SurrealPolitiks S01E004 – Spies, Gone Wild

There’s an old saying that two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.

Which means Washington is going to have a lot of very morbid work to do, if it wants to clean up its intelligence messes.

Over a million people in the United States have “Top Secret” security clearances. While that does not mean that everybody with a clearance gets to read every top secret document, it does mean that it is completely impossible to keep track of America’s secrets. This phenomenon interacts with a well understood overclassification problem, in which secrets are kept without justification, thereby diminishing the seriousness of the classification process, and causing a generally incautious attitude about classified material.

Famously, this was splashed all over the newspapers and televisions in recent months, as Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Joe Biden all were discovered to have classified material in their private residences. While there might be some justification for this in the case of Trump, and maybe even Pence, Biden was discovered to possess documents from when he was a Senator, and lacked classification authority. In Biden’s case, it also demonstrated a much longer history of mishandling the information, and was all the more troubling given that Biden denied any knowledge of the material, his son’s well documented drug addiction, and the infamous Biden Family Business of influence peddling, most notably in Ukraine and China.


Maybe the only thing worse than indiscriminately handing out security clearances, is handing them out in an anti-discriminatory fashion. There’s no good reason to imagine that the US government halts its affirmative action programs at the doorstep of national security. Just look at Lloyd Austin, and don’t even get me started on Sam Brinton. For Democrats, competence borders on disqualifying, unless of course you’re a civil lawyer or campaign strategist.

When an intelligence leak supports our point of view or political agenda, there’s an understandable tendency to cheer the leaker as a “whistleblower” and hail them as a hero. Public opinion toward Edward Snowden, the NSA Contractor who exposed the PRISM program, for example, generally tends to be fairly positive.

For Democrats, it takes on a decidedly partisan character, as does everything else they do. Criminals in the so-called “intelligence community” jeopardized national security all throughout the Trump presidency, demonstrating that Leftists would burn this country to the ground for a chance to rule the ashes. Or, maybe just for the joy of seeing it burn, depending on who you talk to.

But burning to the ground is exactly what a country does when it can’t keep secrets. Imagine what would happen to a private company that couldn’t keep its financial records from being published in the newspapers. The prices they pay for the products they sell, a software developer’s source code, the seasoning blends for famous restaurants, whatever it is, we all have our secrets. They define us no less than the things we disclose.

I like embarrassing Democrats as much as the next guy, and given the way these crooks have politicized every element of the apparatus, it has become near impossible to draw a distinction between the Democrat Party and the State itself. One might justifiably describe this Party State as the enemy of mankind, and on account of this find satisfaction in watching it meet precisely the fate it is doomed to meet should their antics be allowed to persist.

But this is hardly a cost-free unalloyed good. Like it or not, the US government has dominated the world order since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there’s a reasonable consensus that we are all better off that it didn’t go the other way round. You bring down the US Government, and the world is going to be a very different and entirely unpredictable place. It will, by definition, result in a New World Order. That may at some juncture emerge a preferable order than that which we suffer under today, but it is quite certain to be very disorderly for some period of time. During that interim, war and poverty can be expected and might very well be the least of mankind’s problems.

If one were to make bets one who would emerge atop of the heap from that chaos, the smart money would be on China, and while the Chinese have proven adept at maintaining order, it is not of the sort most Americans have become accustomed to. Setting aside the unique American conception of freedom, for which the Chinese have little use, the dominance of the dollar and American military might have afforded Americans the comfort of physical and economic security the likes of which has never been known throughout history. If you think our streets are in chaos today, just you wait and see what happens when it’s not just criminals roaming those streets with nothing to lose.

All of which is to say, I had some trouble processing a series of recent news stories about some allegedly leaked US intelligence documents.

Fingers are pointing in all directions, with conflicting reports across various news outlets, as to the veracity of a hundred or more classified documents allegedly from the US intelligence community, and specifically the Pentagon. The documents purport to show Ukrainian and Russian conflict casualties, American espionage operations in the UK, South Korea, Israel, Ukraine, and especially Russia. A second dump reportedly details “American national security secrets on Ukraine, the Middle East and China”.

At first glance, I’m glad to see the Biden administration with egg on its face once again. This Ukraine grift has become such a debacle that I can’t help but hope my own country loses its little proxy war, before somebody gets the idea to take the proxies out of it and get to the point.

I’ve got a justified contempt for the politicized American intelligence apparatus, and the idea that they are now scrambling to get their spies out of hostile nations before they find themselves dead or in prison, gives me a certain sick satisfaction. For all the fear, uncertainty, death, and suffering they have caused, they are owed at least that much discomfort.

On the other hand, I do expect that changing political winds will sweep the Democrats out of power in the not so distant future. For whoever gets handed the unenviable task of cleaning up this mess, it sure would be nice if they didn’t have to do it without the benefit of a stable currency and a strong military. It hardly seems practical to interview a million people with top secret clearances, and try to figure out how many of them have been reading Antifa blogs, or taking money from foreign intelligence agencies.

Perhaps we should hope there’s some truth to the speculation that these aren’t leaks at all, but plants. And there appears to be some evidence of this.

When I first posted about the story, I repeated some casualty numbers allegedly from the document dump which claimed the US government had basically inverted the casualty numbers for Ukraine and Russia. The veracity of that leak has been called into question sufficiently that I updated the post rather than place my reputation on those numbers, but that, in itself, tells us something interesting.

We know the US government is lying about Ukraine. It’s a war, and they would be lying even if they weren’t nefarious. Given that they are nefarious, we can expect them to lie all the more, and this idea that Ukrainian conscripts are defeating the Russian war machine is preposterous on its face, even with American materiel. So any leaked documents about that conflict would necessarily prove embarrassing.

The New York Times cites an unnamed “senior intelligence official” in calling the leaks “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence. If true, some of the revelations could be perceived as damaging, for example that the United States is spying on its supposed allies in the UK, South Korea, and Israel.

Then again, if the United States wanted to plant disinformation, it would have to publish something that appeared embarrassing, but was ultimately controllable. A good way to do that would be for these allies to be in on the gag. America may not have gotten “caught” at all. These allies could very well have consented to the scheme, as a means by which to add credibility to disinformation.

A piece at RT titled “Here’s why the leaked ‘secret plan’ for a Ukrainian military offensive doesn’t add up” calls into question a number of the findings, but I’ll quote here one that stands out the most to me;

The blatant falsification of data on the readiness of Ukrainian military formations catches the eye. The document states that, of the nine supposedly to be trained up to US and NATO standards by March 31 and April 30, five of Kiev’s brigades have had zero training: these are the 82nd Airborne, the 32nd, 117th, and 118th Territorial Defense, as well as the 21st separate mechanized.

Even if only two or three companies in these brigades were trained, and self-preparation wasn’t completed, their level of training couldn’t be zero. At the same time, the highest percentage of readiness was recorded only in the 47th mechanized(40%) and the 46th airborne assault (60%).

I am by no means inclined to overestimate the prowess of the Ukrainian armed forces. They have conscripted every man in the country, including their transgenders, and sent them off to absorb Russian artillery with zero regard for their safety, and no intent to win the war. That much is clear. American military strategists have not been shy about going on television and saying as much. Winning is not the goal, harming Russia is the goal, and this is best served by a drawn out conflict with no decisive victory for either side. But to say that these units have zero training, after a year of war, is obviously preposterous. To say that their best trained forces are at only 60% readiness is in direct conflict with the otherwise favorable reporting on Ukraine’s combat success rate.

This seems to rhyme with the early US statements about the conflict, that Kiev would fall in 72 hours, or Joe Biden’s famous “minor incursion” remark. These were invitations for Russia to invade Ukraine. They were bait. The US Government was clearly trying to encourage the invasion, with the aim of dragging it out as long as humanly possible to weaken the Russian Federation.

Reading American and British media reports on the supposed leaks, what stands out is the dire conclusions reached by the reporters, without any specificity of the implications. It seems like every reporter in the country has banged out a thousand words or so citing various unnamed sources in the government, all of whom are oh so anxious to speak on condition of anonymity to tell the world that the sky is falling.

But outside the stories of spying on allies, there is no clear indication that the leaks are at all damaging to the United States. If we accept as plausible that these allies are in on a disinformation campaign, then there is no reason to believe a word of the documents.

Come to think of it, they look more like bragging in this light. The documents claim to that the US has thoroughly infiltrated the Russian government, but RT’s analysis on what the documents say on Russian troop movements and casualty figures are telling;

The probable locations of Russian units, indicated on the combat map in red, appear to have been collected from open sources. Several pro-Kiev resources that track military operations contain almost identical information.

Also, the ratios of killed and wounded for the Ukrainian and Russian Armed Forces which initially appeared in these ‘secret plans’ have since been changed. When first posted, the losses for the Ukrainian side were underestimated at about 16,500 –17,000 people. Then (probably to be more realistic), they increased almost fivefold, up to 65,000 – 75,000. At the same time, the numbers given for Russia’s purported losses of vehicles and equipment coincide with data published by Kiev’s Ministry of Defense.

While I don’t doubt the United States spies on Russia, or that a great deal of time and money and sophisticated equipment have been invested in that mission,the information thus far published does not contain anything that would be indicative of a successful infiltration of the Russian State, which the documents purport to show. Sure, the US has been able to provide useful information on Russian troop movements, but this is largely the product of signals intelligence and satellites.

If you think that Kiev’s Ministry of Defense is all about publishing accurate numbers, then I suppose you can believe that an American espionage operation with eyes all over the Russian State would come up with the same stats. If, like me, you’re a bit more cautious about Hunter Biden’s piggy bank, you might conclude that Ukraine is more likely to be publishing war propaganda, and sales pitches for their benefactors at the Federal Reserve. In that case, any US “intelligence leak” that agrees with these numbers, is obviously very suspect.

In this light, it looks more like the United States is sowing disinformation as a means by which to confuse Russian operations, but if I figured this out in an afternoon, you must expect that the FSB is less impressed than your humble correspondent.

And actually, that’s not a whole lot better than a real intelligence leak, if you think about it.

What this actually exposes is something far worse than a disloyal spy dropping documents on Discord. It shows how incompetent and unsophisticated the American disinformation campaign really is, despite the slavish compliance of a credulous media, all too eager to mislead their audiences in service to the Biden administration.

It may very well expose just how little Washington actually knows about what is going on in Russia. This would comport with what we on the Right happen to know about the American Left, among which is that they suffer from a staggering lack of curiosity, brought on in large part by their God complex, and the belief that they dictate reality through manipulation of language. They don’t think they need to know the truth, they can just conjure it. They believe it is so, because they say it is so, and that to disagree is to blaspheme. After all, if they can abolish sex, conjure gender, and have protests that are “fiery but mostly peaceful”, then why not just say that you have also won the war, secured the border, conquered the law of supply and demand, and, of course, gotten more votes than anyone else in the history of the United States.

 

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