless.

Also remember we’re not talking about the bin Laden raid here. These are just fairly mundane briefings about boring topics like ammo counts and theoretical offensives. This information getting leaked is embarrassing and detrimental, but it’s not urgent information that would get someone killed – like for example, bin Laden knowing the exact time Navy SEALs were going to pay him a visit.

Could this be a deliberate leak?

Psyop! Psyop! Psyop! Okay, let’s say this was a deliberate leak. What possible purpose would it serve? If the Biden administration was looking for an exit ramp out of the Ukraine conflict, they wouldn’t need to invent a silly leak. They would just do it. If they wanted to double down on Ukraine and escalate, again, they could just do it. This leak serves no purpose.

And if you’re going to make the accusation that the leak is deliberate disinformation, okay, well, who was behind it? The CIA? The FBI? The DOD? The DOD does do information operations, but not the kind involving throwing your own guy under the bus. I also don’t believe they would let another agency throw their guy under the bus either. Remember McCarthy? He got away with his anti-communist witch hunt while he was targetting Dept. of State employees. After he got too big for his britches and went after the Army that’s when he got hung out to dry. This is real life, not a cartoon.

Now granted, in office politics it’s common for higher ranking people to cover their asses by blaming everything on a junior staffer, but I don’t see any evidence for that here. One guy posting classified material online for internet clout is the simplest explanation for what happened, and the most likely one.

If the leak is real, how come a lot of the information in it is so questionable?

Because the USA’s intelligence gathering abilities are vastly overstated, especially in a war involving a third country where we mostly have to take their word for what’s happening. This isn’t a movie. When an intelligence officer says he’s getting super duper secret intel on Ukraine, or Syria, or Iraq, what he actually means is he’s going to surf the internet until he finds something to copy/paste. I keep saying this but people just give me funny looks – the vast majority of military intelligence is open source. Tools like drones and satellites are nice, but they’re not going to tell you specifics, like enemy casualty reports. For things like that, an American intelligence officer has to rely on Ukrainian sources, or third party websites. I feel like this should be very obvious, but it’s a struggle to get people to understand that.

Could the leak be the work of a larger conspiracy of dissidents?

There’s this idea, particularly in Russian circles, that perhaps there is a conspiracy of American officers who are unhappy about the war and want to end our involvement in it with an embarrassing leak. That’s a possibility I can’t definitively prove or disprove, but I doubt it. As I mentioned from the very beginning, the sloppy way these slides were leaked make me think they weren’t done as an intentional leak to the public (If Teixeira is guilty, he most likely did not think the slides would ever be seen outside his silly Discord channel), there is just too much risk involved, and no guarantee that investigators will stop searching even after Teixeira is convicted. It also doesn’t make sense to put the leaked documents on Discord, instead of a Russian platform. Posting classified information on any American platform comes with the risk of the user data being transferred to authorities. So if I were the mole, I would stick with a Russian platform that obviously wouldn’t be motivated to cooperate with an American investigation and much less likely to be pressured into doing so.

Is the leak significant?

Yes, absolutely. Tucker Carlson’s segment linked below completely hits the nail on the head. There are three crucial lessons to take away from this leak:

-The USA is directly at war with Russia, despite all of Biden’s lies that we aren’t.

– Despite all of the massive support and even direct involvement of the USA, Ukraine is losing, and losing badly.

-Almost every corporate media outlet in the USA is in the Biden administration’s pocket. They only publish stories when given permission to do so, or explicitly repeat talking points straight from the government. Like both Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald have said, none of them are interested in the substance of the Pentagon leak, they’re only interested in directly assisting the government in finding the person responsible, and embracing censorship to prevent such a leak from happening again.

Featured image source: isabellaquintana on Pixabay

Ian Kummer

Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty

• Facebook
• VK
• LinkedIn

All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.

I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.

Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).

---

---