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Pentagon ‘leak’ theatrics continue as US finds scapegoat

By Drago Bosnic | April 14, 2023

The pseudo-WikiLeaks 2.0 has just been stepped up a notch as the FBI arrested the perpetrator who shared the “secret docs” through a Discord server. The 21-year-old Airman First Class Jack Douglas Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard was apprehended on April 13 for his involvement with the “top-secret leak”. The controversial “Pentagon docs” contain what the US mainstream propaganda machine claims is “an array of national security secrets, including the breadth of surveillance the United States is able to conduct on Russia”.

Apparently, Teixeira posted the “classified documents” in an invitation-only Discord (mainly gaming-focused platform) chat group called “Thug Shaker Central”. According to the Washington Post, which reportedly talked to other members of the group, “classified Pentagon documents containing intelligence collected by the US and several other countries were posted by a man claiming to be a ‘military base’ worker”. The chat room apparently had no more than 20 members, mostly young men, who discussed video games, memes, movies and politics. It also included users from both Russia and Ukraine.

At some point during 2022, a user known as OG posted “a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon” and claimed to “know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people”. One of the unnamed members of the chat group told the Washington Post that “at the time, few people read the note” and added that “OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility of a ‘military base’ that prohibited cell phones and other electronic devices and copied the classified documents”, but insisted OG wasn’t hostile to the US or working for any foreign government.

The Washington Post report also presented OG as somewhat of an anarchist, since he supposedly “thought US law enforcement and intelligence were a sinister force that sought to suppress citizens and keep them in the dark” and complained about “government overreach”. The claim could very well be an attempt to portray OG as “a disgruntled serviceman who simply wanted to share dirty state secrets with the American people”. This would reinforce the idea that OG was supposedly acting on his own, further covering up the role of US intelligence in the so-called “leak”.

The Washington Post report never mentioned OG’s real name, but other media later revealed that he was indeed Jack Teixeira. Despite their own claims that he wasn’t involved with foreign intelligence, the US propaganda machine, never the ones to let a perfect opportunity for Russophobia slip by, were quick to blame Russia for the “leak”. Reuters insists that three “anonymous” US officials “confirmed that Russia or pro-Russian groups could be behind the leak”. Expectedly, no evidence whatsoever was presented to back up such claims. But then again, why worry? Who could possibly even contemplate the idea that any US official would ever lie about anything?

The New York Times also reported extensively on Teixeira’s case. According to NYT, Airman Teixeira was trained as a cyber transport systems specialist, a job that could also entail keeping his unit’s communication networks running. He was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base. The NYT report admits that “military officials refused to disclose information on what in Airman Teixeira’s duties would necessitate him having access to daily slides about Ukraine, much less the daily deluge of intelligence reports from the CIA, NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence”.

Some US officials told NYT that Teixeira could also have gained access to “secret docs” through daily emails on a classified computer network, where those emails might’ve been automatically forwarded to other people. On the other hand, members of the Discord group chat told NYT that the aforementioned documents were “purely informative”, but started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of “Thug Shaker Central” took them and posted a few dozen “secret documents” to a public online forum where they were picked up by several Russian-language Telegram channels.

In short, the US propaganda machine wants us to believe that a 21-year-old intelligence technician who just graduated and held the rank of airman (equivalent of private in the US Army) was privy to top-secret intelligence on the Kiev regime’s offensive plans, Russia, South Korea, China and other global hotspots. NYT itself also reluctantly admitted that “the arrest raised questions about why such a junior enlisted airman had access to such an array of potentially damaging secrets, why adequate safeguards had not been put in place after earlier leaks and why a young man would risk his freedom to share intelligence about the war in Ukraine with a group of friends he knew from a video game social media site”.

US media claim that the Pentagon was completely unaware of the “leak” and learned of it only after the documents began surfacing on Telegram and Twitter. Apparently, the Pentagon even tried to hack and delete some of the posts about the documents, “but was ultimately unsuccessful”. Again, it’s quite bemusing that an institution wasting well over $850 billion every year is incapable of removing such “crucial information” from several Telegram channels almost exclusively run by civilian enthusiasts with no budget. The sheer amount of logical disparities indicates that this particular case is highly controversial (at best), while there’s an extremely strong possibility it’s all an elaborate counterintelligence operation.

Apart from the more obvious geopolitical benefits such as pressuring countries like Egypt to distance themselves from Russia or further disrupting Moscow’s relations with the traditionally pro-Russian Serbia (once again accused of weapons shipments to Kiev), there is a very strong domestic incentive to push the “leak” narrative. For instance, the infamous CNN argues that “the leak spotlights major ongoing US intelligence vulnerabilities“, which can hardly be interpreted as anything else but an attempt to strengthen government control in the US. The “leak” could also be used to accelerate the adoption of the truly totalitarian RESTRICT act that the disillusioned former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard described as PATRIOT Act 2.0, only worse.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 2 Comments

Fear of a Microbial Planet

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 13, 2023

Fear of a Microbial Planet, by Dr. Steve Templeton, is a wonderfully accessible book on the Covid era now published by Brownstone institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic.

For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion.

Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health. The most unhealthy populations are those which preserve immunological naivete in the presence of a virus that is otherwise going to circulate widely.

Dr. Templeton’s story is both scientific and highly personal, taking the reader through the basics of immune response and public health even while relaying his personal frustrations with trying to talk sense to others in senseless times.

If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives.

The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.

And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.

But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture.

Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6×10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold.

To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus.

Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong, otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root.

How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified mortality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others?

It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage.

Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else.

April 14, 2023 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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