Secret military documents reportedly included in the mass Discord leak posted by Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira reveal critical weaknesses in Taiwan’s air defenses.
The classified Pentagon assessments of the island nation’s military readiness state that Taiwan officials themselves question their ability to “accurately detect missile launches” from China, the Washington Post reported Saturday.
US analysts found that only half of Taiwan’s aircraft would be “fully mission capable” in the event of a Chinese attack — and suggested that Beijing could successfully control Taiwan’s airspace if it chose to invade.
Last week, three days of Chinese “combat readiness patrols” signaled a warning to independent Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory.
Teixeira, 21, a low-level Air National Guard information technology specialist, is accused of posting hundreds of classified documents related to the Ukraine war and other sensitive military topics to a Discord channel with 20 to 30 members.
The social media site, popular among video-game players such as Teixeira, is cooperating with the investigation, Discord chief legal officer Clint Smith said Friday.
“This recent incident fundamentally represents a misuse of our platform and a violation of our platform rules,” Smith said.
Heavily armed federal agents arrested Teixeira at his mother’s home in North Dighton, Mass. on Thursday.
Meanwhile, one of former President Trump’s top national security aides said Saturday that Teixeira could not have acted alone — but is merely the patsy in a much wider intelligence breach.
“It’s just not possible” for Teixeira to have had access to such a highly sensitive trove, Kash Patel, Trump’s former deputy director of national intelligence, told Breitbart News.
“You can be the biggest IT person in [the Department of Defense], and you are still compartmented off of the actual information,” Patel explained.
Patel said he does not believe “for a single second” that “this guy — a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman — ran his operation alone.”
The spilling of some of the country’s most sensitive intelligence revealed that the US was secretly keeping tabs on allies like South Korea and Israel, and contained information about Russian troop strength and Ukraine’s military planning.
But Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a diplomatic mission to Vietnam, said Saturday that the embarrassing leaks have not hampered cooperation between the US and its global allies and partners.
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