Accused Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira unwittingly qualified for Whistleblower award
His disclosures revealed intelligence community waste and classification abuse on an industrial scale
The intelligence community is a joke, like a Laurel and Hardy comedy. It expends vast resources to assemble drivel or trivia and then turns fools gold into gold by stamping it “classified.” The volumes of classified disclosures by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira on the social app Discord is illustrative.
A key intelligence target was United Nations Secretary General Antonino Guterres, international wall paper who exercises all the influence of a fashion designer. As reported in today’s Washington Post, the intelligence community intercepted conversations revealing the Secretary General aimed to confront Ethiopia’s U.N. representative, Taye Atske Selassie Amde, after Ethiopia’s foreign minister, Demeke Mekonnen, apparently sent a letter nixing his ambitions to visit the convulsed Tigray region to support the imaginary peace process there.
(But who cared? The Secretary General is powerless to influence anything but the menu at the United Nations headquarters. Tigray will remain a cauldron of strife in tribalized Ethiopia whether or not Mr. Guterres weeps or sermonizes).
Guterres was outraged by foreign minister Mekonnen’s lese-majeste and pledged to end his immemorable diplomatic career. But the juvenile quarrel was soon patched up at an African Union summit in Addis Ababa where Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed “apologized” for the foreign minister’s faux pas.
Classified intelligence should be made of more serious stuff. Who authorized squandering taxpayers’ money to collect and store such trivia? He or she should be disciplined? And who decided classification was necessary to avoid harm to the national security or foreign policy of the United States? The disclosure proved as innocuous as reporting that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Where is the discipline for the epidemic of over-classification?
Sister intelligence larks followed. After a grueling travel schedule to New York, Switzerland, Iraq, and Qatar, classified intelligence showed he was “not happy about” travelling to Ukraine to meet President Zelensky entailing another long commercial flight followed by an 11-hour drive to Kyiv. More insipid classified intelligence revealed the Secretary General was “really pissed off” about Zelensky’s unwarned public ceremony honoring International Women’s Day and presentation of medals to uniformed soldiers during his visit, which caused Mr. Guterres to avoid smiling.
You get the picture. The intelligence community treats childish gossip like Ultra of World War II fame that deciphered encrypted Nazi battlefield communications. The true scandal is not Teixeira’s Discord disclosures of classified information, but the refusal of the mainstream media and Congress to exclaim like the child in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, “the Emperor has no clothes.”