By John Schindler, former Navy Officer and Naval War College professor
Served as an intelligence analyst at NSA
Many were shocked by Sunday’s horrific self-immolation by a serving U.S. military member in front of the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C. Twenty-five-year-old Aaron Bushnell, a senior airman in the U.S. Air Force, fatally set himself on fire while wearing his military uniform and shouting “Free Palestine.”
His very public suicide garnered the rapturous praise of the Palestinians and their supporters, who declared him a “martyr.”
Others who were less enthusiastic about Bushnell’s sacrifice wondered how this happened.
What was the mental state of the dead young man, who decided to end his life in one of the most terrible ways imaginable? That Bushnell was a serving military member made the optics worse. But the full story is even more shocking.
Bushnell joined the Air Force in May 2020, after growing up on a compound on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, as part of what can be fairly termed a religious cult.
After enlisting in the military, Bushnell was trained in IT and cyber operations and assigned to the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing, headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland (in particular, to one of its subunits, the 531st Intelligence Squadron at San Antonio, Texas).
The 70th Wing is no ordinary unit, rather the Air Force’s component of the super-secret National Security Agency.
Therefore, most if not all 70th Wing personnel must obtain the highest-level security clearance, “top secret/sensitive compartmented information.”
Bushnell held that clearance, boasting about it to his friends. As a result, he had access to many U.S. national security secrets, working as a cyber defense operations specialist at an NSA base in San Antonio.
To obtain TS/SCI, as it’s called in the intelligence business, applicants must undergo an investigation of every aspect of their lives, personal as well as professional. Showstoppers for obtaining TS/SCI include foreign affiliations, criminal activity, mental illness, drug problems, or questionable personal conduct.
This begs a key question.
How did Bushnell, who made little secret of his radical left-wing politics, get and maintain such a high-level security clearance?
It seems that his extremism, including an embrace of antifa and anarchism, set in after he joined the Air Force.
Indeed, Bushnell’s online rants, embracing hate of Israel and extolling the deaths of fellow U.S. military members, were open in their praise for the radical Left.
It seems unlikely that nobody at his squadron in San Antonio was aware of his political views. Neither is this the Air Force’s only security clearance disaster in recent memory.
Last April, Jack Teixeira, a 22-year-old airman assigned to an intelligence unit of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, leaked prodigious amounts of highly classified information online, mainly pertaining to the Ukraine war. Teixeira, too, held TS/SCI and should not have, due to immaturity, possible mental instability, and radicalism — including threats of violence and vaguely far-right views.
After Bushnell, the Air Force’s security clearance problem can’t be brushed off as an isolated failure. Indeed, the Teixeira case appears slightly more understandable since he was assigned to a National Guard unit where, in practice, security standards are somewhat laxer than in the active-duty military.
There’s no excuse for the fact that Bushnell held top-level security clearances for years while professing radical-left and anti-U.S. government views to anyone who would listen, while being assigned to one of the most sensitive units in the Air Force.
In theory, holders of TS/SCI who go rogue are supposed to be reported to higher-ups by their peers for security investigation. That may have happened with Bushnell; we simply don’t know yet.
The bigger problem is that current U.S. government standards for security clearances only exclude violent radicals.
Unless you admit that you’re a member of a terrorist organization or are committed to the overthrow of the federal government, your politics are considered off-limits for vetting purposes.
It’s different for the far Right. If you’re found to be a neo-Nazi or white nationalist, you will have your clearances pulled and you’ll likely be thrown out of the military with celerity — and properly so.
The radical Left gets more lenient treatment from the Pentagon.
You can say you’re an anarchist in uniform, like Bushnell did, and that’s not considered a serious threat to national security.
Since Democrats persist in the fiction that there is no such thing as antifa and continue to practice “no enemies to the Left,” we can hardly blame Bushnell’s peers in uniform for not reporting him to security for his radical views. Why would they think the Air Force would do anything?
Contrary to leftist mythology, the U.S. military doesn’t have an extremism problem, and neither is it exclusively right-wing.
Our military personnel are no more likely to espouse radical views than the broader public, and such radicals come from across the political spectrum.
Let Aaron Bushnell’s tragic and futile suicide stand as a cautionary tale about letting radicalism of any type exist in our military, particularly inside its most sensitive units.
___
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
Re-Remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s Strategy and Tactics To Transform America (Unconstrained Analytics)
Revealed: Antifa Leader Relied On Anonymity To Push Radical, Violent Communist Agenda (Daily Caller) This article is at the end of the above report along with more of his tweets, like this:
Leave a Comment