Border Tensions vs Information War
Could a false flag escalate U.S.-Mexico conflict? It's hard to see through the fog.
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I got a call late on Friday, Feb. 14, from a trusted source telling me about a crazy memo being circulated in the U.S. Border Patrol. The source read out part of the message verbatim: “Effective immediately until further notice, agents will cease the use of body-worn cameras. Border Patrol has been made aware of a potential safety risk concerning body-worn cameras relating to improvised explosive devices.”
There is obviously a lot to wrap your head around with this message; like is there a Mossad-style op on the Rio Grande? Or is it a ruse to stop recording what agents are doing in the desert? But I thought the source was solid and Border Patrol ditching cameras was news enough so I published the message on Twitter (officially now X, or known as the “Hellsite.”)
My tweet set off some fiery reactions, but other journalists went on to confirm the Border Patrol had indeed suspended camera use, including Ali Bradley of News Nation. I’ll get more into what we discovered about the threat below. But as this was unfolding another border story blew up.
The Mexican Senate had approved on Feb. 11 that ten U.S. soldiers come to train Mexican troops (the U.S. military has actually been training Mexican forces for decades). Back on Twitter, a “media personality” called Nick Sortor, with 800,000 followers, distorted the news to claim in a Feb. 17 tweet that: “The Mexican Senate has just APPROVED the entry of U.S. Special Forces to take on the cartels.”
You can see there is a colossal difference between Green Berets running training and Green Berets running round Mexico shooting up gangsters. But then Elon Musk, the owner of X and world’s richest man, retweeted the claim, and it was seen by over 10 million people (although it eventually got what is called a community note, correcting it, and the next day Sortor would delete it). I have mixed feelings on Elon’s record overall, but in this case, he was definitely spreading bad info.
These reports come amid a flurry of explosive and often contested stories about the U.S.-Mexico-cartel situation that have been bombarding the electronic airwaves since Trump took power on Jan. 20 and transformed policy on The Border (with real impacts on the flow of migrants and drugs). There are also claims of U.S. spy planes and CIA drones invading Mexican airspace, cartels green-lighting attacks on U.S. agents with their own weaponized drones, Ukraine selling guns to cartels, and a proposal to allow U.S. mercenaries to go into Mexico and hunt narcos.
I’ll go through the veracity of some of these. But together, the storm of stories makes me ask two questions. The first, is how do we navigate this new information space? The second is whether bad info, or a false flag event, could seriously escalate conflict between the United States and Mexico?
False Flags and Clusterfucks
On…
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