TOC Ready Room 23 Oct 2021: A ‘domestic terrorism’ retraction, and an emerging plan in Burma

Tonight: a walk-back from the school board association on its claim of “terror” threats from concerned parents; and a military campaign being prepared in Myanmar/Burma.

Parents as “domestic terrorists”; or, Not So Much.  Possibly the most striking thing about this is that it was only yesterday (Thursday, 21 October) that I was in a rather extended exchange on Twitter on this topic.  (This Ready Room edition is actually going up on 23 October, but was started Friday evening.)

I was looking for details about the “threats” allegedly being made by parents to school board members across America, which the media assure us prompted the Department of Justice to issue the 4 October memo vowing DOJ attention to this growing problem of violence and domestic terrorism.

TOC Ready Room 19 Oct 2021; *UPDATE*

[Updates added at the bottom. – JED]

Greetings, readers.  This is the inaugural edition of the TOC Ready Room, which will be an open thread and drop-by briefing space in the spirit of the ready rooms used by military aviators.

My experience being with U.S. Navy ready rooms, the feature image is of a ready room on the carrier USS Constellation (CV64) used by a squadron from Carrier Air Wing 2.  The image is tagged as being from March 2003, when Constellation was on her final operational deployment supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.  (The CVW-2 patch is visible on one of the flight jackets, incidentally.)  Constellation was decommissioned only a few months later, in August 2003.

On a carrier, the ready room is used for planning and squadron briefings, but also serves as a gathering space subject to availability.  It’s the center of squadron life during underway periods and deployment.

The Ready Room posts will be added at least once a week,

Durham’s ‘Clues’: Pentagon contractors, CrowdStrike, Georgia, and the IP addresses

Paul Sperry had an article at Real Clear Investigations on 7 October in which he reported that John Durham’s investigation of the federal government’s handling of “Russiagate” is focusing on Pentagon contractors.  Like the “speaking indictment” of Michael Sussmann, this framing of where Durham’s headed functions to shift perceptions somewhat, shedding new light on old information.

Like so much of the “new light,” the investigative pathways prompted by what has recently come out cause us to look further back and see the fresh likelihood of connections between the familiar events of Spygate/Russiagate and earlier events.

This treatment will not be at all comprehensive.  It’s a collection of such potential links, assembled in the last few weeks and presented in complete sentences as a marker, rather than as a finished analysis or theory.  Basically, these are research notes.  I want to get them out there as a service.

Rather than attempting to weave them as a story, I’m trusting readers to know the basic outline and recognize why dates and events are significant.  There has been prior work on all of the points here:  nothing is entirely new, as I think dedicated followers of the problem set are aware.  Hyperlinks will take you to more extended discussions and analyses.

Here is the grab-bag of interesting points, in no particular order.

USS Connecticut: Close encounter in the South China Sea

Media reported a U.S. Navy statement Thursday that USS Connecticut (SSN-22), a nuclear-powered attack submarine, had suffered an underwater collision on 2 October 2021 while operating in the South China Sea, and was headed to Guam for inspection.  No sailors were killed in the collision; 11 were injured, but the Navy hasn’t indicated the injuries are life-threatening.

The statement, quoted at the U.S. Naval Institute website, is as follows:

“The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN-22) struck an object while submerged on the afternoon of Oct. 2, while operating in international waters in the Indo-Pacific region. The safety of the crew remains the Navy’s top priority. There are no life-threatening injuries,” Capt. Bill Clinton told USNI News.

“The submarine remains in a safe and stable condition. USS Connecticut’s nuclear propulsion plant and spaces were not affected and remain fully operational. The extent of damage to the remainder of the submarine is being assessed. The U.S. Navy has not requested assistance. The incident will be investigated.”

Subsequent reports in the mainstream media have indicated Connecticut was in the South China Sea.

The Sussmann indictment and the Alfa Bank saga: A focused timeline

At Just the News, John Solomon reported a few days ago that according to the Justice Department’s IG, the FBI is still ignoring its own procedures in handling FISA surveillance applications.

Some of Solomon’s opening points:

“The FBI’s Woods Procedures are designed to ensure FISA applications are ‘scrupulously accurate’ and require agents to document support for all factual assertions contained in them,” Horowitz reported. “However, our audit found numerous instances where this did not occur.” 

Horowitz first flagged 29 applications in March 2020 that had problems including 209 errors. 

Twenty-nine applications in one month is not a small or inconsequential number of applications.  Keep in mind, this was still in Donald Trump’s presidency.  What readers think they may have done to clean out the Augean stable of D.C. bureaucracy, even Trump was not able to achieve, more than three years into his term.  It’s always useful to remember how much of the D.C. “establishment” was pulling against him the entire time he was in office.  FBI officials who ignored or gun-decked the Woods Procedures, as a slew of them did in 2016 under Obama, were likely to be prominent among them.

This timely observation from Solomon is by way of introducing a focused timeline that I hope will illuminate how very widespread and entrenched the scope of what John Durham has been investigating will turn out to be.