Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0
Massachuset’s Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira and Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegsmeth have little in common. Teixeira is serving a 15-year sentence for leaking Pentagon documents on an unclassified web site called 4chan and on Twitter and Telegram. He then posted printouts of the documents at his parent’s home as well as on an instant messaging platform “Discord.” The leaked documents were primarily related to the Russo-Ukrainian War, containing operational briefs from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. The operational details would have been extremely valuable to Russian forces for they identified Ukrainian difficulties in countering Russian flanking maneuvers.
Secretary of Defense Hegseth is a former Army National Guard officer who has academic degrees from Princeton University and Harvard University. (Teixeira is a high school graduate.) Hegseth was confirmed by the Senate as the 29th secretary of defense in U.S. history, requiring a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance. It was only the second time in our history that a Cabinet nominee’s confirmation was decided by a vice president’s vote. He is the second-youngest person to serve as secretary of defense, after Donald Rumsfeld, who was the youngest in serving President Gerald Ford and the oldest in serving President George W. Bush. Like Teixeira, however, Hegseth released operational details from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff that identified details of an imminent U.S. military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen. Unlike Teixeira’s information, Hegseth’s operational intelligence could have endangered the lives of naval airmen and compromised the top secret mission.
There is a major difference between the two men regarding outcomes. Unlike Teixeira, Hegseth has faced no punishment for his failure to comply with Department of Defense policies and procedures and to place the lives of U.S. servicemen at risk. The Pentagon’s independent watchdog has agreed to a request from the Senate Armed Services Committee to launch a probe into Hegseth’s actions. The review will determine whether Hegseth was in compliance with classification and records retention requirements. Hegseth has lied, arguing falsely that no classified military plans has been discussed.
There are several aspects of this illegal activity that finds the two men have something in common. First of all, Teixeira and Hegseth were engaging in performative actions that compromised national security interests of the United States. Second, the two men were essentially boasting about their knowledge of extremely sensitive intelligence to what can be fairly described as their peers. Teixeira’s peers were very young men in their teens and early twenties who seemed to have had no interest in the sensitive information that Teixeira provided, but were awed by Teixeira’s knowledge and access to unusual information available to very few people in the U.S. government.
Hegseth’s peers were high-level members of the Trump national security team who had no need for Hegseth’s information at that time because the decision to attack the Houthis had already been made, which is exactly what deputy chief of staff Steven Miller told the chat group in order to cut off any debate regarding the decision. In other words, both men—the teenaged airman and the secretary of defense—were boasting about their knowledge of sensitive information for their own self-aggrandizing reasons.
As a result, the young, low-level braggart is in jail for the next 14 years, but the big-time braggart will go completely free; he’s “too big to jail.” The same could be said for National Security Adviser Mike Waltz who set up the illegal chat room where Hegseth’s military plans were revealed. Waltz is a particularly pathetic case because he was responsible for placing a liberal journalist in the controversial chat room. More recently, Waltz’s lack of stature in the Trump administration was manifested when he couldn’t prevent the firing of six senior staffers from his NSC because of the rantings of a crazed conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer. Loomer is well known for calling 9/11 an “inside job.”
Hegseth’s escapade fits a larger pattern that finds high-level officials escaping punishment, while lower level officials end up in jail. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton received no punishment for her wanton disregard of U.S. laws and national security in using her personal cell phone for storing sensitive materials. CIA director David Petreaus, a retired four-star general, provided sensitive intelligence to his biographer, who was also his mistress, but received a modest fine that was covered by a few of his speaking fees. Former national security adviser Sandy Berger stuffed his pants with classified documents from the National Archives, but received a modest fine.
And former CIA director John Deutch placed the most sensitive CIA operational materials on his home computer, which was used to access pornographic sites. Deutch was assessed a fine of $5,000, but received a pardon from President Bill Clinton before prosecutors could file the papers in federal court. Former attorney general Alberto Gonzales kept sensitive documents about the NSA’s surveillance program at his home, but received no punishment.
Conversely, the “Jack Teixeira’s” of the world get hammered. John Kiriakou, a CIA operative, received a thirty-month jail sentence in 2014 for giving two journalists the name of a CIA operative, although the name never appeared in the media. Kiriakou was punished because he was the first CIA officer to reveal the torture and abuse program. Meanwhile, the authors of the torture memoranda at the Department of Justice—John Yoo and Jay Bybee—received no punishment or even censure. Moreover, Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s law school in Berkeley, and Bybee is a senior judge of the Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit.
A CIA colleague from the 1970s, Frank Snepp, wrote an important book on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam that used no classified information, but had to forfeit considerable royalties because the book wasn’t submitted for the agency’s security review. Meanwhile, former CIA directors Leon Panetta and George Tenet received special treatment from the CIA for their memoirs. (My CIA memoir contained no classified information and took nearly a year to be cleared, requiring the intervention of the ACLU to get the manuscript released. The ACLU took the case all the way to the Supreme Court before it was predictably dismissed on national security grounds.)
The CIA’s review system is in fact a censorship system that can’t be squared with the Constitution. At the same time, in the case of Secretary of Defense Hegseth, we find the government doing nothing to protecting bona fide national security secrets.
The post The Insecurities of Airman Teixeira and Secretary of Defense Hegseth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.