Tulsi Gabbard Takes the Exit Ramp - The Atlantic

Musical Accompaniment We have just learned that Tulsi Gabbard has resigned as the Director of National Intelligence, in a late announcement on a Friday.

She is claiming that she is doing so because her husband has bone cancer, but I do think that there was a bit of a push.

That being said, this is close as, "To spend more time with their family," ever gets to being true in Washington, DC.

It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s low regard for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as its soon-to-be former occupant, that while the commander in chief was making final preparations to invade Venezuela and kidnap its president, Tulsi Gabbard was posting photos of herself from a beach in Hawaii.

Gabbard, who informed Trump of her resignation today, spent 15 months as the director of national intelligence—on paper, at least. By law, the DNI is supposed to serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser. Gabbard never was, and many of her stances were at odds with administration actions. Trump was contemptuous of even her modest efforts to speak truth to power. In the spring of 2025, when Gabbard testified to the intelligence community’s consensus view that Iran “is not building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she said.” Gabbard has long opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran and did not publicly come out in support of Trump’s decision to go to war. One of her top lieutenants quit in protest of the war.

In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump that she would step down on June 30, having recently learned that her husband, Abraham Williams, has a rare type of bone cancer. “Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage,” Gabbard wrote. People who know the couple have told me that they are exceptionally close; Williams, a video producer and cinematographer, has filmed Gabbard throughout her time in public service, including when she took a trip to Syria to meet the dictator Bashar al-Assad while serving as a Democratic member of Congress. Contrary to the Washington cliché, there’s every reason to think that Gabbard really does want to spend more time with her family. But the Iran war likely made leaving an easier choice.

You can read the rest of the Trump Kremlinology at the link, but the nickel tour is, "Selling your soul for proximity to power."

 

Well, Turnabout is Fair Play

US intelligence sources are claiming that Russia is providing high quality satellite imagery to Iran to aid in Tehran efforts to target the US military in the region.

Considering that the US has been generating and supplying the entire kill chain for numerous US weapon systems to the Ukraine to enable them to strike targets deep inside Russia, this seems to me to be an obvious step for Russia to take. 

Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East, the first indication that another major U.S. adversary is participating — even indirectly — in the war, according to three officials familiar with the intelligence.

The assistance, which has not been previously reported, signals that the rapidly expanding conflict now features one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities.

Since the war began Saturday, Russia has passed Iran the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft, said the three officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

………

Analysts said that the sharing of intelligence would fit the pattern of Iran’s strikes against U.S. forces, including command and control infrastructure, radars, and temporary structures, like the one in Kuwait where six service members were killed.

………

Russia’s assistance reshuffles how various countries have engaged in a proxy war since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Throughout that conflict, U.S. adversaries including Iran, China and North Korea have provided Russia with either direct military aid or material support for Moscow’s vast defense industry. The United States has given Ukraine tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and shared intelligence on Russian positions to improve Kyiv’s targeting.

This is not going to end well.

So, It Was Jared Kushner, Huh?

We now know who the, "Senior Trump Administration Official," who was mentioned in an intelligence intercept between two foreign officials.

You know, the one subject to a whistleblower complaint after DNI Tulsi Gabbard sat on this information rather than passing it up the chain as required by law. 

According to the WSJ, it was Jared Kushner, whose primary role in the Trump administration is arranging foreign bribes for Donald Trump.

Not a surprise.

The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

It couldn’t be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner. But the connection to Kushner sheds further light on the top-secret whistleblower complaint that bureaucratically stalled within Gabbard’s agency for eight months and was kept locked in a safe until it reached Congress in heavily redacted form last week.

………

The Wall Street Journal and others reported last week that the complaint was based on a foreign-intelligence conversation collected by the National Security Agency. The conversation included a discussion about a person close to Trump and at least in part concerned issues related to Iran, the Journal reported. 

………

A heavily redacted version of the complaint was seen by select lawmakers in Congress last week after the Journal first reported on its existence and that it had stalled within Gabbard’s office. Democrats have questioned why the complaint was held up for eight months and indicated it raises national-security concerns that deserve more investigation. Republicans have defended Gabbard and said the attention on the complaint has been orchestrated to undermine the Trump administration.

This is a significant story only because Gabbard suppressed this. 

Had it been sent to the White House, it would never have been an issue.

It's always the politics that get you. 

Arrogant Morons

Acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency(CISA) Madhu Gottumukkala wanted to look at some extremely sensitive intelligence reports from, "Another Agency." (If I had to guess, it would be the Defense Intelligence Agency).

He could have looked at the pretty fucking secret reports, but he wanted to access the unbelievably fucking super duper secret version of the report, for which the agency required that a polygraph exam for clearance and access.

Mr. Gottumukkala failed the polygraph examination and promptly retaliated against the staff who told him that he had to take the exam or who had administered the exam.

This man should not have access to Colonel Sanders' 11 herbs and spices.*

At least six career staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were suspended with pay this summer after organizing a polygraph test that the agency’s acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, failed.

The Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation into whether the staff provided “false information” about the need for the test — which was scheduled after Gottumukkala sought access to certain highly sensitive cyber intelligence shared with the agency.

………

The incident this July and the subsequent fallout — which has not been reported before — have angered career staff, alarmed fellow Trump administration appointees and raised questions about Gottumukkala’s leadership of the nearly $3 billion cyber defense agency.

It does not raise questions, it answers them.  He is unsuited to his position. 

………

In an emailed statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said that Gottumukkala “did not fail a sanctioned polygraph test.”

“An unsanctioned polygraph test was coordinated by staff, misleading incoming CISA leadership,” McLaughlin wrote. “The employees in question were placed on administrative leave, pending conclusion of an investigation. We expect and require the highest standards of performance from our employees and hold them directly accountable to uphold all policies and procedures. Gottumukkala has the complete and full support of the Secretary and is laser focused on returning the agency to its statutory mission.”

The technical term for the above is, "Bullshit."

Anyone who needs access to something that requires a polygraph would have to get it signed off from senior management, i.e.  Madhu Gottumukkala 

………

Compounding that instability, CISA has not had a permanent, Senate-confirmed leader since former Director Jen Easterly stepped down in January at the start of the Trump administration. Gottumukkala, a former senior IT official in South Dakota under Kristi Noem, was appointed by the governor-turned-secretary as deputy director in May. He is currently the most senior official at CISA and also holds the title of acting director.

This guy's qualification is that he's a friend of ICE Barbie?

Chinese spies must be high fiving each each other and doing jello shots right now, because it's like a permanent vacation for them. 

………

Gottumukkala failed the polygraph test in the last week of July, according to five current officials and one former official.

The test was scheduled that month to determine his eligibility to review one of the most sensitive intelligence programs shared with CISA by another spy agency, three current officials and one former official said.

………

Senior staff raised questions about whether Gottumukkala needed to review the intelligence materials on at least two occasions. But he continued to push for the access, even if it meant taking a polygraph, according to four current officials.

In early June, a senior agency official did not approve an initial request signed by mid-level CISA staff to grant Gottumukkala access to the program, on the basis that there was not an urgent need-to-know, according to the third current official. The agency’s previous deputy director, this person noted, had not seen the program.

………

The senior official who denied that read-in request was placed on administrative leave in late June for a reason unrelated to the polygraph, according to three current officials. As a result, that senior official was no longer in their role by the time a second request for a read-in — this time signed by Gottumukkala — was approved in early July, the third current official said.

The phone call is coming from inside the house! 

………

Less highly classified versions of the requested intelligence materials would have been available to Gottumukkala without taking a polygraph, said the third current official.

Still, Gottumukkala persisted.

We are doomed. 

^*2/3 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, 1/2 teaspoon basil, 1/3 teaspoon oregano, 1 teaspoon celery salt, 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1 teaspoon dried mustard, 4 teaspoons paprika, 2 teaspoons garlic salt, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, and 3 teaspoons white pepper, which is mixed with 2 cups of white flour.

The Spys Say, "Meh"

The initial report on the bunker buster attack on Iran has been leaked, and the reports appear to be rather underwhelming:

A preliminary classified U.S. report says the American bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials familiar with the findings.

The strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings, the officials said the early findings concluded.

Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program had been delayed, but by less than six months.

The report also said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material. Iran may have moved some of that to secret locations.

Needless to say, this has not made Donald Trump a happy camper:

As President Trump landed in the Netherlands on Tuesday for the annual meeting of NATO allies, he was desperate to hold together the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Iran, cursing and cajoling to make sure that history would remember him for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend and brokering a peace deal days later.

But just hours after he landed, the leak of a new U.S. intelligence report cast doubt on his repeated claim that the American strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programs. Mr. Trump started using the word “obliterated” before he received his first battle damage report, and since then, he has closely monitored which members of his administration have used the same language.

The report’s finding, while preliminary, was particularly damaging because it emerged from inside the Pentagon, which had carried out the strikes, and it concluded that the military action had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a number of months.

Mr. Trump had been eager to celebrate his success at NATO and revel in the fact that he had conducted an attack that none of his predecessors had dared to launch. His view was backed up by Mark Rutte, the secretary general of the alliance, who wrote Mr. Trump a private message thanking him for his “decisive action” in Iran.

Needless to say, Mr. Rutte is a complete simp, and Trump had major butt-hurt

………

The upbeat demeanor crumbled once the intelligence reports started to leak out, with Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, blasting the findings as “flat-out wrong” and a “clear attempt to demean President Trump.”

Later that night, Mr. Trump appeared to dig in, posting on social media a series of quotes from administration officials, as well as the front page of one newspaper, using the word “obliterated” to describe the damage.

“Our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told CNN on Sunday, in one passage Mr. Trump posted. “Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target and worked perfectly.”

You know this sort of failure is not uncommon at your age, Donald.  You may want to talk to your physician about a prescription for Fukitol™.

Side effects may include losses in the mid-term election losses, impeachment, and having your vice-president invoking the the 25th amendment to remove you from power. 

If you experience any of these side effects, discontinue the medication, transfer your assets to a Swiss bank, and flee the country. 

F%$# Me. I Agree with Musk and Ramaswamy

As a part of their DOGE clown show, they want to shut down the National Endowment for Democracy.

At least I am disagreeing with a Wall Street Journal editorial:

On June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan delivered a sweeping address on freedom and democracy to members of the British Parliament. He urged democracies not only to defend their principles at home but also to promote them abroad. He traced the struggle for freedom to the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and the Greeks’ stand against the Persians at Thermopylae. He asserted that “freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings” and noted that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights “guarantees free elections.”

………

Reagan’s vision sparked the creation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private nonprofit corporation funded by Congress that acts as a grant-making foundation. Reagan’s words are woven into the organization's founding declaration. For four decades, the organization has remained true to this vision. 

………

The organization has long enjoyed bipartisan support. But now it’s coming under assault and is reportedly near the top of the Department of Government Efficiency’s hit list. If true, this is a troubling development.

I can’t claim to be a neutral observer. I served for nearly a decade on the foundation’s board, during which time I developed deep respect for the organization’s mission and for the dedication and integrity of its staff.

This man is lying.

The NED was created by Bill Casey as a CIA cutout for regime change operations.

It's purpose was to allow those operations to be pursued by the CIA without any formal government approval.

Bill Casey and the CIA wanted to be able to overthrow governments without any authorization from Congress or from the President.

It was intended to subvert the democratic checks and balances of our government.

It is a corrupt and destructive organization that should have been shut down years ago.

I Agree with THIS Turd?

John Bolton, batsh%$ insane war monger, has roundly condemned Sebastian Gorka's selection as counter-terrorism chief.

F%%$# me, I f%$#ing agree with f%$#ing John f%$#ing Bolton.

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has laid into Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s pick for counter-terrorism chief, as a “conman” whose selection is not “going to bode well for counter-terrorism efforts when the [national security council’s] senior director is somebody like that”.

Trump praised Gorka, who was born in the UK to Hungarian parents, as a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement”.

But Bolton came out swinging at Gorka on Friday. The arch-conservative, who served in the Reagan, George W Bush and first Trump administrations, has set out his stall against many of Trump’s picks, including former Democrat and Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and told CNN that he “wouldn’t have him in any US government”.

Earlier this week, Bolton told NewsNation’s The Hill that up until Gorka was nominated by Trump as a deputy assistant to the president and the senior director for counter-terrorism, he would have said that Gabbard’s nomination “was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history”.

This guy is an unqualified and a bigger lunatic than John Bolton.

I would not say that he was the worst cabinet appointment in recent American history though, there is an awful lot of competition there.

Term of the Day

Sentinel Intelligence

(Archive.is link here) Basically, this is people who look at what is going on, and understand the consequences down the road.

Think of the myth of Cassandra, as the author of this piece does:

………

Many of us have been identifying strongly with Cassandra over the last few years. We watch the media downplay and dismiss one threat after another. We endure endless opinion pieces about everything from climate alarmism to coronaphobia. Influencers accuse us of hurting everyone’s mental health. Strangers call us doomers and fearmongers. Our friends and family treat us like we’re paranoid. When we share dozens or even hundreds of studies, they refuse to look at them. They say, “I don’t want to read anything that’ll bring me down.”

“I’m trying to stay positive.”

Americans and Westerners in general are suffering from a pandemic of denial, wishful thinking, and toxic positivity. It impedes us at every turn, on almost every serious issue. It exacerbates our existing anxiety and contributes to our sense of despair about the future of the planet. Here’s the thing:

You’re not a fearmonger.

You have sentinel intelligence.

Sentinel intelligence refers to a special cognitive ability that allows someone to detect threats before anyone else. Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy talk about this trait in their book, Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. They review a number of natural and economic disasters throughout history. As they write, “in each instance a Cassandra was pounding the table and warning us precisely about the disasters that came as promised.” Not only were they ignored, but “the people with the power to respond often put more effort into discounting the Cassandra than saving lives and resources.”

This ability is not uncommon, as the author suggests, nor is it a superpower.

For many people, in our currently dysfunctional society, they simply do not have the time to look at what is going on.  They are living from paycheck to paycheck and hanging on by their fingernails.

Those who are in a position where they can observe and draw obvious conclusions understand that acknowledging and reacting to potential threats will result in the loss of your job, and as Upton Sinclair noted, "Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

That's why you have things like CDC directors pretending that Covid is over and the Great Barrington Declarations.  

Right or wrong, you get fame and fortune for not addressing future risks.

The Grifting Continues

The cybersecurity firm IronNet, founded by former senior US intelligence officials, has shut down with a general odor of corruption.

Sounds to me like they thought that they could use their professional connections to sell nothing to the government.

The future was once dazzling for IronNet.

Founded by a former director of the National Security Agency and stacked with elite members of the U.S. intelligence establishment, IronNet promised it was going to revolutionize the way governments and corporations combat cyberattacks.

That former director would be General Keith Alexander.

Its pitch — combining the prowess of ex-government hackers with cutting-edge software – was initially a hit. Shortly after going public in 2021, the company’s value shot past $3 billion.

I cannot imagine that their special sauce was anything beyond the potential to hire government employees after their retire.

I'm sure that Alexander made a lot of money after the IPO.

………

Last September the never-profitable company announced it was shutting down and firing its employees after running out of money, providing yet another example of a tech firm that faltered after failing to deliver on overhyped promises.

The firm’s crash has left behind a trail of bitter investors and former employees who remain angry at the company and believe it misled them about its financial health.

IronNet’s rise and fall also raises questions about the judgment of its well-credentialed leaders, a who’s who of the national security establishment. National security experts, former employees and analysts told The Associated Press that the firm collapsed, in part, because it engaged in questionable business practices, produced subpar products and services, and entered into associations that could have left the firm vulnerable to meddling by the Kremlin.

“I’m honestly ashamed that I was ever an executive at that company,” said Mark Berly, a former IronNet vice president. He said the company’s top leaders cultivated a culture of deceit “just like Theranos,” the once highly touted blood-testing firm that became a symbol of corporate fraud.

Remember how I noted that generals are in bed with defense contractors because of an implicit promise of a comfortable sinecure on retirement.

This is just a particularly egregious example of this.

………

IronNet’s founder and former CEO Keith Alexander is a West Point graduate who retired as a four-star Army general and was once one of the most powerful figures in U.S. intelligence. He oversaw an unprecedented expansion of the NSA’s digital spying around the world when he led the U.S.’s largest intelligence agency for nearly a decade.

Alexander, who retired from the government in 2014, remains a prominent voice on cybersecurity and intelligence matters and sits on the board of the tech giant Amazon. Alexander did not respond to requests for comment.

IronNet’s board has included Mike McConnell, a former director of both the NSA and national intelligence; Jack Keane, a retired four-star general and Army vice chief of staff, and Mike Rogers, the former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. One of IronNet’s first presidents and co-founders was Matt Olsen, who left the company in 2018 and leads the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

Alexander’s reputation and the company’s all-star lineup ensured IronNet stood out in a competitive market as it sought contracts in the finance and energy sectors, as well as with the U.S. government and others in Asia and the Middle East.

Translation to that last paragraph:  They were the selling personal and professional connections of senior executives and board members, not any unique knowledge of cybersecurity threats or cybersecurity strategies.

………

Top officials were prohibited from unloading their stock for several months, but Alexander was allowed to sell a small amount of his shares. He made about $5 million in early stock sales and bought a Florida mansion worth the same amount.

Well, that beats working for a living.

………

It did not take long for IronNet’s promises to slam into a tough reality as it failed to land large deals and meet revenue projections. Its products simply didn’t live up to the hype, according to former employees, experts and analysts.

Stiennon, the cybersecurity investing expert, said IronNet’s ideas about gathering threat data from multiple clients were not unique and the company’s biggest draw was Alexander’s “aura” as a former NSA director.

The AP interviewed several former IronNet employees who said the company hired well-qualified technicians to design products that showed promise, but executives did not invest the time or resources to fully develop the technology.

Of course they didn't.  This was about insider access, not technology.

Nice to Know that Someone Reads Newspapers

State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has a pretty dull job.  They read target country media and actually spend some time studying the countries as countries.

No, covert spies seducing sexy code breakers, no high tech satellites and antenna networks to take in signals, they just read about countries of interest, and do so by reading the actual media from those countries.

They have one distinction though, none of the massive screw-ups or drastically wrong predictions of the TLAs in and around Washington, DC.

Go figure:

Every American knows what the CIA is. I would guess that maybe 1 in 1,000 have ever heard of INR — the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, American diplomats’ in-house intelligence agency.


But if you do know about INR, you probably know two things:

1. It has gotten big stuff right when the CIA and others screwed up.
2. When it got that big stuff right, no one listened to it.

INR is the Cassandra of American intelligence, and it earned that reputation the hard way.

As early as 1961, INR analysts were warning that South Vietnam’s battle against the North and the Viet Cong insurgency was failing, and would ultimately fail because the Viet Cong had the support of villagers in the South. Their analyses prompted furious rebukes from the likes of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. But they were right.

In 2002, it happened again. The CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the rest of the intelligence community had concluded that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons, which became one of the ostensible motivations for the US invasion. INR thought their evidence was nonsense. It was right.

In 2022, it happened again. The intelligence community predicted that Russia would win its war on Ukraine easily, cruising into Kyiv in a matter of days. INR dissented, arguing that Ukraine would put up a spirited fight and prevent Russia from getting anywhere near the capital. It was right. (Brett Holmgren, INR’s current chief, took pains to tell me that INR was not the only dissenter but confirmed that the bureau thought Ukraine would put up a strong fight.)

With a minuscule head count, less than 500, and an even more minuscule budget, $83½ million, they get a lot of bang for the buck.

In Related News, Water is Wet

A mathematician working with NIST on new encryption algorithms to deal with the impact of quantum computing has issued a statement that the NSA is likely working behind the scenes to sabotage this effort.

Specifically, he believes that the NSA is encouraging the developers of the new encryption methods to include back doors..

This is kind of what the NSA does.  They don't care about user safety or security, they want to be able to read everything: 

A prominent cryptography expert has told New Scientist that a US spy agency could be weakening a new generation of algorithms designed to protect against hackers equipped with quantum computers.

Daniel Bernstein at the University of Illinois Chicago says that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is deliberately obscuring the level of involvement the US National Security Agency (NSA) has in developing new encryption standards for “post-quantum cryptography” (PQC). He also believes that NIST has made errors – either accidental or deliberate – in calculations describing the security of the new standards. NIST denies the claims.

“NIST isn’t following procedures designed to stop NSA from weakening PQC,” says Bernstein. “People choosing cryptographic standards should be transparently and verifiably following clear public rules so that we don’t need to worry about their motivations. NIST promised transparency and then claimed it had shown all its work, but that claim simply isn’t true.”

The mathematical problems we use to protect data are practically impossible for even the largest supercomputers to crack today. But when quantum computers become reliable and powerful enough, they will be able to break them in moments.

This is why people should be working on methods independent of any funding from or management any government entity of any government.

The spooks will sabotage any such efforts.  (I'm looking at you, Tor)

A Very Bad Thing Happened on This Day

An unspeakably evil act which wounded a country and its people, and they are still suffering to this day.

I am referring, of course, to the US sponsored coup in Chile 50 years ago.

At least 3000 people died, which is proportionally 30 times the death toll of September 11, 2001, and that does not count the approximately 40,000 people tortured and imprisoned, all with the approval of the United States in general, and Henry Kissinger in particular.

The Chilean junta engaged in acts of terrorism in the United States pursuing their critics, again with the tacit assent of Henry Kissinger.

Why that stain of the face of humanity is living comfortably on Park Avenue, and not chilling his heels in prison somewhere is beyond me.

Looks Like Sy is Getting Some Traction

In what is an obvious response to Seymour Hersh's story reporting that the US was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, anonymous elements of the US State Security Apparatus are alleging that an unnamed pro-Ukraininian group appears to be behind the bombing.

So, no definitely no US government involvement, and definitely no Ukrainian government involvement, just some random group who:

• Had the ability to construct multiple 100 kg (220 lb) explosive charges that could be reliably detonated under 60-80 m (195-265) of water.
• Had the ability to operate at those depths, which requires either mixed gas diving, Trimix (Ni-O-He) or Heliox (O-He), or a sophisticated remotely operated vehicle, which means some sort of mothership.  Either of which would require large quantities of Helium when the world supply is dwindling.
  
• Had the ability to accumulate this equipment and training without raising an alarm.
• Had to execute this operation in the Baltic, one of the busiest and most heavily surveilled waterways in the world, completely undetected.

That this could be accomplished without out the tacit support of the US and at least one of the countries in that region (Hersh reports Norway) simply buggers the mind.

New intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months.

U.S. officials said that they had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials.

The brazen attack on the natural gas pipelines, which link Russia to Western Europe, fueled public speculation about who was to blame, from Moscow to Kyiv and London to Washington, and it has remained one of the most consequential unsolved mysteries of Russia’s year-old war in Ukraine.

Yeah, a complete mystery.

………

U.S. officials declined to disclose the nature of the intelligence, how it was obtained or any details of the strength of the evidence it contains. They have said that there are no firm conclusions about it, leaving open the possibility that the operation might have been conducted off the books by a proxy force with connections to the Ukrainian government or its security services.

Only they would have to have operated from some sort of base in the Baltic, and the Ukraine has no access to the Baltic sea.

………

Officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals, or some combination of the two. U.S. officials said no American or British nationals were involved.

Maybe Russians or Ukrainians, but definitely not American or British nationals, because ………?

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I do not think that this conveniently timed anonymously sourced data dump sounds just a little bit self serving.

What the F%$#ing F%$#?

So, we are having wall to wall coverage of a f%$#ing gasbag, but it's not Donald Trump, or Ron Desnatis, or Mitch McConnell, or Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, it's that damn Chinese balloon.

At lunch today, they had CNN on, and they were covering that damn balloon like it was Payne Stewart's private jet. 

Even if this is a Chinese spy balloon, the record of such endeavors, the US tried something like this with Project Mogul, which generated little more than UFO reports around Roswell New Mexico:

The discovery of a Chinese satellite floating over Montana has created lots more heat than light. Hourly news reports make it sound like a replay of Pearl Harbor.

Fact is, the satellite itself presents zero danger, weapons-wise, and if it were on a serious spying mission, it could be easily neutralized.

“Really, it’s not a big deal,” former Air Force general and CIA director Michael Hayden tells SpyTalk.

“We can neutralize so I don’t think it’s a danger either.”

The Pentagon has said as much, too, but its calming message has been pretty much overlooked in the hysterical coverage afforded news the satellite’s discovery a few days ago.

………

Bottom line: Everybody needs to calm down.

I thought about putting the balloon on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, but that would really silly, and I'm not feeling silly today.

Special Prosecutor Named for Trump

It was inevitable once Trump announced his candidacy for the Presidency again, and Merrick Garland has appointed Jack Smith as Special Prosecutor, which is an interesting choice.

The reason for this being interesting for a number of reasons:

• He is a former head of the DoJ's public integrity section, so he is well suited to the position.
• He was involved in the Brooklyn US Attorney's office investigation of Trump for traud in the 1990s. (There is a typo in the article as to the date)
  
• Most recently, he has been working on war crimes investigations at International Criminal Court in the Hague, and Trump initiated sanctions against some of his co-workers there for doing their jobs in Afghanistan and Israel.
• He has a background in the mishandling of classified information.
  

All in all, I think that this guy will likely be a scrupulous and relentless in his investigation of Trump, but the example of Lucy and the football still applies.

The US attorney general Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to determine whether Donald Trump should face criminal charges stemming from investigations into the former’s president’s alleged mishandling of national security materials and his role in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

The politically explosive move comes just three days after Trump announced he is running for the White House yet again, despite a disappointing Republican performance in the midterm elections, especially among candidates backed by the ex-president.

………

Garland named Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor and top former justice department official, to oversee the investigations into Trump as the justice department examines his role in retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence and in the effort to subvert the 2020 election.

………

Trump predictably attacked the move within hours, and complained about an “appalling decision today by the egregiously corrupt Biden administration” at a black-tie event Friday night after earlier telling Fox News’s digital arm: “It is not acceptable. It is so unfair. It is so political.”

I am using Trump's tears to season my soup.

………

But it was to allay those concerns, Garland said at the news conference, that he chose to appoint Smith to run the investigations. “Appointing a special counsel at this time is the right thing to do,” Garland said. “The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand it.”

………

At the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn, Smith helped prosecute a police brutality case that drew national attention and, in the 1970s, [sic, it was actually the 1990s, but fraud investigations of Trump are routing events] investigated Trump over possible fraud charges in a six-month inquiry that ended without charges.

Smith was also briefly involved in the prosecution of a CIA agent for disclosing national defense information and obstructing justice – crimes that echo potential charges against Trump, according to the warrant used by the FBI to search Mar-a-lago.

In a statement released by the justice department, Smith said: “I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.

………

The appointment of a special counsel could indicate that the justice department has already accumulated substantial evidence of potential criminality by Trump and his allies, said Barbara McQuade, University of Michigan law school professor and former US attorney.

Your mouth to God's ears.

………

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had not been given any advance notice of Garland’s announcement. “No, he was not aware, we were not aware,” she said at a delayed press briefing. “The department of justice makes decisions about criminal investigations independently. We are not involved.”

I still don't expect to see Trump in the dock, but I can dream.

No Accountability

We now have testimoney that Gina Haspel personally supervised torture at CIA black sites.

She was director of the CIA for 3 years after this, and probably still has the highest level security clearance. 

The fact that there are never any consequences for the our elites is corrosive to our society:

During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the C.I.A. in 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Ms. Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a C.I.A. black site in Thailand where Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Ms. Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the C.I.A. officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former C.I.A. director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.

………

Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused Qaeda operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.

………

It was previously known that by the time Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Ms. Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to Mr. Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.

But Dr. Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, though she did not participate in them.

The law firm that employs Ms. Haspel, King & Spalding L.L.P., declined to comment and referred questions to the C.I.A., which also declined to comment.

………

And although Ms. Haspel’s role as chief of base at the black site in Thailand is widely known, it is still considered a state secret.

………

At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.

Yeah, I guess that THAT makes everything OK.  (Not)

She should be in jail, not earning some obscene pay from one of the largest law firms in the world.

The First Casualty of War

Is the truth.

The Wall Street Journal, with a tip from Bellingcat, the "Independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists," reported that members of the Ukrainian negotiating team were poisoned, and they pointed at Russia.

Well now, US intelligence sources are denying it.

My guess is that this is not the same people in US intelligence who are big on regime change in Russia, these people, are the ones feeding the "Collective" bullsh%$ about poisoning because they want to sabotage the negotiations.  (According to Bellingcat's "About" page, the group has received grants from the CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy.)

I'm not saying that the Bellingcat is a CIA cutout, but it's certainly CIA cutout adjacent:

A U.S. official said on Monday that intelligence suggests the sickening of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Ukrainian peace negotiators was due to an environmental factor, not poisoning.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal and investigative outlet Bellingcat reported that Abramovich and the negotiators had suffered symptoms of suspecting poisoning earlier this month after a meeting in Kyiv.

While I am certain that there are elements of the US State Security Apparatus who are not insane, and so want the war to end as soon as possible, there are also elements of the US State Security Apparatus who are eager to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, even if this increases the risk of nuclear war.

Needless to say, the second group are completely insane.

Do Not F%$# with Corvids

Researchers in Australia fitted Magpies with electronic trackers.  

The birds were not amused, and helped each other remove the tracking devices.

Corvids are known to use tools, carry on multi-generational grudges, and now, they are outsmarting scientists.

A group of crows is called a, "Murder," a group ravens is called an, "Unkindness," or a, "Conspiracy," and a group of Magpies is called a, "Parliament," a, "Tribe," or a, "Mischief."

Whatever you call them, they are smart, highly social, and vindictive.  

Stay on their good side:

The Australian magpie is one of the cleverest birds on earth. It has a beautiful song of extraordinary complexity. It can recognize and remember up to 30 different human faces.

How did they determine that it was 30, and not 20 or 40?

But Australians know magpies best for their penchant for mischief. An enduring rite of passage of an Australian childhood is dodging the birds every spring as they swoop down to attack those they view as a threat.

Magpies’ latest mischief has been to outwit the scientists who would study them. Scientists showed in a study published last month in the journal Australian Field Ornithology just how clever magpies really are and, in the process, revealed a highly unusual example in nature of birds helping one another without any apparent tangible benefit to themselves.

In 2019 Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, set out to study magpie social behavior. She and her team spent around six months perfecting a harness that would carry miniature tracking devices in a way that was unintrusive for magpies. They believed it would be nearly impossible for magpies to remove the harnesses from their own bodies.

Dr. Potvin and her team attached the tracking devices and the birds flew off, showing no signs of obvious distress. Then everything began to unravel.

“The first tracker was off half an hour after we put it on,” she said. “We were literally packing up our gear and watching it happen.”

In a remarkable act of cooperation, the magpie wearing the tracker remained still while the other magpie worked at the harness with its beak. Within 20 minutes, the helping magpie had found the only weak point — a single clasp, barely a millimeter long — and snipped it with its beak. Dr. Potvin and her team later saw different magpies removing harnesses from two other birds outfitted with them.

The scientists took six months to reach this point. Within three days, the magpies had removed all five devices.

Coordinate sophisticated altruistic behavior, which is very rare nature.

Don't grieve for the researchers though, they ended up publishing an article about Magpies helping each other escape from the trackers.

The CIA Abides

Once again, the CIA has been exposed engaging in illegal collection of data from US citizens inside the United States.

This is, of course, explicitly illegal, but they are the CIA.  They don't care, they don't have to:

Two US senators have gone public with evidence of what they assert is a previously secret bulk data collection effort by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), conducted outside the law and without oversight.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, of Oregon and New Mexico respectively, on Thursday announced that in April 2021 they sent a co-signed letter [PDF] to director of national intelligence Avril Haines and CIA director William Burns, seeking expedited declassification of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's (PCLOB) review of two CIA counterterrorism programs – named "Deep Dive I" and "Deep Dive II".

The Deep Dives were made possible by Executive Order 12333 – a Reagan-era order that allows widespread data collection, and data-sharing with the CIA, in the name of national security.

The senators wanted a review of the documents' status because they felt the CIA had conducted a bulk information collection effort that harvested data on US citizens – probably illegally. Declassifying the documents, they argued, was necessary as the public has a right to know what the CIA gets up to, and to ensure Congress could exercise oversight of the agency. 

Absent aggressive oversight by both their nominal civilian bosses in the executive and by Congress, this will always happen.

It is the case with intelligence agencies (and law enforcement) everywhere: If they not kept on a tight leash, they will violate the privacy and civil rights of those they are supposed to protect.

Twitter Conversation of the Day

Johnny Cash was the first American to learn of Stalin's death.

— Steve, the Depressed Mets Fan (@Digenarate) January 13, 2022

He was in charge of monitoring Soviet Morse messages at an airbase in West Germany at the time and it came in during his shift

— Zack Budryk (@BudrykZack) January 13, 2022

My mind is truly and completely blown.