Leaked Gaza Cable. US Military in 74 Countries. Election Hysteria.

Don’t believe the fuss about election interference. Don’t take our word for it. Here’s what former NSA Director Paul Nakasone said said on Thursday: “(In) 2018, 2020 (and) 2022 we had safe and secure elections … (in) 2024 we will have safe and secure elections again.” The retired four-star general would know, having served as director of the NSA and commander of U.S. Cyber ​​Command. CYBERCOM’s mission includes defending U.S. elections from foreign cyber threats.

Nakasone is an unusually sober voice in the national security world, and sober remarks like his don’t often make headlines. Contrast what he said with the hyperventilation in the news media and Congress over Iran’s outrageous attempts to hack the Trump campaign. On Tuesday, Rep. Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to President Biden. “I am writing to express my grave concern over the alarming reports that Iran is actively attempting to influence the upcoming U.S. election,” the letter begins, written as if Turner were holding a flashlight to his chin during a scary campfire story. Ironically, Donald Trump is another voice of sobriety on this issue, proverb of the Iranian-backed hack of his campaign: “They could only get publicly available information…”

The US is sending troops to 74 different countries this week alone. Our military deployment in countries like Germany, Qatar or Japan is the most well-known to people, but they are far from the only ones. As we reported in our new ClipNews Twitter account (follow us) here), the US military has sent troops to the following countries this week alone:

Some countries have permanent U.S. bases, some countries have small facilities, some countries have covert operations, and some are countries where U.S. military troops conduct combat exercises. Some of these countries—Jordan, Saudi Arabia—are determined to cover up the U.S. military presence. You will occasionally see criticism of our globe-trotting military, but only in relation to countries like Iraq or Syria. In reality, it may be easier to talk about the countries we are not deployed to.

Leaked US diplomatic cable reveals tensions between USAID and Israel.

The cable we obtained shows USAID warning the Biden administration that the Israeli military has “dramatically increased the pace of evacuation orders in Gaza,” exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. “The IDF’s evacuation orders have hampered both humanitarian access to populations in need and civilian access to aid, increasing the needs for food, health, protection, shelter, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) among an increasingly vulnerable population after more than ten months of conflict.” The IDF’s evacuation orders have resulted in an 80 percent reduction in water production in one part of Gaza (!), the cable reveals. You can read the entire cable in a Twitter thread posted on ClipNews.

The U.S. military assists the Secret Service on Inauguration Day. The Ministry of Defense announced on Thursday that it would “provide Secret Service assistance to the presidential and vice presidential candidates during the 2024 campaigns through Inauguration Day 2025.” The support comes in response to a request for assistance from the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service’s parent agency. The Secret Service’s expanded mission includes all kinds of work that has nothing to do with protecting current or former presidents, as we have previously reportedThe fact that they need outside help to carry out what the Secret Service itself describes as a “no-fail” mission should raise a lot of questions about whether the agency should be involved in, say, counterfeiting investigations (which should be the job of the FBI or the Treasury Department).

And as for the military “assisting” domestic security during the elections, transition, and inauguration, this speaks to the military’s unspoken concerns about violence and its quiet preparations to prevent a repeat of January 6. We’ll talk more about this later.

Codename of the week: KaChing. While code names are meant to obscure the nature of the secret programs they designate, in practice they often don’t. KaChing is a top-secret CIA intelligence database of currency transaction reports used to find and track terrorists, drug dealers, money launderers, transnational organized crime syndicates, sanctions candidates and busters, and foreign intelligence agencies. Again, the intelligence world is much less Jason Bourne and much more Burn After Reading.

We hear that KaChing is being supplemented or replaced by a new database called Fireship.

Hypeland Security, I mean Homeland Security, warns of “Attack on power plant in anti-Israel action.” That quote comes from the title of a limited intelligence report that the Department of Homeland Security distributed to local police across the country and that we obtained this week. Sounds pretty ominous, right? An attack on a power plant, that must be an oil plant. Imagine that blows up! But what the title doesn’t make clear is that the “power supply” was a single solar panel array and that the “attack” caused minor damage. Effects of the attack are shown in the photo of the solar panel array below:

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