Here’s a new update for y’all.
So, I’ve repeatedly written that it is possible for agencies to share info and documents with each other. And it’s also possible for “secure environments” to be less secure than is ideal, and for individual workers to not receive the amount of supervision they should. For this rogue statement, experts from across the internet were quick to condemn me as an idiot who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
And yet, a few days later…
From Larry Johnson at Sonar21:
In between my chat with Judge Nap and Scott Ritter, I received a tip from a friend that some of the Air Force bases do in fact have access in the SCIFs to the CIA documents allegedly posted by Jack Texeira. Apparently, there are a number of CIA officers posted at these bases and a decision was made a few years back to open the access to them.
Oooookay.
But the access is not wide open. You have to have the right “tickets” in order to get into that compartment.
This is a point I failed to mention in previous posts — i.e., ticketed permission. Let me use another more mundane example to explain. The NRA (aka National Rifle Association) has a website for instructors (nrainstructors.org). Only people who are NRA certified instructors can access that site. The NRA has a variety of categories for instructor certification, such as Basic Pistol, Basic Rifle, Concealed Carry Weapon, and Personal Protection Outside the Home. If you only are certified as a Basic Pistol instructor then you cannot access any of the training material for the other disciplines.
Sir, I was an NRA instructor and if you think NRA instructors can’t easily find ways to access “unauthorized” curricula, then I have bad news for you.
Ultimately, what is the point of all this speculation? That there’s a huge government conspiracy to put out a fake leak, but they were too stupid to pin it on a believable person? Why not just pick someone who does in fact have access? And if the leaked documents are faked, why not just have them all be internal DOD communications, and not the supposedly unbelievable CIA documents?
I said this several times – it’s not a good “psyop” to attack yourself and your own organization. Why not fake some Ukrainian documents saying the same thing? Then all the bad press would be directed at a Non-NATO nation, and would achieve the same effects, whatever those are supposed to be.
Oh, but this is a clever plan to make the Ukrainian war look bad, and allow a pivot to Taiwan! Great, but this statement is based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever. And if the Biden administration wanted to pivot to Taiwan, they would just do it. There’s no need for a silly conspiracy.
One of my friends and long-time readers who comments here often had this to say:
“…the young airman who was arrested yesterday was somehow used to publish [the documents].”
How was this miracle achieved? Hypnotism? Holding his family at gunpoint? And then, after making him post the photos online, these miracle workers waited for a couple of months for the leak to go viral?
All right then.
This whole leak thing has been a great way of separating the self-styled experts from normal people.
Yes. If this is all a fake, how are they forcing the suspected leaker to play along? MK Ultra? It’s cartoonish villainy antics that don’t merit serious discussion.
I don’t find it unbelievable that there could be more than one person responsible for the leaks (and the authorities do not want to admit this). I also don’t find it unbelievable that someone in the US intelligence community dumped some fake or altered documents to discredit the authentic ones. This is especially true for the documents that appeared later.
But to sneer at all this information as a pSyOp and not bother address the substance of the leaked documents is, well, frustrating. If there was a PSYOP here, it was to discredit the authentic leak, and was completely successful at this goal. Because virtually every western “pro-Russia” outlet and forum is arguing about whether or not a junior airman could access a CIA document, and not arguing about what those documents said.
As for the commentators insisting that this was a deliberate leak to trick the Russians into making a mistake… no. Russia isn’t going to base their military plans on a leaked document from two months ago, for God’s sake.
From a comment on Moon of Alabama (a little harsh, but tough to disagree):
“Larry Johnson was wrong about the leaks and the CIA internal docs not being accessible to an airman, just like I said he was on a previous thread. Now he’s backtracking, slowly, but surely (see his most recent post).
This highlights a problem with conspiracy theorists. They shoot their mouths off with certainty because they want something to be true to confirm their paranoid beliefs, but their info is distorted, one-sided, outdated or just plain wrong. Just because you don’t understand how something could happen doesn’t mean there is a sinister plot behind the events. It merely means that you’re not the know it all genius you portray yourself as being. Humility and common sense are in short supply these days and there is a surfeit of stupid ideas and babbling experts on the internet, all trying to carve out a niche as truth tellers and reveals of hidden knowledge. It’s like a cult.”
There was another comment on MoA yesterday saying that you’re full of shit about the leak issue. Another comment was about Larry Johnson which indicated that the commenter didn’t read Johnson’s entire article.
I disagree with both comments and nobody is perfect.
Is it possible that Teixeira had access to some of the documents, and hacked the others? You don’t have to be a genius to have some hacking skills & a fellow in Teixeira’s position would almost certainly have some.
Yes and I don’t think he even needed to hack anything. No system is perfect, especially when you’re dealing with this sheer volume of information..
Personally I’m a little fed up with how much bandwidth this leak / not leak / psyop / not psyop is consuming…
“Russia isn’t going to base their military plans on a leaked document from two months ago, for God’s sake.”
Quite right. So can we (I don’t mean here of course, but in general) move on…
QK
Yes, and you can be sure any competent intelligence professional will proceed on the assumption that the leaked documents are fake anyway, unless supported by other evidence.
On one hand, I agree with you that the endless and mostly pointless debate about the leak is taking up way too much bandwidth. At the same time, the contents of the leak that I find interesting got almost no bandwidth at all.
You did a good job with it. It’s disappointing that there was not more of a good open analysis of the details. I think the Internet has sort of gone downhill. Twitter has killed a lot of blogs. And you just can’t find good/smart blogs or forums (fora?) as much any more.
Hey now, that 50-day old weather report is really important to Russia! 😉
Larry Johnson also nailed his colours to the Evan Gershkovich Cannot Possibly Be A CIA Spy Because The CIA Wouldn’t Be So Stupid As to Recruit A Journalist mast. He didn’t wait for the Russians to present what material they had as evidence, he just fell over himself writing multiple articles on his hypothesis. He’s going to have to walk that back as well, I think.
That’s why I try to wait before making any definitive statements one way or another. But people who want to be online truthsayers have to be fast, which means they generally have to speak with shaky evidence or no evidence at all
I thought you had a nice analysis a few days ago. Kudos. It’s really sad seeing how silly some of “our side” tend to be. They just run off full tilt with stuff from grifters and second raters. I think you are wasting your time trying to tell them again.
P.s. Bothers me that someone is creating and consuming such detailed PPT crap. I can just see people moving the tiny flags around on those dashboards. Very glad that my service time was pre-PPT and at an operational unit. There is just something about the whole shore command and Beltway bandit sphere that turns me off, big time. And the whole thing got turbocharged with money after 9-11. So now we have people creating all that crap!
PPT?
PowerPoint
Interesting how fast Larry Johnson is backtracking.
https://sonar21.com/will-jack-teixeira-get-the-general-petraeus-treatment-for-mishandling-classified-intelligence/
From “Teixeira couldn’t have possibly had access to the documents” to “he couldn’t have access to CIA documents” to “let’s see if it can be proved in court that he was the one who posted the documents.”
I predict the same thing will happen about his insistence that Evan Gershkovich was not a spy.
The guy was VERY fast to say I didn’t know what I was talking about lol…