6/12/17 Peter van Buren on Reality Winner’s dubious arrest

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All right, you guys, this is Scott Horton Show.
I'm still sick, but I'm sort of back.
And I got our friend Peter Van Buren on the line here.
He used to work in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer all over the place.
He's the author of, well, a few important books.
First of all, We Meant Well, which is sarcastic.
He didn't mean well.
He was a government employee working over there in Iraq.
That's about his story about the Iraq War got him in trouble with the State Department.
He wrote The Ghosts of Tom Joad, a story of the 99 percent, a novel.
And he has a new novel out, and it's more than a novel.
It's a historical fiction kind of a thing, because he's really trying to make a point, though, so it ain't just a novel.
There's a lot of nonfiction buried in there as well.
It's called Hooper's War, a novel of World War II Japan.
And you can find all this stuff at WeMeantWell.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Peter?
A pleasure to be here, Scott.
How are you?
I hope you're feeling better.
I'm doing quite a bit better.
Thank you very much.
And thank you, everybody, who sent me nice tweets and emails, and some people even sent some money in.
Not sure of the connection there, but thank you very much, everybody.
I really appreciate it.
All the kind words and wishes and everything.
Yeah.
Okay.
So reality winner, Hercules Rockefeller, Max Power.
So this is not the real name of a person, but apparently this is not just a media hoax either.
This actual person, whoever she is, actually changed her name to Reality Winner, I guess.
Is that much of the story real?
Do we know?
I don't know.
I think at some point when her social media was still available, she had written about in the past that that really is her name.
Oh, it wasn't even changed to it.
That was what her parents called it.
That's my understanding, because she had written about how she used to get teased, but then she came to accept it.
It was another one of those wonderful stories.
The funny thing about that, if her last name is Winner, okay, but Reality Winner doesn't...
It's not like reality is a perfect synonym for contest or challenge or...
You know what I mean?
Reality Winner.
You don't win reality.
What does that mean?
She's going to be the queen of the universe one day or something?
Parents out there in the audience, potential moms and dads, come on.
Your kids are going to have a hard enough life.
Give them a normal name that's bland.
If they want to come up with something really colorful for whatever purpose, they can go ahead and do that.
Or if it's going to be colorful, at least have it make some sense on the face of it.
But don't have them go through school as Moon Unit Zappa.
It's just not fair.
They've got enough problems out there.
Look where it ended up for Reality Winner.
She just took over the Chelsea Manning suite at Leavenworth.
Oh, man.
So here's the thing.
Well, what is the thing?
This person got a document and leaked it to Matthew Cole of The Intercept.
Is that it?
Tell me a story here, Peter.
I've been sick, man.
It's on you.
What happened?
I'm sick, too.
But you at least have a have a actual bacterial fungus virus thing to blame it on me.
It's all it's all in my head.
OK, so the short version of this is that someone whose name really is Reality Winner, a young woman, she joins the Air Force six years ago.
She supposedly trains as a linguist in Dari, Pashto and Farsi and goes to work for military intelligence, works at the 94th Military Intelligence Unit, which is co-located Fort Meade with the NSA.
If she's working, if she does speak any of those languages, of course, that means she's focused probably on Afghanistan stuff.
And she works there.
She gets hired as she leaves the Air Force.
She gets hired as a contractor.
She goes to work for the NSA at a facility in Augusta, Georgia.
Within the first 90 days of starting work there, she locates a document that purports to show that the Russian Military Intelligence Service, the GRU, tried to spearfish some passwords out of a private company that makes software that's involved in voting registration.
She prints this document out, snail mails it to two guys over at the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald's whistleblowing site.
They publish it and Reality Winner gets caught almost immediately, nearly literally within hours simultaneous of the publishing, and she gets locked up and goes to jail.
I write an article on my blog, WeMentWell.com, calling bullshit on the whole thing.
Okay.
Well, so take us through which parts you don't believe in, in which order.
Yeah.
So you start with, and I don't quite know the conclusion, and I share that with the listeners in hopes that they can add to this, but I mean, you do what you can here.
What I can say is when things don't add up in a normal way, you start asking why not.
You always begin, just like we all know from watching Law & Order SVU on TV, you start with the question of who benefits, who comes out ahead from a particular crime, a caper, an incident, a matter.
That oftentimes points you towards who the guilty parties are, right?
And I take out a big hefty life insurance policy on Scott Horton, and then suddenly you disappear and I'm the last one who saw you.
Gee, who do we start looking into first?
So we begin with who benefits from this.
So Reality Winner leaks this document that pops up into the public consciousness just a day or two before James Comey testifies, supposedly showing another connection between the Russians and our election process.
Who looks good there?
Well, the intelligence community looks pretty good, looks like they're on this, and it makes Trump look bad, and had Comey not come up with enough surprises on his own, it would have been fodder for the committee to work with him on it.
Turns out they didn't really need it, but there you go.
Who looks, who benefits from this?
Well, not the Intercept, because the FBI in the very public unsealed warrants and arrest documentation and court filings makes it very clear that the Intercept's own actions helped them arrest Reality Winner.
They say, quite clearly, in case anyone didn't know it, that the document that the Intercept showed them for verification, parentheses, the Intercept shows their leaked documents to the NSA for verification, close parentheses, was folded, was creased, and that means that it was printed on paper, it wasn't transmitted electronically, and boom, somebody has access to a printer inside an NSA facility, so they already know it's that.
And then it turns out that even though it was available knowledge, it certainly wasn't front-page knowledge, that most color printers put micro-dot encoding on documents, and you can actually trace a document to a specific printer if it's necessary to do that.
And wham-bam, it's a specific printer, there's only six people who printed this document on that printer, one of them is Reality Winner.
So here's the part that makes the least sense to me, because so far I'm agreeing that the things that you're saying make sense, I understand your point of view, I don't think it's necessarily kind of dis-positive, I'm not really sure, she might just be some, you know, self-recruited member of the Resistance here, like in the thing, but we can get back to that in a second, but this is the part...
We're not concluding, no.
I'm sorry?
No, I agree with you, I mean, we're not, I have not made any conclusion here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, yeah, we can get back to all that for a second, but this is the part that really jumps out at me, is the Intercept thing.
I have respect for Matthew Cole, although, you know, somebody said he was the guy that burnt Kiriakou, so I don't know the circumstances of that, I guess I'd have to go back.
Him and another guy credited at the Intercept article, a guy whose last name is Esposito, both of them who, their alleged clumsiness in handling this leaked document helped get Reality Winner busted, both of them were involved in John Kiriakou, who was a CIA whistleblower, getting outed and going to jail.
We can circle back to that, but again, just one of those curiouser and curiouser things that two supposedly progressive journalists are involved in outing two sources, both of whom end up in jail, but I digress.
Yeah, I mean, it raises a couple of questions, right, like either Matthew Cole is some kind of rat, not really a journalist at all, but he actually is working for the government, or what they say about him isn't really true, that he gave them this document this way.
I mean, why should we believe the FBI over the Intercept?
Are they denying that they gave the full document?
Because what journalist would give the actual document, rather than retyping what it says or something?
I mean, that just sounds crazy.
You know, the Intercept has been very, very quiet.
Jeremy Scahill put up a little note after all this broke, saying that blah blah blah we're basically not going to comment on any of this.
And so we don't really know their side.
Both Cole and Esposito have dropped off Twitter.
So the whole Intercept side of this is, there's nothing there.
We don't know what their take on any of this is.
But it almost sounds like that was the op, was to ruin the Intercept.
But then again, well, you know, maybe Cole really did just screw it up that bad.
I mean, I don't really know.
But again, we're not ready to say, here's what happened, aha, you know, back and to the left.
Right.
It's not at that level yet.
But we're, what I'm doing here is raising a lot of questions and saying, who's benefiting from all of these coincidences, mistakes, examples, what have you.
Sounds like the bad guys.
I mean, by the government.
To me that the, if I was going to run, if I was inside the intelligence community and I'm thinking, okay, so I want to run an op and let some patsy get some more information out there that makes it look like Trump and the Russians are working together.
And I want to, might as well burn, you know, somebody I don't like along the way.
I mean, why not throw a little mud on the Intercept?
It may have just been a lucky break.
Maybe they, you know, they, they pick the Intercept clearly is a great place to do this kind of thing because the Intercept has a, has a very good reputation.
They're bull.
They're very belief, well-believed, I guess is the right word.
The idea would be that this is not being published, you know, on the Alex Jones network or, or some obscure blog where people are going to say, oh, that's fake or something like that.
No, the Intercept has, has credibility.
So you piggyback off that and either, you know, you're, you're three steps ahead of them and you figure out a way to burn them as part of the op or, you know, every once in a while you just get lucky and something falls in your lap and it's like, I like the, I like the burn them argument here because, you know, the Intercept doesn't really fit with the resistance or whatever, you know, they are, you know, better at critical thinking than all this bandwagon Russia stuff, for example, that, you know, that Greenwald has been, you know, accused the same way you and I get accused of being, you know, putting the interests of Russia first or whatever, refusing to go along with all the, you know, Russia intervention bandwagon stuff.
So from Reality Winner's point of view here, they don't really seem quite like the fellow travelers that she's identifying with in the story.
Absolutely.
They're perfect because, I mean, Greenwald has been openly skeptical about the amount of Russian interference in the election.
And so the fact that, you know, he's willing to publish a document that purports to show some more interference is great.
He's credible.
Who could be more anti-government than Glenn Greenwald?
You add all this stuff up and the Intercept is the perfect place to do something like this if, in fact, it is an op of some point.
Now, the other thing that can happen is, again, you can just sort of get lucky.
But when you start to look at coincidences and there's one, there's just one too many and they all sort of add up the same way.
Look, the bottom line is, is that typically when someone leaks a highly classified government document, it's the government who looks bad.
In this case, the government doesn't look bad at all.
The government looks good.
Who benefited most from this leak?
Well, it sure looks like the government did.
Right.
And that that's where you start to say, come on, all these things can't be true.
And it actually is even more complex than that.
When you look at the document itself and it's online, you can you can find it.
It's linked through my website.
WeMentWell.com, the piece we're talking about was dated June 6th.
You can search for it.
It's very interesting because we we now we as a as a as a group of consumers are very familiar with NSA documents.
Edward Snowden gave us a very healthy and robust tutorial in what they look like, how they're organized and, you know, that wonderful PowerPoint.
Too much caffeine PowerPoint style that they like.
Right.
Which, by the way, I just have to put this in parentheses here for the audience.
Guys, just put in your favorite brand search engine.
E F F N S A.
And they have a page called Primary Source Documents that has all of the documents and all of the news stories about them categorized for you there.
Every bit of the Snowden leak.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
The thing the thing about the document that Reality Winner leaked.
Is that.
It looks like a big deal, but when you you actually read it critically, it isn't.
It essentially says that.
The Russian military intelligence tried to do a spear phishing attack to get some passwords, spear phishing for the for the few readers who are not familiar, the idea would be that they send out targeted emails trying to get you to click on something so they can harvest your passwords.
Everybody's got one in their spam folder as we speak, trying to get them to hand over a credit card number or Social Security number or password or something like that.
You've seen them before.
And if you're my mom listening, you've you've clicked on every single one of the mom.
Stop it.
So they try to get these passwords.
But what is not in that document.
Is a single reference to a primary source or method, right, and that is in itself somewhat suspicious.
Remember that this is the document that was leaked is supposedly an internal NSA briefing document that is highly classified, meaning that it was written, created for an audience of people who have the proper classification to know a lot more about this.
Then is in that document and typically not always, but typically those documents are going to have references.
They're going to have footnotes.
They're going to direct that sophisticated audience back to other information that they have access to if they want to drill down a little bit.
And particularly in this case, the big question is, well, how did the authors of this document come to the conclusion that it is, in fact, Russian military intelligence who was pulling this spear phishing campaign off instead of three kids in their basement or the Bulgarians or Israeli intelligence or whoever?
So there's no references in there.
The language is very general, but at the same time it says GRU.
In other words, if this was sort of some kind of show off the slide that you use at a very high level, a very broad based briefing, then you probably don't need to say you probably don't say GRU.
You say a foreign actor or even Russian actor.
Oh, I see.
You're specific enough, but then you don't give the background information to typically, like I said, a footnote or a reference or a pointer to another file that this class's cleared audience would be able to then go back and figure out how you came to your conclusions.
Just like in an academic conference, you know, you may not sit there and and work through all the literature you reference, but in your notes, you're going to have those photos.
So I just sort of wonder about this.
The other the other wonder would be in other words, you're saying for them being specific enough to mention the GRU, you would think that they would be specific enough to say, well, because it's aggressive, persistent threat 28 and we've already determined that that's exactly or otherwise they wouldn't even say GRU at all.
They would say, well, you know, it's that thing that we were talking about before.
And because that that level of information wouldn't be included at all, apparently, according to the rest of the document in context.
And so if you're going to I'm trying to build an argument that if you're going to leak something on if you're the government and you're going to leak something on purpose, either to discredit Trump, discredit the intercept or all of the above, you have to make it juicy enough that the public will pick up on it.
You have to make it real enough to fool most of the folks.
But you really don't want to give anything away.
Right.
I mean, you don't want to actually, you know, hand over a secret if you can avoid it in the intelligence business.
This is known as a dangle.
And the idea would be that if you're going to try to create a double agent, I want to send someone to you, Scott, that you are willing to believe is going to work for you.
But he's actually working for me.
I've got to he's got to convince you that he's real and he's got to he's got to give you something.
Right.
He's got to deliver a piece of intelligence to you that is real enough that you're going to believe him and take him as a credible actor.
At the same time, why do I want to give you something for free?
You're my you're my adversary.
And so there's always this problem of in the dangle, making it juicy enough and real enough or actually real without doing harm to yourself.
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And thanks.
Now, so let's speculate then.
I mean, the deal, I guess, would be that her boss, somebody came to her and said, look, here's what's going to happen.
You know, leak this document to the Intercept.
We're going to burn them, make them look like fools.
We're going to get out an extra little story here about Russian intervention in the election.
You're going to have to go to jail for just a little while.
But then it's going to be all right.
Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, or they're just going to throw under the bus barrier in the Manning hole.
Scott, Scott, you disappoint me, my son.
I've tried for over the years to train you to be to think like an intelligence operator.
Yeah, I'm a skater kid, man.
It works best when somebody like Reality Winner thinks she's doing something that she's different than when she's not in on it, because idiots like Reality Winner tend to say things in public and forget what the right answers are.
And they tend to to to to end up blowing these things.
So instead, what you do is one of two, I'm guessing and I must stress for the audience and any potential assassins, I'm simply speculating here.
I'm speculating.
One of two things happens here.
The first is that Reality Winner was just the idiot who took the bait.
In other words, if you're the NSA and you want to.
Sniff out leakers or potential leakers, you are going to put some stuff in the system as bait, you're going to make sure those documents are juicy, you're going to make sure they're accessible and you're going to just kind of put them in there and see if anybody goes looking for them.
And it just by accident, Reality Winner just happened to be the one who did it, and that there's other documents floating through the NS system.
The other is that you recruit Reality Winner without her knowing it.
You go back and you look in the the vetting process because she had to apply for this job and her social media was apparently a, you know, the resistance fan fiction nightmare, you know, of stuff where she's wants to burn down the White House and it's going to be up to people like her to stand up to Trump.
And, you know, she's just a poster child for this.
And instead of saying, oh, my God, we don't want somebody like this working at the NSA.
Are you people kidding me?
No.
You bring her inside.
And one of her new friends at the new job says, hey, you know, I think we're part of the resistance together.
I bet there's some cool documents and you kind of lead her to find it.
If she's too stupid to know how to get in touch with the intercept, you you're her good friend kind of helps her figure out, you know, how to email them twice from her work computer.
That's pretty low OPSEC there.
And she and she becomes a patsy.
She is set up to do this.
She goes to her grave believing that she is a member of the resistance who thought this all up by herself and did the right thing.
Yeah, that's how.
Well, now let me ask you, you worked in the government for a long time.
Did you see the bosses screw employees in just that kind of way, at least once or twice or anything like that?
Would they really do that to you guys?
I worked for the State Department, which for most of my career was a bunch of boring academic people who if they weren't wearing tweed jackets with with, you know, smoking pipes, they figuratively were if they weren't literally doing it.
But the intelligence community, by the nature of their work, is always worried about insider threats.
The CIA was well known and they like to tell they like to tell people that they would embed.
Typos in their in documents and keep track of things, in other words, this is well before the technology that exists today.
But the idea would be that the eyes only document that only Scott, Peter and Nico have copies of.
Well, Nico's copy has a typo on page three, Scott's on page four and Peter's on page five.
Well, if that document appears in The New York Times, it's very easy to figure out which of us leaked it.
And by making sure the staff, you know, knows of these things, you kind of put out a vibe saying we're smarter than you, we're way ahead of you, we're more sophisticated than you, so don't try to mess with us.
Every time somebody like Reality Winner goes to jail, a bunch of other folks inside the NSA who are considering leaking change their mind.
And this is one of the reasons why the government prosecutes leakers, whistleblowers and these things so aggressively is that it everyone they catch is an example to a bunch of others who say, you know, man, I'm just not going to do it.
I was thinking of doing it.
But if you can't trust the intercept or if, hey, I didn't know they were keeping track of everything like this, it's a wonderful way to stop a bunch of leaks that you never even knew were going to occur.
So I suspect Reality Winner is not a super secret agent.
I suspect she's a dumb person who stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time or was set up to fall.
And sorry for her, but that's what happened.
One one small note here, the one of the accusations that they put out and they had some things about her saying, you know, she will burn the White House down or, you know, which I don't take that seriously at all.
Probably 10 percent of America said those words out loud in some context or another.
You know them here on the show a few times.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this is a daily occurrence in my house.
But then where they say, oh, and then she declared some kind of loyalty or some some friendly feeling toward Osama bin Laden or something like that.
I just knew that that was an absolute lie that whatever it was that she'd written that ever included that, I'm certain it didn't say that, you know, and then the wife actually mentioned to me that they backed off that one and they admitted that that one actually wasn't true.
But they still say that she said that if there was war with Iran, she would fight on Iran's side or who knows.
I mean, but but it just occurs to me that, you know, whenever you hear the government accuse, you know, it's not just that she's white, but it's just that she's not in, you know, a first generation or a second generation Muslim immigrant to this country and trying to say she's got some loyalty to Osama bin Laden, something like that.
It just sounds like, oh, yeah.
And and she had a book with a swastika on her shelf, too, except that it was the rise and the fall of the Third Reich.
You know, it wasn't whatever.
Anyway, it just sounds like a typical government smear to me.
So I like being resistant to stuff like that, even when it's somebody who I'm not necessarily on their side.
I would hate to think that if I ever got arrested, that it would be some legitimate accusation against me, the books on my shelf, because I got communists and I got Nazis.
I got Mao Zedong, the very worst person who ever lived is on my shelf.
So if that makes me a Maoist or a traitor to America, then I guess haul me away.
Yeah, I got it.
In fact, I'm putting out a book which you have endorsed, which explains Osama's point of view for 200 pages.
Wait, wait, I didn't read that part.
Could I could I. OK, well, it's like 50 pages.
Yeah.
And by the way, when you whenever you're done, I really would like my copy of Mao's thoughts back.
I mean, I don't know when I loan that to you.
But look, you know, that's part of how disinformation works right now in America.
We have.
We can't seem to we we collectively can't seem to make up our mind about.
Whistleblowers versus leakers, versus intelligence spy guys, and so the government is never really sure how one of these things is going to play out.
You know, they tried very, very, very hard with to paint Edward Snowden as a Russian spy, and it never stuck.
He remains in the minds of a lot of Americans as as a patriot, as a whistleblower, as someone who who displayed extraordinary courage.
With this case, reality winner, I think the stuff about Osama bin Laden was there kind of just as insurance.
You know, if the media was going to break in her favor in some for some reason, like, oh, my gosh, here's another brave American trying to tell us what's going on.
They had that kind of in as backup.
It's like, well, no, no, no, she's not.
Look, she's she's loves Osama bin Laden, things like that.
The fact that that's not what happened in the media, for whatever reason, it doesn't surprise me that that those accusations disappeared fairly quickly because it turns out they weren't really needed.
No one is no one outside of a very small fringe group seems to be sort of saying reality winner is a freedom fighter and it should be revered.
It's kind of what happened with and it's very interesting.
We're getting a little off subject.
So pull me back if necessary.
But I'm watching what's going on right now with the rebranding of Chelsea Manning by the mainstream media.
When, you know, when Manning.
First, but by the progressive media, I'm sorry, I apologize.
When Manning first came out with with the documentation and was partnered there with WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks and Manning were presented by the progressive media as as freedom fighters.
They were whistleblowers.
They were people who were telling us what our government was doing behind our backs.
And they took great risks to do that.
Julian Assange on magazine covers.
Yet when WikiLeaks suddenly became Putin's cockholster and started saying bad things about Hillary Clinton and leaking her material, that all got rebranded.
And Julian Assange became another tool of the Russians.
Well, here you have Chelsea Manning, who has been rebranded as about 90 percent.
And I'm not saying any of this in a negative way.
And I have supported Chelsea from the very beginning.
I was publicly supporting Bradley Manning from the very first days.
But the point is, is that the progressive media has now rebranded her about 90 percent transgender activist and about 10 percent whistleblower because that WikiLeaks thing has now become kind of uncomfortable.
And the way that.
And because who wants to ask a bunch of questions about the Iraq and Afghan war logs when that's all old news now?
Yeah, I mean, that's old news and it's boring.
But the idea would be that we have to if you're going to run an op to discredit the Intercept, if you're going to run an op to get some more rushes behind the election stuff out there, you want to be careful that the villains, the good guys and the bad guys are exactly who you want them to be.
And so it makes sense to have some backup propaganda ready to dump all over reality winner if necessary.
You throw it out there and nobody's taken the bait.
So you just let it die on the vine and you don't push the idea that she loved Osama bin Laden or what have you.
If you saw I'm more than willing to predict that if the progressive media had picked this up in a different way and started calling her a whistleblower and demanding that she be treated not as a criminal in an aggressive manner, I think you'd see more of that negative propaganda come out against her.
Right.
Yeah, that's probably true.
And then I don't know how they're going to spin.
I saw the quote.
I have to admit, I saw the quote where supposedly, according to the government's claims that she had told her sister, well, I'm just going to play the cute little blonde white girl card and get out of this.
And I thought, you know, either that's going to work or it's not.
I'm not really sure it might backfire.
And then again, it might actually work.
I don't know.
She doesn't even have to change gender.
She's already a cute little white girl.
Some of these things are just so ridiculous that I don't think anybody could make some some of these things up.
I like I said, you know, if you're looking for a Patsy, it's somebody said her name can't be.
You can imagine a bunch of guys sitting around, you know, CIA headquarters and saying, OK, we're going to need a Patsy.
How about this one?
Yeah, it's reality winner.
No, come on.
OK, that's it.
Meeting over.
Let's do lunch.
Yeah.
Decided.
Come on.
It's late.
We're all tired.
You know, let's stick.
No, no.
Her name is Reality Winner.
Some of it just kind of falls into your lap, I guess.
I don't know for itself.
All right.
Hey, listen, I got to go, man, because Eric Marley's is wondering where the hell am I?
I'm late.
All right.
Well, I wish you the best.
I hope you feel better.
And let's keep an eye on this story, though.
I'm predicting here and now that it is going to just disappear.
And we're not going to hear a whole lot more about it.
But if we do, we'll talk more.
We will.
Well, thank you very much for coming on the show and writing about this to take it easy.
Good stuff.
All right, that is the great Peter Van Buren.
His website is we meant well, we meant well.
It's sarcastic.
Hooper's War.
That's the book, a novel of World War Two, Japan.
Please read it.
Please spend money on it and then read it.
We meant well, dot com.
I'm Scott Horton and I got to go because there are Marley's is wondering why I'm so dang late.
Thanks, you guys.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
Are you a libertarian and or peacenik live in North America?
If you want, you can hire me to come and give a speech to your group.
I'm good on the terror war and intervention, civil liberty stuff, blaming Woodrow Wilson for everything bad in the world.
Iran, central banking, political realignment and well, you know, everything.
I can teach markets to liberals and peace to the right.
Just watch me.
Check out Scott Horton, dot org slash speeches for some examples and email me Scott at Scott Horton, dot org for more information.
See you there.