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Oh, the CIA, you say? Yeah, let's believe what the CIA says. They can definitely be trusted at their word and they never have done anything questionable. /s
by macinjosh 6y ago
Oh, the CIA, you say? Yeah, let's believe what the CIA says. They can definitely be trusted at their word and they never have done anything questionable. /s
- alchemism 6y agoI gave a cigarette to the kid from CrowdStrike outside an airport on the way to a Con. He worked directly on the breached computers at the DNC. I would not consider him CIA material, let's say. :)
- jessaustin 6y agoWas he FBI material? Private investigator material? Don't be coy about his level!
- pm90 6y agoThe CIA cannot lie to US legislators without committing a federal crime. They can choose not to disclose information to the public and “neither confirm nor deny” but they can’t knowingly tell a lie.
- jaywalk 6y agoThey can and they have. Let's not pretend we live in fantasy land.
- ardy42 6y ago>> The CIA cannot lie to US legislators without committing a federal crime. They can choose not to disclose information to the public and “neither confirm nor deny” but they can’t knowingly tell a lie. > They can and they have. Let's not pretend we live in fantasy land. He didn't say they're incapable of lying to Congress, just that it's illegal for them to lie Congress. By the GP's statement, if they lied then they also broke the law.
- cies 6y agoSo we just need to find one case they did to falsify this claim. And to do so we need whistle blowers. There are serious problems with intelligence agencies in democracies.
- 34679 6y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-director-john-brennan-lied-senate https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di... Not this claim, but a recent example of the CIA lying to Congress with impunity.
- jessaustin 6y agoWhistleblowers not actually required: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylBrECV7Wc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylBrECV7Wc
- primroot 6y agoThey can "not understand the question." https://apnews.com/33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad https://apnews.com/33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 6y agoWhat about the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? > "The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions," Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the panel, said. https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-report-affirms-u-s-intelligence-findings-on-2016-russian-interference-11587483408 https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-report-affirms-u-s-intel...
- jaywalk 6y agoWhat about them? Of course they're going to back their spooks.
- ModernMech 6y agoSo we are not supposed to trust our our national intelligence agencies, or the FBI, or the House, or the Senate after the latter three have published extensive and thorough reports laying out the evidence. Whose word exactly are we supposed to take on this? Donald Trump's? Because he seems to be the only other party in the government on the other side of this issue. Where's his report?
- z3ncyberpunk 6y agoNot one of those organizations has a history or reputation of honesty or credibility sooooo no.
- jessaustin 6y agoHave you read any of these "reports"? They contain no "evidence" that could be presented in a court. Did you see Mueller's disastrous Congressional testimony in support of his report? It was clear that he hadn't read it either. Trump lies like he breathes, but that doesn't mean we have to believe obvious fantasy that obviously supports the continued stupid wars of the military-industrial complex. In general, the most likely possibility is that both the president and the TLAs are lying.
- 6y ago
- cies 6y agoThey (CIA, NSA, US deep state in general) are in the business of lying. The WMDs that Saddam had? The Gulf of Tonkin incident? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
- komali2 6y ago> US deep state I agree with you but I think using terms like this can hurt credibility.
- cies 6y agoThey keep making up more of these three letter institutes (CIA, NSA, DoD, ...), I cannot keep up. I mean those that have unaccounted budgets.
- komali2 6y agoThey do? You just listed most of them lol. As I understand it the DoD is just the department these agencies fall under (unless it's the DHS). The actual agencies you've just about covered, surely? CIA, NSA, ICE being the most problematic, then FBI and, what else? I mean yea they suck but I don't think it's necessarily a hydra.
- imphatic 6y agoRight and Assange went on TV and lied about Wikileaks publishing credit cards, which they had done. So....
- akhilcacharya 6y ago> Yeah, let's believe what the CIA says. Unironically yes, because the alternative wants Americans dead by putting bounties on American servicemembers' scalps.
- macinjosh 6y agoSorry to break it to you but the real world isn't this binary. Also recent reports indicate that their is no evidence to support that story: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-commander-intel-still-hasn-t-established-russia-paid-n1240020 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-comma...
- jessaustin 6y agoStill, the story was pitched perfectly to the essential self-centeredness of Americans. You mean, in the nation we invaded decades ago and have bombed mercilessly ever since, murdering and orphaning hundreds of thousands of innocents, there are some people who oppose us to the extent that they'll shoot back, without being paid to do so? They must hate us for our freedom!
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI hope that if nothing else happens after Trump is out of office, that we all at least collectively regain our distrust of US intelligence agencies again.
- jessaustin 6y agoYour optimism is misplaced. They may not be smart, but they have a low cunning. They have learned from this episode, and they will make sure there is always a Trump figure in place (not necessarily at the presidential level, but that might work best) to distract the more credulous 80% of the public. Obama at least pretended that there could be public oversight of the unsupervised services. They haven't suffered that insult since Trump took office.
- z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
- simonh 6y agoAs always with cases like this we need to review the actual situation, not just distil it down to a hyper-simplistic minimal summary and then base a conclusion on that. It's not just a case of believing what the CIA say, they and other independent cyber security teams who have also investigated this, have also presented evidence to back up their investigations to show why they think this. There are also other cases of known proven Russian hacking. Assange has provided nothing. So let's not pretend this is a symmetric case of word versus word.
- whoknew1122 6y agoIs CIA in the business of lying and propaganda? Yes. But things need to be taken in context. The CIA is under the executive branch, and therefore at the mercy of the political whims of the president. Saddam's non-existent WMDs? Reported by the CIA under an presidential administration that was clutching for any reason to go to war with Iraq. Gulf of Tonkin? Again, the CIA reporting on something that buttressed the case for war. Again, aligned with the then-presdential administration's desire to escalate things in Vietnam. The DNC hack is reported by the CIA to be Russia. The current presidential administration has full-throated in their bias toward Russia and against any supposed pro-Trump Russian interference in the 2016 election. And the CIA still says a highly-damaging (to the Democrats' electoral chances) email dump was orchestrated by Russia. One of these things isn't like the other.
- fetbaffe 6y agoHowever CIA also pushes their own agenda like Timber Sycamore, a secret operation lobbied by CIA director David Petraeus, to overthrow President Assad of Syria, that led to a war that created a humanitarian disaster. President Obama signed off the operation, however it was a CIA creation & execution, with the help of Arab intelligence. CIA does way more than lying and propaganda. They create wars too.
- whoknew1122 6y ago> "CIA does way more than lying and propaganda. They create wars too." No one is saying they don't create wars. Look into the School of Americas for all the death and destruction the CIA caused in Latin and South America. The CIA was also first on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a CIA report on a subject of importance to the president. The CIA isn't going to release that report without sign-off from the top brass, all of whom serve at the pleasure of the president.
- osobear 6y agoThe Syrian Civil War had started before that. The CIA was picking sides for the US, just like every other geopolitically relevant country. The CIA trying to overthrow Assad is good though, the humanitarian disaster is his fault, and Putin's. None of it is "propaganda".