You all recall this, covered on Friday, Trump’s tweet of the Iranian rocket launch site upon which there had been a malfunction:
The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One. pic.twitter.com/z0iDj2L0Y3
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2019
The “reaction” to Trump taking his phone out to photograph the classified document, including picture, has been swift and clear.
Robert Deitz, a former lawyer at the CIA and National Security Agency, told Business Insider that Trump made a “serious mistake” with the tweet.
“It identifies for the world the methods we have attained” in collecting imagery intelligence, Deitz said. “One doesn’t use intel for the purposes of taunting. The Russians and the Chinese will be very happy to study this.”
Now, we hear increasing discussion about whether Trump did even more to jeopardize our national security than just release information pertaining to our spy/drone photographic capability. Indeed, Trump may have just unleashed evidence of a decades-long campaign to disrupt Iranian missile development.
The propensity for saying the quiet part out loud is less amusing when it blows the cover on a multi-decade, multi-president campaign to disrupt Iranian missile and nuclear development with minimal loss of life.
Lots of analysts counting pixels in Beijing and Moscow today. https://t.co/BI4eQ8OAQw
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) August 30, 2019
“Multi-decade,” multi-presidential campaign to interfere with Iranian’s missile and possible nuclear development? Where have we heard that before? A computer worm for centrifuges, maybe?
It’s now widely accepted that Stuxnet was created by the intelligence agencies of the United States and Israel. The classified program to develop the worm was given the code name “Operation Olympic Games“; it was begun under President George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. While neither government has ever officially acknowledged developing Stuxnet, a 2011 video created to celebrate the retirement of Israeli Defense Forces head Gabi Ashkenazi listed Stuxnet as one of the successes under his watch.
It would seem that our intelligence community has had an active program to degrade Iranian nuclear capabilities for some time. Is it possible that the intelligence community is speaking in code here? That the problem with Trump’s tweet is not the photograph – which, admittedly, isn’t all that different than that which one could get from Google Earth – is the real intelligence breach more related to the fact that the U.S. did have something to do with the rocket malfunction, and Trump’s gloating and coy denial is seen as proof?
There is no question that the United States has a program aimed at interfering with Iranian rocket development. From February of this year in the New York Times:
The Trump White House has accelerated a secret American program to sabotage Iran’s missiles and rockets, according to current and former administration officials, who described it as part of an expanding campaign by the United States to undercut Tehran’s military and isolate its economy.
Officials said it was impossible to measure precisely the success of the classified program, which has never been publicly acknowledged. But in the past month alone, two Iranian attempts to launch satellites have failed within minutes.
Those two rocket failures — one that Iran announced on Jan. 15 and the other, an unacknowledged attempt, on Feb. 5 — were part of a pattern over the past 11 years. In that time, 67 percent of Iranian orbital launches have failed, an astonishingly high number compared to a 5 percent failure rate worldwide for similar space launches.
So two-thirds of Iranian launch attempts end in failure. It sounds like an intelligence program is effectively keeping the Iranians from making much progress. But for that program to continue with success, it must remain unacknowledged, and opaque. No intelligence officer wants attention focused on the program. And yet what could possibly set off more alarm bells than a public tweet, taunting Iran?
The people who know the issue best, former intelligence officers, are uniformly angered and concerned. Perhaps the outspoken former intelligence officials are signaling a deeper concern. By focusing upon the intelligence capability given away in the picture, they may be covering more concrete concerns about the possible rocket program itself.
Terrifying. This is exactly the type of thing that gets some of our most loyal people killed, people in the field gathering intelligence or running counter-intelligence, the silent war. On a Trump-whim, they might be in serious danger. Moreover, if Iran now believes the U.S. is disrupting its rocket program, it is very possible that Iran might attack U.S. interests outside the region. Those deaths – too, would be a direct result of Trump’s impulsiveness and braggadocio.
We need off this train, Pelosi cannot start impeachment proceedings soon enough. This action alone would endanger any president. Perhaps this will be the last straw.
We knew it would get very ugly. It is hard to believe that Trump would blow aside national security concerns this easily, or at least this publicly. We best prepare for more ugliness, in ways we previously couldn’t imagine. Start imagining.
****
Peace, y’all
Jason
I am back on Twitter and would appreciate y’all following me, Twitter: @MiciakZoom
The tweet doesn’t read like Tr*mp wrote it. He doesn’t use big words like “catastrophic” and “determining”.
Good point. Still, he presumably has control over what is sent out on his Twitter account, he hasn’t disowned it in any way, and I think it is clear enough that he wanted this out for his own purposes.
He loves boasting about what “he” can do (ignoring that there are a lot of other people who do the actual work)..
Sometimes he uses the , “we”, when talking about his, “buddy”, Putin as in, “We are making great progress, Putin is a good man”, and, “Putin said he did not do it so I believe he did not do it”,.
His blabbering to Putin started with proudly telling top secret info to 2 Russian agents in the Oval Office … Putting many Israel field agents in mortal danger and skewing up that Country’s plans and intelligence system …
He has demanded totally private meetings with Putin and other Despots, so FREAKING wrong and still, he gets away with it … the worst President EVER, at keeping his damn mouth shut … in another country, he might have already been neutralized, letting out top secrets so blatantly …
There comes a point when someone needs to decide if shouting out top secrets is any worse than the telling WE THE PEOPLE, 12,000 lies and still counting, the Constitution only mentions one lie as a qualifier for a charge to the President in an impeachment process …
“Loose Lips Might Sink Ships”, “Defense On The Sea Begins On The Shore”, “Defense In The Field Begins In The Factory”. These were all patriotic creeds and slogans pushed by the US Office of War Information Office during 1942 (WWII) on the US population using posters to keep the US safe from direct attack on the US 48 from Nazi and Jap subs and warplanes. And it worked pretty well. After Pearl Harbor, there were only 5 direct attacks on US soil: https://www.history.com/news/5-attacks-on-u-s-soil-during-world-war-ii What Bolton, Pompeo & Trump have done and are continuing to is do deploy over 1,000 nuclear warheads on US subs, and jets in bombs and in cruise missiles by October. It sure looks like these unstable hotheads plan to use these against Iran to start WWIII as cover for their continuing illegal actions to gradually turn the US and as an excuse to declare Martial Law and eliminate rights and freedoms guaranteed under our Constitution. They are using propaganda to attempt to sell the use of nuclear weapons against Iran or anyone else they wish to attack because (1) they reduce reaction times before a potential adversary must decide whether to retaliate; and (2) by calling them “low yield” nuclear weapons. But each warhead or bomb is only slightly less powerful than the bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. In reality the earth and human society would not survive the radiation and nuclear winter that results. Their twisted end game is to rapidly turn the US into a fascist dictatorship where Trump and his GOP-Nazi enablers may do whatever they please to suppress, oppress, imprison, torture, murder anyone they please who gets in the way of their acquisition of all power and riches within the US and eventually the world.
My god I hope you’re wrong. It may well be their end goal. But, I do sense a new level of urgency in addressing the maniac. Have you not felt that the country has been rocked by Trump’s last 2.5 weeks? He’s descending quickly. As I have said, this is unsustainable, and I think we’re picking up speed toward an end game, here.
That’s a lot of CT you have there.
Frank Vyan Walton has a fine post at Kos that goes into the kind of reaction people in the IC (or who have actual clearances) have to this sh*t.
Yes, I read it, and it was an excellent breakdown, highly recommended to all.
Impeach Trump Now, Speaker Pelosi.