“Is China preparing for war?” CBS’s Scott Pelley asked General Tim Haugh last Sunday on 60 Minutes.
“There was no other reason to target those systems. There’s no advantage to be gained economically. There was no foreign intelligence-collection value,” replied the general. “The only value would be for use in a crisis or a conflict.”
Systems? The segment featured Chinese infiltration into the computer system controlling electricity and the water supply for Littleton, a town of 10,000 residents in Massachusetts.
Littleton’s manager, Nick Lawler, pointed to how disastrous losing control of the computer system could become, noting that with that control an evil force — in this case, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — “can poison the water.”
Literally as well as figuratively.
Once head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, Haugh explained that the CCP is “certainly attempting every single day to be able to target telecommunications, to be able to target critical infrastructure.”
Even in little bitty Littleton. Talk about “unrestricted warfare”!
We have known for years that China’s Communists were tyrants; responsible for arguably a hundred million deaths due to murder, torture and starvation; subjugating Tibet; harvesting organs from political prisoners; placing more than a million Uyghurs in concentration camps; canceling all political rights in Hong Kong. These totalitarians also threaten to invade Taiwan and lay claim, ridiculously, to 90 percent of the South China Sea … which they are policing.
Then we discovered the Chinese had opened police stations in the United States and other countries to harass and silence Chinese dissidents who had managed to escape to our shores.
Now, it is hardly a surprise that the CCP has intruded into our electrical grids and water systems, while buying up farmland near American military bases.
Xi Jinping and the Chicoms are far worse than our rivals. While a far starker problem for those living in Asia, we are not safe from the Chinese State.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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