Ukraine deals with the real world about Kherson, and bridges, while GOP fixates upon Trump, saying Nuclear secrets are not serious, and madness
BRAVO FOR UKRAINE
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In a daily intelligence update, UK defence officials said Ukrainian precision strikes were likely to have made the road crossing over the Dnieper River "unusable for heavy military vehicles". Nova Kakhovka lies about 55km (34 miles) north-east of Kherson.
Russian forces had only succeeded in making superficial repairs to the main Antonivsky Bridge, the officials said, which Western military sources said was "completely unusable" after a Himars artillery rocket attack last month.
The main rail bridge near Kherson was also further damaged last week, the UK update said.
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This is called taking care of business in the real world, Kudos
Whereas the GOP is fixating upon MADNESS
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RNC sent out a fundraising text: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL: UNPRECEDENTED move Biden’s FBI RAIDS Pres. Trump’s home. Time to take back Congress.”
Rubbish. There’s no evidence that the FBI search was motivated by anything other than concerns (and, under a court order, probable cause) that Trump made off with documents rightfully belonging to the United States. That’s a criminal offense. If anyone has been undermining the rule of law, it’s Trump. Recall that Trump himself appointed the current director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, after firing former director James Comey for investigating the ties of Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russia.
But any allegation of Trump wrongdoing is automatically treated by the Trump Republican base as a loyalty test — triggering demands that Republican lawmakers and GOP hopefuls defend Trump and attack Democrats for going after him
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While the GOP pines away for madness we have this little tidbit about the allegedly overblown scare over the classified documents
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Broadly speaking, the US intelligence and defense communities would possess four different categories of files that might be considered “nuclear documents”: nuclear weapon science and design; other countries’ nuclear plans, including the nuclear systems and command of allied nations (UK, France) and adversaries (Russia, China, North Korea, Iran), as well as countries whose nuclear programs exist in a more gray zone (Israel, India, Pakistan); details on the United States’ own nuclear weapons and deployments; and details on US nuclear command & control procedures, known in Pentagon parlance as NC2.
Each category of these documents would carry with it some unique classification peculiarities. And all of them exist at the so-called Above Top Secret level, because a simple Top Secret clearance on its own isn’t enough to access the files.
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Whereas
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Conservative media outlet?Breitbart?is facing criticism for publishing the names of?FBI?agents involved in the raid of former President?Donald Trump's home.
Breitbart published a leaked version of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, including the names of an FBI special agent and supervisor agent, on Friday. The agents both signed their names on receipts for property seized from Trump's home, including boxes of classified documents that reportedly may have included nuclear secrets. A redacted version of the warrant, which omitted the names of the agents, was officially released hours later.
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That is the ticket : Endanger Agents doing their jobs. I.e, the named individuals may have to go into other areas, and relocate on account of violent threats
All for the sake of BACKING a LIE
whereas Ukraine to its eternal credit is taking care of essential business
See the difference ?
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Why Republican candidates can't escape Trump
Once again, he's put them in a bind
Aug 9
Republican candidates for Senate, House and governorships in the upcoming midterms have been filling the airwaves today with baseless assertions that the FBI search of Mar-a-lago shows the politicization of the Justice Department and undermines the rule of law. Republicans ranging from third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have issued statements brimming with outrage and accusation. Last night, the?RNC sent out a fundraising text: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL: UNPRECEDENTED move Biden’s FBI RAIDS Pres. Trump’s home. Time to take back Congress.”
Rubbish. There’s no evidence that the FBI search was motivated by anything other than concerns (and, under a court order, probable cause) that Trump made off with documents rightfully belonging to the United States. That’s a criminal offense. If anyone has been undermining the rule of law, it’s Trump. Recall that Trump himself appointed the current director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, after firing former director James Comey for investigating the ties of Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russia.
But any allegation of Trump wrongdoing is automatically treated by the Trump Republican base as a loyalty test — triggering demands that Republican lawmakers and GOP hopefuls defend Trump and attack Democrats for going after him.
This is putting Republican candidates in a terrible bind.
As Biden and the Democrats take victory laps for legislation they’ve been passing – the CHIPs and Science Act, which President Biden today signed into law, and, very soon, the Inflation Reduction Act – the Republican Party wallows in Trumpist grievance and accusation.
GOP candidates know that their best chance of prevailing in November with independent voters depends on distancing themselves from Trump and focusing on hot-button issues like inflation, crime, and immigration. But today’s reaction to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search shows how difficult that will be. September and October are likely to be all about Trump, and Republican candidates will have to go to the mat for him. Consider:
The January 6 committee will resume its hearings in early September. Those hearings will almost certainly provide more evidence of Trump’s attempted coup of 2020.
The Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s role in pushing fake electors and in removing documents from the White House appears to be heating up.
The D.C. Court of Appeals has just cleared the way for the House Ways and Means Committee to obtain Trump’s long-hidden tax returns.
Prosecutors in Georgia continue their investigation into Trump’s demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "find" the votes Trump needed to win an election that three separate courts confirmed he lost. Rudy Giuliani has just been ordered to testify before the grand jury in that case.
Trump himself will likely declare his candidacy for president in September or October.
All of which means Republican candidates will be under increasing pressure from Trump’s base to defend Trump, to rage against his accusers, and to re-litigate the 2020 election – tasks that will be increasingly difficult as further evidence emerges of Trump’s criminality.
Meanwhile, Democrats will be able to boast about what they’ve done for the American people — reduce drug prices, cut the costs of healthcare, clean the environment, maintain America’s competitive edge, and modernize the nation’s roads, bridges, and water and sewage systems. As Joe Biden put it today when he signed into law the CHIPs and Science Act, America has met the moment: “a moment when we bet on ourselves, believed in ourselves and recaptured the story, the spirit and the soul of this nation.”
Which do you think will be the more attractive message to the independent voters who will largely determine the outcome of the midterms — defending Trump or “recapturing the can-do spirit” of America?
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And see this
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Here’s What Trump’s ‘Nuclear Documents’ Could Be
FBI agents reportedly searched Mar-a-Lago for “nuclear documents.” That can fall into one of these four categories.
YESTERDAY EVENING, THE?Washington Post?broke the?blockbuster news?that FBI agents who?searched former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence?on Monday were looking for “nuclear documents,” a phrase that immediately set off alarms inside national security circles. The nation’s nuclear systems and plans are considered among the most sensitive and most narrowly known secrets.
Trump denied the report, calling the “nuclear weapons issue” a “hoax.” But assuming the?Post’s reporting is correct, what could such a vague phrase as “nuclear documents” mean, and what could we learn about such a category?
Broadly speaking, the US intelligence and defense communities would possess four different categories of files that might be considered “nuclear documents”: nuclear weapon science and design; other countries’ nuclear plans, including the nuclear systems and command of allied nations (UK, France) and adversaries (Russia, China, North Korea, Iran), as well as countries whose nuclear programs exist in a more gray zone (Israel, India, Pakistan); details on the United States’ own nuclear weapons and deployments; and details on US nuclear command & control procedures, known in Pentagon parlance as NC2.
Each category of these documents would carry with it some unique classification peculiarities. And all of them exist at the so-called Above Top Secret level, because a simple Top Secret clearance on its own isn’t enough to access the files.
Security classification procedures really began only in the 20th century, and were codified during the Cold War into?three standard levels of classification: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, each carrying with it increased levels of control, storage, and more intensive background checks.
Under US law, Top Secret is specifically used to denote “national security information or material which requires the highest degree of protection” and information where, if disclosed, “could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage” to national security. Day-to-day, almost anything interesting that the US intelligence or military does exists at that “Top Secret” level. Many US intelligence and military personnel will joke that “confidential” and “secret” information is rarely much more interesting or informed than reading the day’s newspapers.
The wide tranche of operations and intelligence that technically counts as Top Secret means that nearly all sensitive positions in the US government—including FBI agents, many military personnel, and most intelligence officers and analysts—come with a Top Secret clearance and background check standard. All told, according to research?conducted?by?The Washington Post?in the wake of 9/11, nearly a million Americans possess Top Secret clearances.
We’ve known since February that Donald Trump apparently took?numerous documents?from the White House, including documents classified at the Top Secret level. But the reporting this week has added two new wrinkles, both of which hint that the stuff hidden in Mar-a-Lago was even more sensitive.
That’s because virtually all the truly interesting secrets inside the US government aren’t just Top Secret, but come with additional levels of security clearance and special “need to know” access that restrict them even more tightly.
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Nuclear science and design files, for instance, are uniquely classified as “Restricted Data.” These files are historically accessed through what’s known as a Q Clearance, a special background check and access protocol. (And yes, the Q Clearance is the “Q” in?QAnon, a reference to that anonymous figure’s?supposed clearance?inside the US government.)
The Restricted Data designation was created by the Atomic Energy Act at the dawn of the Cold War and is now run by the Department of Energy, which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapon stockpiles and development. As nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein?explained?on Twitter today, the goal was to build a classification outside of the defense establishment that would allow scientific knowledge more flexibility than simply military applications.
“TS/RD” files are what’s known as “born classified,” in that, unlike other classified intelligence or scientific work, they are presumed to be highly classified from the moment of their creation. Effectively, rather than opting into classification, nuclear design and science have to opt out.
Meanwhile, NC2 documents—think documents relating to how the presidential nuclear football operates or how nuclear launch procedures would unfold—have historically had their own classification known as Extremely Sensitive Information (ESI), which again requires special access rights.
Some of the?reporting?around the Mar-a-Lago search, by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl and others, says that the FBI raid also pertained to what are known as Special Access Programs (SAPs), another unique classification category that usually deals with the most sensitive covert operations and technical capabilities of intelligence and defense systems. (The intelligence community has its own equivalent of the military’s SAPs, which are known as CAPs, or Controlled Access Programs.)
SAPs require someone to be “read into” the program specifically—meaning, they need to have a specific “need to know,” and the documents are carefully tracked to see who has read them and where they’re stored. Usually, individuals are “read into” an SAP in what amounts to a mini-ceremony of sorts, one that involves meeting with a specially cleared security officer and signing a specific nondisclosure agreement for that SAP. Over the course of an official’s career, the SAPs that they’re allowed access to are carefully tracked.
Beyond SAPs, which focus on capabilities, there’s another category of classified information known as SCI, “Sensitive Compartmented Information.” This designation is usually used for protecting what intelligence officials call “sources and methods.” Those could include the identity of a highly placed asset in a foreign government, for instance, or how the NSA has managed to technically penetrate a foreign military’s communication networks. According to?Newsweek’s William Arkin, at least some of the documents sought in the FBI search related to “sources and methods.” And?The Wall Street Journal?reported?this afternoon that a list of items removed from Mar-a-Lago includes “various classified/TS/SCI documents.”
SAPs and SCI are known by their own codenames. For example, the long-standing classification for our satellite reconnaissance was TALENT KEYHOLE, so documents protected by it were labeled “TS/SCI TALENT KEYHOLE.” (FBI Director Christopher Wray, who presumably was part of the team that signed off on this week’s Mar-a-Lago search, was a bit player in the?Bush administration showdown?over one of the best known and most infamous recent SAPs,?STELLAR WIND, an NSA wiretapping program created after 9/11.)
Interestingly, for the purposes of the Mar-a-Lago search, SAPs can also protect nuclear research and development as well as the highly secret and protected presidential and military NC2 communication systems, which are known by their own special clearance, YANKEE WHITE.
There are?additional levels?of document classification restriction the US government uses to show what can be shared with whom: ORCON, which means Originator Controlled, prohibits information from being shared outside of the department or agency where that document was created; NOFORN prohibits information from being shared with any foreign officials; and REL TO FVEY means that the information can be released to countries and officials that are part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance along with the US: the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
Almost regardless of the specifics, any of these “nuclear” categories—SCI, SAP, ESI, RD—denote and protect the most sensitive documents in the entire US government, and penalties for even an inadvertent security breach can be harsh.
Classified documents—and even just conversations about classified information—are never supposed to leave the special reading and conference rooms designed by the US government, known as SCIFs, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, which are sealed, windowless,?specially built, and shielded to be impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping. (The US government even has?special Airstream trailers modified?to be portable SCIFs for Defense Department VIPs that travel aboard military cargo planes. And when high-level officials like the president travel, security officials build?portable SCIFs?inside hotel rooms.)
The Justice Department regularly prosecutes those who mishandle or incorrectly take classified documents out of such secure facilities.
End of quote
Also
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Breitbart Slammed for Doxxing FBI Agents Involved in Mar-a-Lago Raid
BY?AILA SLISCO?ON 8/12/22 AT 11:46 PM EDT
Conservative media outlet?Breitbart?is facing criticism for publishing the names of?FBI?agents involved in the raid of former President?Donald Trump's home.
Breitbart published a leaked version of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, including the names of an FBI special agent and supervisor agent, on Friday. The agents both signed their names on receipts for property seized from Trump's home, including boxes of classified documents that reportedly may have included nuclear secrets. A redacted version of the warrant, which omitted the names of the agents, was officially released hours later.
Commentators soon took to?Twitter?to accuse Breitbart, an outlet previously managed by former Trump adviser?Steve Bannon, of doxxing—the practice of identifying a person or releasing personal information about them, often with the aim of enabling targeted harassment. Some also accused Trump of leaking the warrant to Breitbart in hopes of targeting the agents.
"[U.S. Attorney General Merrick] Garland called Trump out to make warrant public,"?tweeted?digital strategist Alan Rosenblatt. "Trump tried to get one over on Garland, releasing warrant to Breitbart, w/out redacting FBI agents names. That's right, Trump doxxed FBI agents serving a legal search warrant. Once again, Trump is inciting violence."
"It's also worth noting that they published the names of the FBI agents, which serves no purpose other than opening them up to threats and harassment," legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti?tweeted. "Breitbart is also confused about what 'SSA' means. It refers to Supervisory Special Agent, a FBI supervisor."
"Trump, via Breitbart, released unredacted copy of property receipt containing names of FBI agents,"?tweeted?attorney Mark S. Zaid. "Based on his history, this can only be interpreted as intentional to cause these Special Agents (one of whom I know) & their families grief & subject them to possible threats."
"From what I can tell, the court unsealed it - but before that could happen, Trump himself leaked it to Breitbart," author Tessa Dare?tweeted. "But the version he leaked had the FBI AGENTS' NAMES in it, whereas the official unsealed one kept those redacted to protect them and their families. A**hole."
"[Breitbart] incl the names of the individual FBI agents involved in the search," Elephant Journal?tweeted. "The court issued release of the warrant redacts that sensitive information. Team Trump just put a target on the backs of the agents & their families. That is 100% the intent."
"Trump's social media platform sent a push alert this afternoon to an article with an unredacted version of the search warrant that included the names of two FBI agents,"?tweeted?CNN?correspondent Donie O'Sullivan. "Those agents' names are now circulating on pro-Trump social media and are being villainized."
"So... when Trump leaked the warrant docs to WSJ,?Fox?& Breitbart this afternoon, the names of the FBI agents in moved were not redacted," news anchor Ed Greenberger?tweeted. "Anyone who thinks Trump cares about America, or Americans, is a damn fool."
The FBI has received an increase in violent threats in the wake of conservative rage over the raid on Trump's home. FBI Director?Christopher Wray?has denounced the threats,?saying?on Wednesday "violence against law enforcement is not the answer, no matter what anybody's upset about."
Less than 24 hours before the Trump search warrant was leaked to Breitbart, an armed Trump supporter who had recently?advocated killing FBI agents?online was shot dead by police after allegedly attempting to break into the FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Newsweek?has reached out to Breitbart for comment.
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Meanwhile in this fake news generated hate fest, Ukraine is dealing with the real world
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Ukraine says it has taken out vital bridge in occupied Kherson
13 August 2022
Ukraine says it has taken out another bridge that is vital for Russian forces occupying the southern Kherson region.
It says the bridge on the dam at Nova Kakhovka - which it has attacked before - is now impassable. The claim has not been independently verified.
It comes just weeks after the key Antonivsky Bridge?was put out of action by Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine is waging a counter-offensive towards Kherson city, which Russia captured in the early days of the war.
"The destruction of the road bridge of the Nova Kakhovka dam was ensured, with the result that it was taken out of operation," the Ukrainian army's Operational Command South posted to Facebook.
In a daily intelligence update, UK defence officials said Ukrainian precision strikes were likely to have made the road crossing over the Dnieper River "unusable for heavy military vehicles". Nova Kakhovka lies about 55km (34 miles) north-east of Kherson.
Russian forces had only succeeded in making superficial repairs to the main Antonivsky Bridge, the officials said, which Western military sources said was "completely unusable" after a Himars artillery rocket attack last month.
The main rail bridge near Kherson was also further damaged last week, the UK update said.
"Even if Russia manages to make significant repairs to the bridges, they will remain a key vulnerability," the UK defence ministry said.
It added that thousands of Russian troops west of the river were now "almost certainly reliant on just two pontoon ferry crossing points" for ground resupplies.
Military analysts say there is a growing risk of the troops being cut off from the rest of main Russian occupying forces.
The attack is part of a Ukrainian effort to isolate Russian troops, with the ultimate goal of recapturing the entire region.
If it proves successful the ambitious campaign would provide a boost for Kyiv by retaking from Russia the only regional capital it has so far captured since the invasion in February.
Kherson, which had a population of about 290,000 before the war, is currently administered by Moscow-backed officials.
Last month, Russia said its military focus was no longer only on eastern Ukraine but on its southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia too.
According to Russia's Tass news agency, officials in Kherson city have started moving forward with plans to hold a referendum on formally joining Russia.
The US has accused Russia of preparing to annex parts of occupied Ukraine illegally.
But Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukrainian minister for reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, said this week that any referendum held in occupied-regions would never be internationally recognised.
She also advised Ukrainians remaining in Russian-held areas to evacuate, adding that 5,300 people had left the Kherson region in the last five days.
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Andrew Beckwith PhD