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Isn't a much better question to ask if the Trump administration sabotaged the process on their own by authorizing a mission that killed three civilians and then mutilated their bodies so that they wouldn't be discovered? A mission that, judging by nothing serious happening due to its failure, clearly wasn't that important in the first place? Because I'm much, much more inclined to blame military/security state overreach than I am the people reporting on it. Nobody had to authorize this mission. Nobody had to give them rules of engagement that apparently left no room for even a moment to determine whether the people they spotted were security personnel or fishermen. If peace was really such an important goal (which to be clear, I don't think it is, either for this or the previous Trump administration), why do something so stupidly provocative in the first place?
This is a bizarre claim. The goal of the 2019 talks was to come to some agreement with North Korea, and no such agreement was reached. What more profound failure could possibly have resulted from lacking intelligence? Are you seriously contending that being able to listen in on Kim Jung Un's discussions wouldn't have been an advantage at the negotiating table? That's no minor thing. I'm not confident that that information would have led to success, but you haven't done much to justify your confidence it wouldn't have.
The US planting listening devices in proximity with world leaders is a subject with a storied history, by the way. It rarely results in deaths, but I suspect mainly because most nations are sufficiently foolish as to trust US-made infrastructure the NSA can trivially compromise.
(North Korea has gone so far as to develop its own national operating system for this reason, among others.)
It came out in the Snowden leaks that they'd casually tapped the phones of 35 foreign leaders, and that was just the program he knew about. And these were people we had a lot more to lose by offending. This program persisted through both Bush's term and Obama's; I find it hard to believe either would have failed to approve this operation, provided there actually was a meaningful possibility of success. Both certainly did approve operations that killed more foreign nationals for much less potential upside.
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Yeah I'm not sure why the takeaway should be "don't report on our military fuckups" instead of "don't do military fuckups". Even if it got leaked on purpose now, so what? The press's job is to inform the public. It never would have been possible to leak to begin with if they didn't fail so badly in a mission that clearly wasn't very critical.
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