Today's Must-Read: No Secrets

Between our president and our enemies, at least. Here's a really scary article by Howard Blum at Vanity Fair on Trump blowing the Israelis' cover.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, President Donald Trump, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on May 10th, 2017.

By Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/Getty Images.

On a dark night at the tail end of last winter, just a month after the inauguration of the new American president, an evening when only a sickle moon hung in the Levantine sky, two Israeli Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters flew low across Jordan and then, staying under the radar, veered north toward the twisting ribbon of shadows that was the Euphrates River. On board, waiting with a professional stillness as they headed into the hostile heart of Syria, were Sayeret Matkal commandos, the Jewish state’s elite counterterrorism force, along with members of the technological unit of the Mossad, its foreign-espionage agency. Their target: an ISIS cell that was racing to get a deadly new weapon thought to have been devised by Ibrahim al-Asiri, the Saudi national who was al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker in Yemen.

It was a covert mission whose details were reconstructed for Vanity Fair by two experts on Israeli intelligence operations. It would lead to the unnerving discovery that ISIS terrorists were working on transforming laptop computers into bombs that could pass undetected through airport security. U.S. Homeland Security officials—quickly followed by British authorities—banned passengers traveling from an accusatory list of Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptops and other portable electronic devices larger than a cell phone on arriving planes. It would not be until four tense months later, as foreign airports began to comply with new, stringent American security directives, that the ban would be lifted on an airport-by-airport basis.

In the secretive corridors of the American espionage community, the Israeli mission was praised by knowledgeable officials as a casebook example of a valued ally’s hard-won field intelligence being put to good, arguably even lifesaving, use.

Yet this triumph would be overshadowed by an astonishing conversation in the Oval Office in May, when an intemperate President Trump revealed details about the classified mission to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Along with the tempest of far-reaching geopolitical consequences that raged as a result of the president’s disclosure, fresh blood was spilled in his long-running combative relationship with the nation’s clandestine services. Israel—as well as America’s other allies—would rethink its willingness to share raw intelligence, and pretty much the entire Free World was left shaking its collective head in bewilderment as it wondered, not for the first time, what was going on with Trump and Russia. (In fact, Trump’s disturbing choice to hand over highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians is now a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia, both before and after the election.) In the hand-wringing aftermath, the entire event became, as is so often the case with spy stories, a tale about trust and betrayal.

Since I'm feeling charitable this morning, I'll just note that I don't believe Trump was purposely undermining Israeli (and Western) intelligence efforts in the Middle East (although he's repeatedly shown that he has no love for the intelligence community). It's that he's a show off ("Looky what I got!"), pathologically insecure, completely ignorant of foreign affairs, has no concept of consequences -- that there even are such things -- and fairly stupid.

And he's managed to do incalculable damage to our intelligence efforts.

Read the whole thing. It's appalling.

Via Balloon Juice.

A Point

And one I've been making for a while, even before the Orlando shooting. From Hank Plante, in the Desert Sun:

Every anti-gay politician, every bigoted preacher, every self-hating bully has blood on his hands. Make no mistake about it, the shooting in Orlando which targeted the LGBT community was the end result of decades of anti-gay hate speech and gay bashings.

Every time a politician or community leader has advocated second-class citizenship for gay Americans, it has given permission to the haters to strike out – in this case in a mass slaughter. . . .

The fact is, gays and lesbians are no strangers to violence. My friend David Mixner, a gay rights pioneer, reminded his Sunday readers on the site Towleroad of the 32 gay bar patrons who died in 1973 when someone fire-bombed the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. Mixner is right when he says, “Every one of us knows someone who has been gay bashed.”

So imagine the message that anti-gay hate speech sends to someone who is mentally unstable, let alone such a person who has an assault weapon.

Harte makes a point: they don't even get it. They either don't understand or won't admit that they have created this environment.

You'll notice the number of right-wing figures who have been very quick to point the finger at Islam (when they're not blaming Obama -- and some of them manage both), when it's they themselves who have in some cases devoted their careers to creating the environment in which something like Orlando is not only conceivable, but inevitable. (And a special shout out to Wayne LaPierre of the NRA: you have lots of blood on your hands.)

There's history here.

I mean, come on -- this is a no-brainer: remember Mama Grizzly with her map showing certain congressional districts with targets on them? And Gabby Giffords got shot. But it wasn't Palin's fault, no, not at all.

These people really need to be called out, and our ball-less media isn't going to do it.