I Might As Well.

OK, I might as well put my 2 pennies in on the issue of today Assange's arrest in UK. It was expected and Assange is not the first, nor the last whistle-blower who got screwed by government agencies for providing crucial disclosures on government operations. I already had a word on him a while ago, I will reiterate:

He is a very bright fellow, you know, in iPhone-7, or whatever is hip currently, way. Book smart? Probably, again in a Idiot's Guide to C++ or Java kinda way. And, of course, Julian Assange never completed his programming degree but still managed to obtain a global notoriety through his Wikileaks service and his public activity, which, in the end, brought him to the position he is in right now--that is being a prisoner in Ecuador's Embassy in London. Evidently this, somehow, qualified him in the eyes of many to pass judgements on some key geostrategic and political issues.

For a person who decides to provide classified information, even if it discloses evil intentions of government, for a general public one has to be slightly more than just celebrity to handle own noble intentions. Assange is primarily a celebrity and not a very bright one, I may add.  For people even remotely acquainted with history and military and intelligence operations, however, WikiLeaks information was and is not something which could have been defined as eye-opening. In fact, it was a "nothing new" affair. In other words it was known to anyone with a half-brain. For "lefty" products of Western hamster universe of office plankton, however, Assange is a "hero". He may well be the one, after all, but I personally still have to face the fact that classified information is called classified for a reason, and while US government and political establishment, in many of their manifestations, are evil, nobody, in any government, ever condoned leaking of classified data, and for the purpose of preventing such leaks any serious nation has a well-developed network of counter-intelligence services who operate on a legal foundation of, putting it in layman's lingo, "you leak, you get locked". Russia, US, Germany, China, India and Lesotho (well, I am not 100% positive about Lesotho)--all operate on this principle. I know, I held a very high level of clearance and I knew what may happen and did happen when those rules were violated.

Edward Snowden, obviously, was aware of this paradigm and, as an actual holder of high level clearance in CIA and intelligence professional he knew what he was getting into, and now look at him--he is obviously doing better, way better, than Assange, while living in Moscow and being secured from extradition to the USA. So, what's the lesson of Assange's saga? Very simple--be professional in what you are doing, especially when crossing the red line of the law. People like Assange are not exactly professionals--they are celebrities by definition and have views of the outside world that of celebrities or, being frank, very close to those of modern office plankton defined by ignorance of true complexities of modern world and forces at play in the world of espionage and classified information. So, while I am sympathetic to Assange's plight and see the value in his activity, Assange, for me at least, will remain one of those examples of how not to do what he was doing. This is if to assume that no higher level game was played in which Assange was merely a pawn. But this is yet to be learned, if ever. So, let's wish Assange luck in getting, possibly, but probably not, Presidential pardon--after all, he and WikiLeaks did help Trump get elected.   

UPDATE: No comments are required here, everything speaks for itself--crying out loud shame, but expected nonetheless:

US President Donald Trump, who said he loved WikiLeaks during his election campaign, tried to distance himself from the arrest of Julian Assange, which was carried out by Britain on the request of the US.Speaking to journalists in the Oval Office on Thursday, hours after the arrest of Assange in London, Trump said:

I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing. 

UPDATE 2 from 04/12/19: Russian language is needed. But here is Alexandr Asafov speaking to Pravda on Assange and speaking about what I spoke here in this post. Practically the same. He also thinks, in softer terms, that Assange made a mistake. 
 
Why Assange decided not to go to Russia? I have an opinion but it changes absolutely nothing at this stage. 

Susan Rice--A National Security Adviser. Adviser?

This is really becoming redundant by now, but I couldn't miss Susan Rice's Weekend interview to another hack, Fareed Zakaria.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/05/14/exp-gps-rice-diversity-national-security.cnn

Watch this interview and enjoy Rice's outlandish claims such as a pearl about "almost whole Russian Air Force" deployed to Syria. People, this is really dangerous--we are talking about people whose incompetence is so into our faces, is so manifest, is so militant that one has to ask where those people came from? I have an answer--from Ivy League degree mill in all kind of humanities BS, including so called "history" which in the West, with some important but not very numerous exceptions, is long ago reduced to propaganda narratives reminiscent of Orwell's 1984.  

I understand that neither Rice nor, especially, an overt hack Zakaria have any idea about real (emphasis on real) defense issues but the former is still, for crying out loud, a National Security Adviser, while the latter still commands a significant attention of all kinds of people. I recall reading Zakaria's glowing opinions on US public education system--no person in his own mind would propagate such an open BS but there it was. The worst, however, in all this situation is that it is the White House and Obama's Administration which lacks completely any situational awareness and that is what  really scary. I understand that Rice is, probably, very good with issues of "diversity" and, most likely, can write a Ph.D. thesis on the net impact of LGBT bathrooms on the "diversity" and "cultural sensitivity" of diplomatic corps, but it was always a good idea to learn the subject before expressing any opinions on it--the risk of looking and sounding like an idiot decreases exponentially. This, however, is not the path US political "elites" take. They consider themselves above and beyond the sound and well established criteria which for centuries defined competent professionals. Now, you can imagine what kind of "advice" Obama is getting from his National Security Adviser. 

In conclusion. Russian Air Forces operates more than 3,000 aircraft, large portion of which are advanced state-of-the-art fixed and rotary wing aircraft. Being a part of Russian Air Space Forces, this massive force is fully integrated with arguably best air defense in the world and with massive advanced C4ISR complex. But how could National Security Adviser to US President possibly know that. Today, US "academe" and the lucrative so called think-tankdom (aka "expert" community) stands as a living proof of a total failure of humanities "educated" corps to really comprehend what any military is about and how it fights. Things will NOT get any better. Combination of incompetence, confusion, self-deception, Russophrenia and, very often, plain simple jealousy and inferiority complexes--that is what guiding this whole, using Ben Rhodes' lingo, blob.

10 years ago, Professor Roger Thompson in his brutally honest and extremely professionally written book wrote about the Clancyesque view of the war (and military):

Term unprofessional is what defines today this blob--from the very top to the very bottom. Susan Rice is a living proof of that. I guess reading Tom Clancy (as Reagan did before meeting Gorbachov) is in order. Late Tom, sure as hell, made many people in Soviet and Russian military laugh.  But then again, in all honesty, Russians should shut up, they themselves, by Putin's order, endured an imbecile with furniture superstore experience in the position of Defense Minister for several years;-) I guess Pentagon and CIA had their revenge laughing their asses off looking at the tax specialist trying to figure out the difference between tactics and strategy.  Let's call it even;-)))