The big story that popped overnight was the Washington Post’s exclusive interview with a teenager who helped share the Pentagon’s top-secret briefing documents in a right-wing gun-worshiping chatroom on Discord, an internet platform regularly used by gamers. The following phrase, describing the members of the group and their apparent motives, will go down in history, as facts continue to emerge in this story: “United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God…”
Clusterfuck indeed. We know the biggest threat in this country, both domestic terrorism and direct attacks that undermine the constitution, come from these right wing racist misogynistic groups.
That they are tolerated with a wink wink in the military and police force throughout the US is the biggest threat we have to our democracy.
It certainly makes Trump looking at a "secret" map very quaint! I also have to wonder how Assange is a wanted man for posting military secrets on Wikileaks but Musk sharing this information on Twitter is a nothing burger?!
A flat out traitor to his Oath and to his Nation. Don't know how it will turn out as to how many of he documents in the dump are legit or altered but given his access and security clearance it is looking more like they are the real goods instead of some kind of disinformation.
What I do not get is how a National Guard Office/Post could have access to some of the information in the dump that relates to our intelligence gathering on foreign governments and their capabilities. For example, what use would a Guard unit and its command structure have in knowing Egypt or China was considering selling arms to Russia?
Whatever, I also like LTIV find it the convergence of white nationalism and the cadre of leakers and his followers a scary thought. I have previously commented I found the number of current and ex military present and participating in the January 6 coup attempt was troubling. This incident compounds my belief the United States military has a very significant Fifth Column problem it needs to work on.
Of course, that is easy to say when you have the likes of General Michael Flynn openly fellow traveling with Team Putin and the other fascist leaders like Viktor Orban. It seems there might be some deep part of the military mind when "groomed" the right way might just opt for autocracy instead of democracy. Add a dollop of good old fashioned Fundamental Christianity and you have a lethal brew.
I hope young Jack goes away for a long time in Leavenworth. He has put his nation and his fellow service members at risk. Reading the Post story I was struck with the fact he and his fellow gamers were having difficulty coping with the loneliness of Covid. All I could think about is how lonely over the years American fighting men laying in trenches in the dark waiting for the next artillery barrage or kamikaze attack must have felt. And, how now thousands of Ukrainians are in bunkers and trenches waiting for the next Russian barrage. Young Jack for whatever reasons picked the wrong side to play for. It is time he spent a good long time in the penalty box.
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 13, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Indeed, what a straight up forward clusterfuck, and this is what happens when the standards for service are lowered to the "If it walks, and talks, it's in".
That has got to stop.
Sure, the military is all volunteer, but by god, they've got to have some sort of basic standard that will not have highly classified documents ending up on social media to be ingested by everyone and his aunt Fannie!
Embarrassing and highly humiliating.
Which is exactly how the military should feel right now.
National Guard units handling TS military intelligence?
Our standards are so bad..when my father started his career in the Army in 1939, it was with the NJ National Guard, and he was digging ditches. It wasn't until he made Lt. Colonel that he was even near anything that could have been construed as classified-it took 22 years for that to happen.
We're screwed with the quality of people now in the service.
Incels, indeed.
This guy is going to be in a cell for a very long time...
Your column is the first thing I look for when anything horrible happens. I thank you for sharing your thoughts and insight because I have little knowledge of the military.
How the hell could a 21-year-old Airman 1/c, a "technology support staffer", have access to all that Secret, TS, NOFORN material? And also, according to one report I read, access to a SCIF? So, maybe some of the stuff he was sending around to his gaming group was even SCI?? It boggles the imagination, and the mind as well. Sounds like Otis AFB could use a house cleaning with the iron broom, starting at the top.
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 14, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
I'm not the least bit surprised that this classified information found its way into the public domain via a leak in the Air National Guard. In many respects, membership in the guard is treated as a private club by those on the inside, and whose senior commanders are among the most politically connected in any state. In particular, once a Guardsman finishes Basic Training, and whatever other MOS-connected training they get as part of their initial orientation, they revert to a plantation mentality once they get to their home unit. And as long as the paperwork is kept up-to-date, they kick back and collect their monthly stipends on their way to a military pension after 20 years of service. It's a cool gig, even for what we groundpounders know as a PFC, Private First Class, or E-3. There's not much else to do on drill days, and those of the days in which a soldier might be on post for whatever purpose their commanding officer wants them to be there. There's nothing new under the sun for an Eleven Bravo type that I was, way back when, or someone to see to the needs of the motor pool, or whatever administrative tasks needed to be done. Airmen do what airmen do, taking inventory or pulling maintenance on all those neat toys-for-boys that taxpayers pay so handsomely for.
In matters involving military intelligence, it's an entirely different story. Airmen Teixeira, this 21-year-old who uses military training, apparently, to put himself into some sort of leadership position for an online chat room and styled itself Discord, to the oohs and ahs of all the other preening teens who were members of his online group. This was Show-and-Tell in a very big way; and by golly, he had the goods. As we all wont to say of such young men: They are 'young, dumb, and full of cum', with their heightened testosterone levels substituting for brains. I would not expect any sort of reasoned judgment to come out of these young men. They strut about in their National Guard uniforms as cosplay, pretending that they are real soldiers. Other than the several months of military training they received, all of which is put to whatever use it can be in their devotion to online video games, they're not soldiers in any sense of the word, no more than members of a college fraternity might be described as potential members of a college faculty. We tolerate them because, when the balloon goes up, as we say, they are there ready to go, provided that they are soundly led by an officer corps that is committed to preserving the nation and its future.
On that latter point, there is cause for doubt. The scenario that has been laid out before us suggests that these highly classified, national- and international-security documents were laid out on tables like coffee table books of objets d'art, architectural photos, the usual stuff that well-off people have to impress others visiting their home. That may or may not be true, but that is definitely what seems to have happened here. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see what these materials are in the minds of those who might misuse them: these are the perquisites of those who are close to power but do not exercise it themselves. In effect, what we are seeing are the behaviors of one Donald J. Trump, who misused his access to classified documents, transmogrified into a National Guard unit that is supposed to maintain information security, and yet treats it with the insouciance that Trump himself applied to the documents that he retained, until he was relieved of the burden of having them through an FBI search warrant.
As with Trump, the rot at the top of this culpable negligence is what allowed this to happen. I would be the first to say that this 21-year-old servicemember should be prosecuted and jailed for mishandling classified data. I would also prosecute anyone else who had a hand in distributing or publishing this material online. These would include the eighteen or so chat room buddies who had a hand in this affair; I don't particularly care whether they serve one year of confinement or five. I would, however, fire the entire chain of command within the Massachusetts Air Guard, all the way up to, and including, what would have to be a Brigadier General or someone of higher rank within the Guard T.O. & E. structure, in order to impress upon the state's military establishment, and those to whom they report in the Pentagon, the seriousness of this lapse of judgment. The National Guard of any of the uniformed services does God's work when they are deployed to save people in floods and wildfires. But that is not their primary purpose. The Pentagon wants to have a lean and mean active duty establishment that can respond to international spot fires and flare-ups wherever they happen to be in the world, and their commanders know that they are on call at any moment. We do not want, nor can we afford a large standing army. Instead we have reservists and guardsmen; but what we have here is the functional equivalent of the Minuteman statue in Concord, Massachusetts, that symbolizes patriotic resolve, but little else . Their patriotic resolve is not the requisite competency to fulfill the tasks necessary to make that arm of the military effective. At least for the purposes of gathering and processing military intelligence, and the ability to use that intelligence effectively, guardsmen and reservists need to up their game. It's painful to say so, but it may be necessary to restrict access to such information within the enlisted ranks to relatively senior and experienced noncommissioned officers, or senior company grade officers like First Lieutenant, Captains, or field grade officers such as Majors and Colonels, at least for the time being. It may also be appropriate to restrict access to active duty personnel only, because the strictures of military discipline need to be impressed upon the individuals involved, so that they don't go off and show their new toys to their good buddies in the chat room, or in the officers club. Of all the places in the world that I least thought this would happen in, would've been Massachusetts! Instead, what we have is some kid who was out of training for couple years, with too much time on his hands, and the common sense of a pigeon. I'm going to have to call my friend in Beverly, Massachusetts, a former armor platoon leader during the early 1960s, who could fully appreciate the risks we run when we allow half-trained young men access to our country's most delicate secrets. He would understand; but I'm not sure that many other people today would fully appreciate the risks we are running when we fail to pay attention to the fundamentals. Then we can commiserate with one another.
When I was working at the Shipyard at Pearl Harbor, we workers sometimes had to handle classified papers and NAVSEA documents during the process of doing our jobs. We had to go to briefings where we were warned about our responsibilities to make sure those papers were accounted for during and after finishing any jobs that required them. During one of those briefings I brought up the fact that most really serious security breaches were not caused by the lowly GS and WG employees, but by people within the military like John Anthony Walker and others. The military has to clean its house first and this latest breach shows the rot runs deep within itself…All the way up to generals like Mike Flynn…
Lucian, do you have any idea how big a problem our armed forces have with these right wing groups in the military? If we’re serious about combatting the problem the only solution may be to reimpose the draft and bringer in a wider diversity of recruits. As it stands now I can’t imagine that many young people with liberal persuasions have any desire to serve.
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 13, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Classifying documents in the military (roughly: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, etc.) is sort of tricky. The Intelligence person who writes/generates a report wants it to be seen and read by many. That's how you get known. Hence, he wants the report to initially be just shy of Top Secret. (No one bothers to read Confidential stuff, most of which can be found soon enough in magazines, old days, and now online.) Later it may be made Top Secret. Generally, people subject to capture cannot see or generate Top Secret (I was in that situation), but higher ups re-classify to TS, frequently ASAP. However, by then, people with no real need to know have seen it. (I was shocked, later, to find out who and how many got my reports.)
Another funny thing is that most officers of flag rank feel loss of prestige if they are NOT on lots of Intel Distribution lists...they want to always be in the loop. Most of them don't like to read a lot, so they have people with ABSOLUTLY no need to know, do their reading and filtering for them.
Hence, some punk airman in a National Guard unit had access to a wide range of intel and let it loose.
My opposition to the death penalty is unshakable. However, I see no reason why this man should not be sentenced to life to clean the toilets, take out the trash, and otherwise provide cheerful, humble, unquestioning service for the rest of his days to … Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
You are of course correct about what the Pentagon needs to do going forward. My fear is that the services are struggling for recruits, which has led to these lax standards. Until some kind of national service becomes a requirement, low lifes (lives?) will continue to infiltrate.
The earlier version of what happened said a teenager, due to the pandemic, "wanted to make friends,"
so he shared secret docs. How novel: classified docs as friend-bait! This whole episode fairly shrieks:
"The security secrets of the United States seem to be kept in a threadbare pouch." That the views of the OG kid are what they are points directly to the cat Lardass let out of the bag. We really are coming apart at the seams. However, "gushery" is a good new word, so there's that.
I can’t believe a National Guardsman who just got promoted to E-3 had that kind of access to classified material. 😳
Jack Teixeira and the Mar a Lago guy, who also shouldn’t have had access, should spend the rest of their lives in prison, tho.
Clusterfuck indeed. We know the biggest threat in this country, both domestic terrorism and direct attacks that undermine the constitution, come from these right wing racist misogynistic groups.
That they are tolerated with a wink wink in the military and police force throughout the US is the biggest threat we have to our democracy.
It certainly makes Trump looking at a "secret" map very quaint! I also have to wonder how Assange is a wanted man for posting military secrets on Wikileaks but Musk sharing this information on Twitter is a nothing burger?!
A flat out traitor to his Oath and to his Nation. Don't know how it will turn out as to how many of he documents in the dump are legit or altered but given his access and security clearance it is looking more like they are the real goods instead of some kind of disinformation.
What I do not get is how a National Guard Office/Post could have access to some of the information in the dump that relates to our intelligence gathering on foreign governments and their capabilities. For example, what use would a Guard unit and its command structure have in knowing Egypt or China was considering selling arms to Russia?
Whatever, I also like LTIV find it the convergence of white nationalism and the cadre of leakers and his followers a scary thought. I have previously commented I found the number of current and ex military present and participating in the January 6 coup attempt was troubling. This incident compounds my belief the United States military has a very significant Fifth Column problem it needs to work on.
Of course, that is easy to say when you have the likes of General Michael Flynn openly fellow traveling with Team Putin and the other fascist leaders like Viktor Orban. It seems there might be some deep part of the military mind when "groomed" the right way might just opt for autocracy instead of democracy. Add a dollop of good old fashioned Fundamental Christianity and you have a lethal brew.
I hope young Jack goes away for a long time in Leavenworth. He has put his nation and his fellow service members at risk. Reading the Post story I was struck with the fact he and his fellow gamers were having difficulty coping with the loneliness of Covid. All I could think about is how lonely over the years American fighting men laying in trenches in the dark waiting for the next artillery barrage or kamikaze attack must have felt. And, how now thousands of Ukrainians are in bunkers and trenches waiting for the next Russian barrage. Young Jack for whatever reasons picked the wrong side to play for. It is time he spent a good long time in the penalty box.
Indeed, what a straight up forward clusterfuck, and this is what happens when the standards for service are lowered to the "If it walks, and talks, it's in".
That has got to stop.
Sure, the military is all volunteer, but by god, they've got to have some sort of basic standard that will not have highly classified documents ending up on social media to be ingested by everyone and his aunt Fannie!
Embarrassing and highly humiliating.
Which is exactly how the military should feel right now.
National Guard units handling TS military intelligence?
Our standards are so bad..when my father started his career in the Army in 1939, it was with the NJ National Guard, and he was digging ditches. It wasn't until he made Lt. Colonel that he was even near anything that could have been construed as classified-it took 22 years for that to happen.
We're screwed with the quality of people now in the service.
Incels, indeed.
This guy is going to be in a cell for a very long time...
Your column is the first thing I look for when anything horrible happens. I thank you for sharing your thoughts and insight because I have little knowledge of the military.
I am reminded of what you always hear about cockroaches: when you see one, there's a thousand more you don't see.
How the hell could a 21-year-old Airman 1/c, a "technology support staffer", have access to all that Secret, TS, NOFORN material? And also, according to one report I read, access to a SCIF? So, maybe some of the stuff he was sending around to his gaming group was even SCI?? It boggles the imagination, and the mind as well. Sounds like Otis AFB could use a house cleaning with the iron broom, starting at the top.
I'm not the least bit surprised that this classified information found its way into the public domain via a leak in the Air National Guard. In many respects, membership in the guard is treated as a private club by those on the inside, and whose senior commanders are among the most politically connected in any state. In particular, once a Guardsman finishes Basic Training, and whatever other MOS-connected training they get as part of their initial orientation, they revert to a plantation mentality once they get to their home unit. And as long as the paperwork is kept up-to-date, they kick back and collect their monthly stipends on their way to a military pension after 20 years of service. It's a cool gig, even for what we groundpounders know as a PFC, Private First Class, or E-3. There's not much else to do on drill days, and those of the days in which a soldier might be on post for whatever purpose their commanding officer wants them to be there. There's nothing new under the sun for an Eleven Bravo type that I was, way back when, or someone to see to the needs of the motor pool, or whatever administrative tasks needed to be done. Airmen do what airmen do, taking inventory or pulling maintenance on all those neat toys-for-boys that taxpayers pay so handsomely for.
In matters involving military intelligence, it's an entirely different story. Airmen Teixeira, this 21-year-old who uses military training, apparently, to put himself into some sort of leadership position for an online chat room and styled itself Discord, to the oohs and ahs of all the other preening teens who were members of his online group. This was Show-and-Tell in a very big way; and by golly, he had the goods. As we all wont to say of such young men: They are 'young, dumb, and full of cum', with their heightened testosterone levels substituting for brains. I would not expect any sort of reasoned judgment to come out of these young men. They strut about in their National Guard uniforms as cosplay, pretending that they are real soldiers. Other than the several months of military training they received, all of which is put to whatever use it can be in their devotion to online video games, they're not soldiers in any sense of the word, no more than members of a college fraternity might be described as potential members of a college faculty. We tolerate them because, when the balloon goes up, as we say, they are there ready to go, provided that they are soundly led by an officer corps that is committed to preserving the nation and its future.
On that latter point, there is cause for doubt. The scenario that has been laid out before us suggests that these highly classified, national- and international-security documents were laid out on tables like coffee table books of objets d'art, architectural photos, the usual stuff that well-off people have to impress others visiting their home. That may or may not be true, but that is definitely what seems to have happened here. It does not take a great deal of imagination to see what these materials are in the minds of those who might misuse them: these are the perquisites of those who are close to power but do not exercise it themselves. In effect, what we are seeing are the behaviors of one Donald J. Trump, who misused his access to classified documents, transmogrified into a National Guard unit that is supposed to maintain information security, and yet treats it with the insouciance that Trump himself applied to the documents that he retained, until he was relieved of the burden of having them through an FBI search warrant.
As with Trump, the rot at the top of this culpable negligence is what allowed this to happen. I would be the first to say that this 21-year-old servicemember should be prosecuted and jailed for mishandling classified data. I would also prosecute anyone else who had a hand in distributing or publishing this material online. These would include the eighteen or so chat room buddies who had a hand in this affair; I don't particularly care whether they serve one year of confinement or five. I would, however, fire the entire chain of command within the Massachusetts Air Guard, all the way up to, and including, what would have to be a Brigadier General or someone of higher rank within the Guard T.O. & E. structure, in order to impress upon the state's military establishment, and those to whom they report in the Pentagon, the seriousness of this lapse of judgment. The National Guard of any of the uniformed services does God's work when they are deployed to save people in floods and wildfires. But that is not their primary purpose. The Pentagon wants to have a lean and mean active duty establishment that can respond to international spot fires and flare-ups wherever they happen to be in the world, and their commanders know that they are on call at any moment. We do not want, nor can we afford a large standing army. Instead we have reservists and guardsmen; but what we have here is the functional equivalent of the Minuteman statue in Concord, Massachusetts, that symbolizes patriotic resolve, but little else . Their patriotic resolve is not the requisite competency to fulfill the tasks necessary to make that arm of the military effective. At least for the purposes of gathering and processing military intelligence, and the ability to use that intelligence effectively, guardsmen and reservists need to up their game. It's painful to say so, but it may be necessary to restrict access to such information within the enlisted ranks to relatively senior and experienced noncommissioned officers, or senior company grade officers like First Lieutenant, Captains, or field grade officers such as Majors and Colonels, at least for the time being. It may also be appropriate to restrict access to active duty personnel only, because the strictures of military discipline need to be impressed upon the individuals involved, so that they don't go off and show their new toys to their good buddies in the chat room, or in the officers club. Of all the places in the world that I least thought this would happen in, would've been Massachusetts! Instead, what we have is some kid who was out of training for couple years, with too much time on his hands, and the common sense of a pigeon. I'm going to have to call my friend in Beverly, Massachusetts, a former armor platoon leader during the early 1960s, who could fully appreciate the risks we run when we allow half-trained young men access to our country's most delicate secrets. He would understand; but I'm not sure that many other people today would fully appreciate the risks we are running when we fail to pay attention to the fundamentals. Then we can commiserate with one another.
When I was working at the Shipyard at Pearl Harbor, we workers sometimes had to handle classified papers and NAVSEA documents during the process of doing our jobs. We had to go to briefings where we were warned about our responsibilities to make sure those papers were accounted for during and after finishing any jobs that required them. During one of those briefings I brought up the fact that most really serious security breaches were not caused by the lowly GS and WG employees, but by people within the military like John Anthony Walker and others. The military has to clean its house first and this latest breach shows the rot runs deep within itself…All the way up to generals like Mike Flynn…
Lucian, do you have any idea how big a problem our armed forces have with these right wing groups in the military? If we’re serious about combatting the problem the only solution may be to reimpose the draft and bringer in a wider diversity of recruits. As it stands now I can’t imagine that many young people with liberal persuasions have any desire to serve.
Classifying documents in the military (roughly: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, etc.) is sort of tricky. The Intelligence person who writes/generates a report wants it to be seen and read by many. That's how you get known. Hence, he wants the report to initially be just shy of Top Secret. (No one bothers to read Confidential stuff, most of which can be found soon enough in magazines, old days, and now online.) Later it may be made Top Secret. Generally, people subject to capture cannot see or generate Top Secret (I was in that situation), but higher ups re-classify to TS, frequently ASAP. However, by then, people with no real need to know have seen it. (I was shocked, later, to find out who and how many got my reports.)
Another funny thing is that most officers of flag rank feel loss of prestige if they are NOT on lots of Intel Distribution lists...they want to always be in the loop. Most of them don't like to read a lot, so they have people with ABSOLUTLY no need to know, do their reading and filtering for them.
Hence, some punk airman in a National Guard unit had access to a wide range of intel and let it loose.
Essential reporting once again, Lucian.
My opposition to the death penalty is unshakable. However, I see no reason why this man should not be sentenced to life to clean the toilets, take out the trash, and otherwise provide cheerful, humble, unquestioning service for the rest of his days to … Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
You are of course correct about what the Pentagon needs to do going forward. My fear is that the services are struggling for recruits, which has led to these lax standards. Until some kind of national service becomes a requirement, low lifes (lives?) will continue to infiltrate.
The earlier version of what happened said a teenager, due to the pandemic, "wanted to make friends,"
so he shared secret docs. How novel: classified docs as friend-bait! This whole episode fairly shrieks:
"The security secrets of the United States seem to be kept in a threadbare pouch." That the views of the OG kid are what they are points directly to the cat Lardass let out of the bag. We really are coming apart at the seams. However, "gushery" is a good new word, so there's that.