The Meaning Of The Leaks

The Big Buzz for the past several days has been the NYTimes account of major leaks of US/NATO documents. Larry Johnson—in his second article on the topic—again argues strongly that the documents are authentic and not some sort of Russian disinformation. This is the overwhelming consensus and one that I share, although most commentators have acknowledged some attempts at manipulating the documents. Here’s Johnson’s overview:

NEW LEAKS OF U.S./NATO MILITARY INTELLIGENCE DOCUMENTS ALARMS WASHINGTON

Washington, you have a problem. News broke late today that a new batch of classified documents have hit the internet and the Biden Administration is scrambling to put a band aid on a sucking chest wound. …

A new batch of classified documents that appear to detail American national security secrets from Ukraine to the Middle East to China surfaced on social media sites on Friday, alarming the Pentagon and adding turmoil to a situation that seemed to have caught the Biden administration off guard.

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, officials said. A senior intelligence officials called the leak “a nightmare for the Five Eyes,” in a reference to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.

The latest documents were found on Twitter and other sites on Friday, a day after senior Biden administration officials said they were investigating a potential leak of classified Ukrainian war plans, include an assessment of Ukraine’s air defense [AD] capabilities.

The assessment of Ukraine’s AD capabilities will figure further, below. So also the geographical scale of the leaks: “from Ukraine to the Middle East to China.” Johnson’s bottom line mirrors that of the NYT: This is big.

But my wife and I have discussing the meaning of this. What has become of the previous leaks—the Zhou classified docs, the Hunter bank records, Milley’s suggestions that the time for a negotiated end has come? And in the meantime we’ve had all the war mongering re China, attacks on our occupation forces in Syria, the increasing marginalization of our presence from the Mediterranean across West and South Asia. There are even suggestions that the US is trying to sponsor a Color Coup or Revolution in Israel.

My suggestion is that these latest leaks come from the same sources with the same motivations. The source is likely to be within the military establishment, who we know are alarmed at the position they find themselves in. Consider:

1. The kinetic war in Ukraine has revealed a Russia that is prepared for war on a scale that few have imagined, and with an industrial base capable of resupply that dwarfs the capabilities of the collective West. In terms of a land war in Eurasia, NATO is being progressively reduced to the status of a paper tiger.

2. Couple with that the revelations that the US launched a terror attack on key German infrastructure—Nordstream. That has to enter into European, especially French and German, calculations going forward. It also ties in to the disastrous blowback from the sanctions war. The US is revealed to no longer be an adequate backstop for ties to Russia and China—and now to the Middle East and even Brazil.

3. The result is the rapid change in US leverage in an economic sense and the realization of how great a threat that deleveraging poses to the US capability to project force on a global scale. The claims from the US military establishment that they require a doubling of their budgets must have been made with the realization that that is almost certainly impossible. I suggest that was a message being delivered to the hardcore of the American Imperial establishment—the US Senate: The path you have us on is unsustainable.

4. The further message is, Look, we gave you the information you needed to deal with the Zhou regime and you failed to act. We now reveal the depths of the quagmire and the possibility of further pushback.

What is revealed in the latest leaks? Largely the catastrophic state of affairs for the proxy war effort in Ukraine. Dr. Snekotron provides a fairly readable account in a 28 part twitter thread. Big Serge provides a bottom line for the much rumored “spring offensive”:

Big Serge

@witte_sergei

The big takeaways (again, assuming the documents are authentic) are that the Ukrainian counteroffensive will be built around half strength brigades, and that NATO has no real insight into Ukrainian losses or frontline strength because Ukraine only gives them propaganda numbers.

As another commentator points out, no army pushes out troops to the front with only a month’s worth of training to fill out half strength formations—not unless their losses have been catastrophic.

Simplicius the Thinker weighs in with a very detailed analysis, but—like Big Serge—also drawing on Dr. Snekotron and other sources. His major takeaways, however, are these:

MAJOR: Nato Plans for Ukraine Leaked

Some concluding thoughts to wrap it up:

My biggest takeaway from it all, is that the AFU’s supposed ‘coming offensive’ is truly a last hurrah, even more than we imagined. The reason is twofold:

1. Firstly, their numbers in general appear much lower in every regard. Not only is the manpower extremely low, but the Western equipment numbers are incredibly paltry compared to what was originally promised long ago.

2. And then, the second biggest story is how bad the shape of their AD missile stockpiles appear to be. With the high rate of consumption, they appear to be on the verge of complete defenselessness.

…

However, May is already the red-flag danger zone for A.D. consumption. So if they launch their massive offensive, and it fails throughout the month of May, by June they could be in a situation where their AD is so badly degraded that Russia can launch its own ‘Summer Offensive’ against a depleted, exhausted, now-armorless AFU which also can’t defend itself from the air.

And when you couple this with the fact that Russia is now reportedly using mass amounts of new guided aerial assets, (including Shoigu’s very foreboding visit to a bomb factory today, which showed some of Russia’s largest and scariest bombs being built, like the Fab-9000, a 9000kg monster), it all portends some very ill tidings for Ukraine.

Follow the links for more details. The bottom line should be clear: This Ukraine proxy war is a loser. Worse. Unlike previous losers from which the US could simply walk away, this time is different. This time the losing will be on a global economic scale that will directly affect both the US economy as well as our military force projection capabilities. There will be no walking away from those consequences, so the sooner we face up to them the better. That appears to me to be the message and meaning of these leaks. That and a plea to the US Senate to do something, fast, about the Zhou regime and its Neocon ruling cabal.

Now, to support my contentions on the global scale of all this, I return to themes highlighted by Johnson and Simplicius. Simplicius, near the top of his long article, gets to the heart of the implications we can draw from the leak. Simplicius begins by pointing to the dueling narratives in the MSM. Like Johnson (and me) he comes down on the side of the NYT over Reuters:

Yes, there is still a possibility that it is basically disinfo. Particularly because the timing of the leaked release so ‘conveniently’ falls right on the eve of the big AFU offensive.

Reuters claims the following:

Russia or pro-Russian elements are likely behind the leak of several classified US military documents posted on social media, Reuters reported.

However, there are certain extenuating circumstances that heavily point to the leaks being real. Which are namely that: there is apparently a much larger trove of leaked data that is floating around, in fact most of it is not even related to Russia / Ukraine and is in fact much more serious and ‘sensitive’ as per U.S. sources, as it pertains to highly secretive internal transmissions regarding China, the Middle East, and more. You can read about it on this new NYTimes article.

Please reread that. We’ve been talking about the world transforming events involving China and the Middle East—meaning, world energy supplies and the arrangements for shipping and paying for those supplies. That, says Simplicius and the NYT, is by far the most sensitive part of the leaks. That’s what takes this whole matter beyond the regional Ukrainian war to the global level. And that’s what has the leakers so alarmed. So alarmed that they’re not trying to hide the strengths of the forces aligning against the American Empire—to the contrary, they are at pains to emphasize the seriousness of the threat.

And secondly, there are a lot of pieces of info in the leaks which wouldn’t make logical sense in revealing if it was simple disinfo. For instance, revealing how many NATO/Western spy/intel assets are operating in Ukraine, etc. Such things only serve as evidence for Russia of U.S./West’s collusion an secret provocations/escalations, and serve as future legal proof of the West being the antagonist and initiator in the conflict, which gives Russia major legal and geopolitical advantages. That to me is too big of an oversight.

That looks like finger pointing at the Neocons. Yes, it’s self interested, but that’s to be expected.

Also, the fact that much of it paints Russia in a favorable light, in terms of the pure numbers. If it was a deliberate leak, one would think they would sneak in some embarrassing or discrediting info about the Russian military, to paint it unfavorably, at least to some extent. Why let the world know how low Russia’s losses really are, for instance?

How about this? Because it’s important to kill the Bodyguard of Lies if we are to deal constructively with the crisis that is brewing. I say that with reference to what Simplicius says next. I don’t believe this is “disgruntled internal NATO employees wishing to sabotage the operation [the spring offensive].” These unhappy NATO employees know the spring offensive is doomed, whether they leak or not. If that were the extent of the damage, they could deal with that. It’s what comes after that that has them so alarmed, when Russia’s demands will escalate—backed by China and the reshaped dynamics of global power.

I’m partial to believing the flipside of the coin, which is that it was leaked on the eve of the offensive by disgruntled internal NATO employees wishing to sabotage the operation. Although it could be ‘part of the plan’, I don’t think the Biden admin would go so hard in trying to scrub the data off the internet if it were a real disinfo campaign.

This next, to me, is key with regard to what I just said. Very little in the leak is a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to events—not as regards Ukraine alone. But remember, as the NYT says, the most sensitive parts concern the global situation, not the spring offensive.

And lastly, very little in the leak is actually ‘surprising’ or unknown information because much of it very accurately reflects all the projections that those of us who are on the ball have been making, and so it serves more as a confirmation of known facts. If it were true disinfo, I would expect that it would have some ‘surprising’ shocks that we didn’t anticipate, which would attempt to steer our analysis in some deflected direction, but it in fact confirms everything we’ve been seeing and reporting in many significant ways.

In the meantime, the House committees are subpoenaing Zhou bank records and Zhou is putting off a campaign announcement. And the regime urges trans crazies to resort to violence against normal Americans. Not normal times.