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4/11/23: DEEP ENDS – ABSORBING THE LEAK W/ DONALD JEFFRIES

Posted on April 11th, 2023 by Clyde Lewis

Over Easter weekend, U.S. officials and their foreign allies scrambled to understand how dozens of classified intelligence documents had ended up on the internet - they were stunned and occasionally infuriated at the extraordinary range of detail the files exposed about how the United States spies on friends and enemies alike. We are seeing how the media outlets are filled not just with garden variety establishment loyalists, but with longstanding members of the U.S. intelligence community who could very well be operatives of the Deep State conspiracy.  Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks with author, Donald Jeffries about DEEP ENDS - ABSORBING THE LEAK.

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There is a situation that has been brewing for a few days that shows us how the Deep State operates. How they can use the information to their advantage and how they can confuse a leak of intelligence in such a way that people will have doublethink on the matter and will ignore the information that was breached and distributed in chat rooms, sub stacks, and blogs.

There was a historical documentary that nerds like me tend to watch when there is nothing mindless to do and that is “The Fog Of War,” Eleven Lessons from the Life of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara.

The documentary came out in 2003. It illustrated his observations of the nature of modern warfare. They are vitally important as America’s leaders are taking the nation into wars that can’t be won.

Among many of his eleven lessons that are a few, I remember. McNamara said, “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.”

McNamara uses this in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: undefinedWe see what we want to believe.undefined

Belief and seeing are both often wrong.

McNamara uses this in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: undefinedWe see what we want to believe.undefined

He also says that we need to be prepared to reexamine our reasoning.

McNamara says that even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: undefinedIf we canundefinedt persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning.undefined

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. You may have to engage in deception.

This is something we should think about when are fed Deep State information and disinformation about the war.

The Deep State will go to deep ends to throw us down the rabbit hole

Over the Easter weekend, U.S. officials and their foreign allies scrambled to understand how dozens of classified intelligence documents had ended up on the internet, they were stunned — and occasionally infuriated — at the extraordinary range of detail the files exposed about how the United States spies on friends and enemies alike.

The documents, which appear to have come at least in part from the Pentagon and are marked as highly classified, offer tactical information about the war in Ukraine, including the country’s combat capabilities. According to one defense official, many of the documents seem to have been prepared over the winter for Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military officials, but they were available to other U.S. personnel and contract employees with the requisite security clearances.

Other documents include analysis from U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia and several other countries, all based on information gleaned from classified sources.

They first appeared online on 4chan and, before that, a gaming discussion group.

There are two different versions of the leaked documents floating around online, and one appears to have been altered to downplay the number of Russians killed while increasing the number of Ukrainian casualties. The original casualty assessment puts the number of Russian losses at around 35,000 while the altered document showed claims Moscow has only lost 16,000 soldiers.

The modifications could point to an effort of disinformation by Moscow, the analysts said. But the disclosures in the original documents, which appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans, represent a significant breach of American intelligence in the effort to aid Ukraine.

The series of detailed briefings and summaries open a rare window into the inner workings of American espionage. Among other secrets, they appear to reveal where the CIA has recruited human agents privy to the closed-door conversations of world leaders; eavesdropping that shows a Russian mercenary outfit tried to acquire weapons from a NATO ally to use against Ukraine; and what kinds of satellite imagery the United States uses to track Russian forces, including an advanced technology that appears barely, if ever, to have been publicly identified.

What the Pentagon leak reveals is that NATO is already at war with Russia, that the Pentagon and not Ukraine is in charge of planning every aspect of the US proxy war and that WW3 seems inevitable

Countries in South America are sending troops there now and many countries around the world are sending money and equipment to fight against Russia in Ukraine. Iran and China are helping Russia against Ukraine.

An intelligence leak of this sort, posted on social media and available around the world, is bound to harm intelligence sharing between Ukraine and the United States.

This sounds like a ghost war where all of these countries are fighting in the background but all we focus on in the territorial war with Russia and Ukraine, and not about how World War 3 is already underway undefined but historians have to declare if this is a world war.

But the loose definition of a world war is a war engaged in by all or most of the principal nations of the world.

So does the definition apply now?

The documents do not provide specific battle plans, like how, when, and where Ukraine intends to launch its offensive, which American officials say is likely coming in the next month or so. And because the documents are five weeks old, they offer a snapshot of time — the American and Ukrainian view, as of March 1, of what Ukrainian troops might need for the campaign.

To the trained eye of a Russian war planner, field general or intelligence analyst, however, the documents no doubt offer many tantalizing clues and insights. The documents mention, for instance, the expenditure rate of HIMARS — American-supplied high mobility artillery rocket systems, which can launch attacks against targets like ammunition dumps, infrastructure and concentrations of troops, from a distance. The Pentagon has not said publicly how fast Ukrainian troops are using the HIMARS munitions; the documents do.

It was unclear how the documents ended up on social media. But pro-Russian government channels have been sharing and circulating the briefing slides, military analysts said.

Well, all we have to do to figure this out is to go back about a year ago and realize that this could be a psy-op that has been in the planning for some time.

Back in April of last year, NBC News alleged that US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to monopolize news outlets to mount an information warfare campaign against Russia during the military offensive in Ukraine, despite being aware the intelligence wasn’t credible.

The US intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine War, that was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in early days of the military campaign.

If you remember there was at first a fit of denial about what was reported, and confusing signals being sent to the people as Under Secretary of State for political affairs Victoria Nuland told Marco Rubio in a hearing that there were biological research facilities in Ukraine.

The concern at the time was whether or not Russia was seeking to gain control of these labs.

Remember the biological labs story was leaked to the press and the Pentagon was having to do damage control so the story could be amended and now all that is left is confusion and is probably forgotten undefined there has been so much going on.

Much of the leak was sanitized and much of the NBC report is still being withheld by the US intelligence community that the monopoly news outlets are not at liberty to report on now.

Regarding the malicious disinformation campaign mounted by Western media on behalf of NATO powers, the report notes: “The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”

Again the leak strategy is a golden opportunity for the Pentagon to scare us into thinking that Russia is trying to define the war -by putting out fake leaks. But if they are so fake, then why all of the concern?

Last year, the US security agencies insidiously kept feeding false information about the impending fall of the Ukrainian capital to the monopoly media throughout Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine.

Early on during the war, Ukrainian officials were hesitant about sharing their battle plans with the United States, for fear of leaks, . As recently as last summer, American intelligence officials said they often had a better understanding of Russia’s military plans than of Ukraine’s.

So who do you think is directing the war?

Because the leaked documents have arrived in the form of photographs of printed documents, rather than original files, the possibility of forgery or alteration must be considered and of course, I wonder as well undefined but if the documents were partially faked, were they disseminated to help Russia advance its public relations goals, perhaps by minimizing their casualty numbers or inflating those of their enemy?

They certainly would not be fooling anyone at the Department of Defense, since they obviously have the original files on hand. Or could it be that the United States leaked the documents with faulty intelligence strewn throughout their contents to confuse Russia ahead of a Ukrainian offensive?

This is like an old-fashioned Cold War conspiracy, which I love because of its intriguing nature.

The scale of the leak — analysts say more than 100 documents may have been obtained — along with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could be hugely damaging, U.S. officials.

One senior intelligence official was quoted in the report as saying the leak is undefineda nightmare for the Five Eyesundefined - in reference to the intelligence-sharing nations of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The NY Times reports that one intelligence slide which is circulating features undefinedan alarming assessment of Ukraine’s faltering air defense capabilities.

But the leaked documents appear to go well beyond highly classified material on Ukraine war plans. Security analysts who have reviewed the documents tumbling onto social media sites say the increasing trove also includes sensitive briefing slides on China, the Indo-Pacific military theater, the Middle East and terrorism.

The report quotes one analyst who warns this is likely undefinedthe tip of the icebergundefined and that more major leaks are coming, or possibly have already happened, in something which could begin to rival the undefinedPentagon Papersundefined of the Vietnam War era. The Pentagon Papers were based on the publications of classified evidence.

The documents were the Defense Department’s history of the USA’s political-military involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967..

The story if you remember was about the publication of a classified 7,000-page government report that laid bare how successive US administrations had escalated the Vietnam war while concealing doubts that the action could ever be successful.

That report – the Pentagon Papers – was made public in 1971 by the New York Times over legal objections by the Nixon administration. But the manner in which the documents had been obtained by Times reporter Neil Sheehan was a mystery.

The Nixon administration, which had sought an injunction on further publication, understood the import of the story.

These papers put into question our trust in government officials and how they lie during wartime and then call it Classified.

Today we have very serious issues now with the news we get from corporate media conglomerates. They have been complacent in damage control of left-wing foibles, They have kept quiet about intelligence leaks that would tarnish the reputation of the President.

There would be no major network news CEO or editor that would use these freshly leaked documents to damage the reputation of Joe Biden like the Pentagon papers did with Richard Nixon.

So honesty the leaks are a very tricky subject to investigate undefined the fact that they were leaked on a weekend also has me wondering about whyundefined and a lot of my theories tend to think that even if there are reported flaws or alterations form the Pentagon undefined we must look at the information with discernment undefined but it will certainly show that in the mindset of Ukraine War Fatigue, there are factions that wish to leak and exploit flaws in NATO planning and the road they are paving to world war.

More and more of the outlets from which Americans get their information are being filled not just with garden variety establishment loyalists, but with longstanding members of the U.S. intelligence community which could very well be operatives of the Deep State conspiracy

Time and again you see connections between the plutocratic class which effectively owns America’s elected government, the intelligence and defense agencies that operate behind thick veils of secrecy in the name of “national security” to advance agendas that have nothing to do with the wishes of the electorate, and the mass media machine which is used to manufacture the consent of the people to be governed by this exploitative power structure.

After World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.

The CIA and similar intelligence agencies have had continued involvement in the news media to mold thought and opinion in ways scarcely imagined by the lay public.

The leak has already complicated relations with allied countries and raised doubts about America’s ability to keep its secrets. After reviewing the documents, a senior Western intelligence official said the release of the material was painful and suggested that it could curb intelligence sharing. For various agencies to provide material to each other, the official said, requires trust and assurances that certain sensitive information will be kept secret.

The documents could also hurt diplomatic ties in other ways. The newly reveal intelligence documents also make plain that the U.S. is not just spying on Russia, but also its allies. While that will hardly surprise officials, making such eavesdropping public always hampers relations with key partners, like South Korea, whose help is needed to supply Ukraine with weaponry.

Senior U.S. officials said an inquiry, launched Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would try to move swiftly to determine the source of the leak. The officials acknowledged that the documents appear to be legitimate intelligence and operational briefs compiled by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, using reports from the government’s intelligence community, but that at least one had been modified from the original at some later point.

One senior U.S. official called the leak “a massive intelligence breach,” made worse because it lays out to Russia just how deep American intelligence operatives have managed to get into the Russian military apparatus. Officials within the U.S. government with security clearance often receive such documents through daily emails, one official said, and those emails might then be automatically forwarded to other people.

Another senior U.S. official said tracking down the original source of the leak could be difficult because hundreds, if not thousands, of military and other U.S. government officials, have the security clearances needed to gain access to the documents.

While the documents were compiled by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, they contain intelligence from many agencies, including the National Security Agency, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Some of the material is labeled as having been collected under the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, or F.I.S.A., noting that its further distribution is not allowed without the permission of the attorney general.

There are at least two discussions about South Korea’s debate about whether to give the U.S. artillery shells for use in Ukraine, violating Seoul’s policy on providing lethal aid. One section of the documents reports that South Korean officials were worried that President Biden would call South Korea’s president to pressure Seoul to deliver the goods.

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SHOW GUEST: DONALD JEFFRIES

Donald Jeffries started out researching the JFK assassination as a teenager in the mid-1970s, working for Mark Laneundefineds Citizens Committee of Inquiry. He has written six books, with three more coming out this year, and his work has been lauded by the likes of Ron Paul, Naomi Wolf, Roger Stone, Cynthia McKinney, Cindy Sheehan, Sherri Tenpenny, and Jesse Ventura, among others. His website is donaldjeffries.media