So here's a quick update.
In the good news department, I finally weighed in under 300 lbs for the first time since 2008.
In the bad news department, donald "fuck national security" trump leaked a highly classified photo of an Iranian ballistic missile test just so he could tweet out his insults towards Iran. It's such a reckless and stupid move that Adam L. Silverman had a meltdown about it:
What Cheryl described is clearly what happened here. The President had someone on his staff, most likely his caddie Dan Scavino, who is currently serving as the Assistant to the President-Director of White House Social Media Communications and tweets as/for the President, bring an unsecure smart phone into a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) and take a picture of this classified information so he could tweet it out. Whomever took the picture, either at the President’s direction or their own initiative because they realized what they were doing was sketchy, placed a black bar over the classification markings, then loaded the image up so it could be tweeted out. Bringing an unsecure phone into a SCIF and taking pictures of anything in the SCIF is the type of thing that gets one suspended, one’s clearance stripped, and one prosecuted for stealing classified information.
The irony here is, the main culprit on this - trump - cannot be charged with anything because, as President, he can and will declassify anything he wants. Everybody else from Scavino (alleged) all the way down the chain to every intelligence officer with fingerprints on this photo can plan on punishments and maybe even jail time over this - Silverman notes that anyone with security clearance can't even look at the tweet without risking penalty! - but not the sonofabitch who wanted this done just to mock his enemies.
It's a massive flaw in a federal government that never saw this coming:
If you’re wondering how this could be the case, how someone with a clearance who was just scrolling through Twitter, reading Balloon Juice, or watching the news when this comes up can get in trouble, but the President can just put classified information out there, claim he has the right to do it, even if it hasn’t been formerly and properly declassified, and he faces no jeopardy and the rest of us with clearances do, it is because THE RULES WERE NOT CONCEIVED OF AND WRITTEN WITH THE CURRENT PRESIDENT IN MIND!!!!! NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!! The assumption was, based on historic performance of previous presidents, that NO FUTURE PRESIDENT WOULD BE THIS STUPID AND CARELESS!!!!
As Cheryl indicated, what the President tweeted out was the good stuff. No one is supposed to know we have that good of resolution wherever and whenever we want. And because the Iranians and others – friends and foes alike – know when the test failed, combined with the shadows and other static imagery in the GEOINT, they’ll be able to work out where we were looking from.
This is not just a major Operational Security (OPSEC) failure by the President, it is also a major counterintelligence (CI) breach by the President.
The Iranians have to be asking themselves if we have constant satellite or drone surveillance of this launch pad (and others). They have to wonder if someone inside their ranks let out when that launched was scheduled so that our camera(s) were ready for it. Any and every asset our nation has - or that our allies like Israel have - on the ground in Iran related to this are now in dire risk of exposure.
Don't forget trump did this before. He bragged to Russian representatives about intel on Syria (Russian ally in their civil war) that was shared from Israel. It forced Israel to shut down that intel program and evacuate people (or else lost them in retaliations), all because our Loser of the Popular Vote could not keep his damn mouth shut.
Every day worsens the reality that our allies and our own agencies - CIA, NSA, FBI, et al - dare not pass along classified information to our own elected leaders. Our nation's ability to defend itself and prepare for outside threats is now more compromised than any other time since the Cold War.
trump is now the greatest security threat to the United States since
Dear America: We warned you. We WARNED you trump would be a clueless, ill-informed, reckless leader on the international stage. 62 million of you still voted for him just to fuck with libruls. Our nation can no longer rely on our intelligence agencies willingness to pass along classified intel to our own fucking White House.
1 comment:
They are (mostly) convinced that the intelligence services are deep state traitors hell bent on taking down the president because they have the temerity to disagree with the ridiculous argle-bargle he spews on a regular basis, so you can't really expect too much from them.
Fergus shouldn't be trusted with his own passwords, let alone government secrets.
-Doug in Oakland
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