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Certainly to me, especially given he’s testified under oath to multiple congressional committees and the ICIG. He’s made some outrageous accusations that absolu

Certainly to me, especially given he’s testified under oath to multiple congressional committees and the ICIG. He’s made some outrageous accusations that absolutely need to be investigated. Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain.

mmcwilliams 3y ago
I understand the context, but what I'm asking is; do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice? Or is their expertise rather in acquiring, analyzing and compartmentalizing information.
- likeabbas 3y ago
  > do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice? No. Intel (especially counter intel) officers are, trained to give information to convince someone of a certain context. Whether that information is true depends on the situation. But it’s certainly not common for anyone to lie under oath, especially when they are testifying that specific people and corporations are involved in illegal operations. He’s opened himself up to not only perjury, but also lawsuits of false accusations. I don’t think the billion dollar defense contractors would have any trouble suing David Grusch if he’s lying.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I think there is a pretty good record of high-level intelligence officials lying to Congress under oath, and a similar history of no consequences whatsoever when the lie was later revealed. WMDs in Irak and the inexistence of the PRISM program were both testified about in Congress, and later turned out to be lies. Which high-level intelligence officials were ever even investigated for perjury?
    - likeabbas 3y ago
      Even still, you’ve completely ignored the other half of my comment. Grusch is alleging specific people and corporations are involved in illegal activities. The corporations should have no trouble suing Grusch for false accusations and defamation, which in this case would be equivalent to jail time. So even if congress didn’t refer him to the justice department for perjury, those corporations absolutely will sue Grusch if he’s lying.
      - danenania 3y ago
        It's also a very different thing to lie to Congress with the backing of the IC (as happened with Clapper, WMDs, etc.) compared to lying to Congress against the IC's wishes. You are astronomically more likely to be prosecuted for the latter.
        likeabbas 3y ago
        Do you have any evidence of this? The IC can refer you to the justice department on his own if you've lied to him/her.
blincoln 3y ago
> Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain. There are some other possibilities. My main theory for what Grusch specifically is talking about is that intelligence agencies probably deliberately sprinkle different fake programs into the lists that different people are given access to, so that when information leaks, they can track who is doing the leaking. Someone probably had a little too much fun creating fake documentation of alien corpses and crashed spacecraft instead of something less world-changing, and some of the folks who ended up being assigned material from that set felt like that was getting into territory that the public really did deserve to know about, because it would change everything if it were true. It would not only explain the entire Grusch side of this discussion, but the reactions it's gotten from different branches of government. Everyone who knew about the leak-detection mechanism would be tight-lipped because they wouldn't want to disclose its existence. So it would look like an attempted coverup, but it would be a coverup of a security mechanism, not space aliens. I actually found the story more believable until some of the specific testimony today. A red cube with sides as long as a football field? Where would Boeing even hide such a thing from other countries' spy satellites? Three-dimensional shadows of hyperdimensional objects? That's a really neat idea, but I think it fails the test of Occam's Razor in this case. Military pilots encountering strange phenomena is a separate bucket, IMO. The US military has some of the best pilots and equipment in the world. I trust that if a bunch of them say they saw something strange, especially with visual, radar, and thermal evidence, there was something strange out there. But OTOH, I think it's an enormous stretch to attribute it to space aliens. It's probably a mixture of rare natural phenomena, classified/experimental aircraft of one sort or another, and mundane objects behaving very oddly when they're far outside their normal context. When I used to work in a skyscraper, I once looked out the window and saw what looked like some sort of tear in spacetime dancing around the sky. Absolutely black, but with a chaotic silhouette that would smoothly ripple, then suddenly jerk into a new shape. I watched it for several minutes, and it kept going. Eventually it got close enough for me to see that it was just a black garbage bag that had somehow ended up in the right air current to be whisked around almost endlessly. I never did see it land, or even get close to the ground. I'd love for Grusch's story to be true, but at this point I'll believe it when I see it.
- 3y ago
wombatpm 3y ago
The existence of National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn would seem to support the thesis that we have crazy people who lie at the highest levels of government.
- likeabbas 3y ago
  Don’t you think congress should investigate these crazy people then?
  - smolder 3y ago
    I wouldn't trust Congress to do a good job investigating practically anything. They have their share of crazies and chronic liars.
    - likeabbas 3y ago
      I used to think most politicians were cooks. Now I realize most of them are very smart and have very different private opinions from the ones they scream at their base. This topic is a good example of showing how intelligent some congressmen (who you thought were crazy) are. For example https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1684249806300905480?s=46&t=rYeJVDyUwUYdb7zdhjECnw https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1684249806300905480?s=46&t=...
flarg 3y ago
We had a crazy President

mmcwilliams 3y ago

I understand the context, but what I'm asking is; do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice? Or is their expertise rather in acquiring, analyzing and compartmentalizing information.

likeabbas 3y ago
> do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice? No. Intel (especially counter intel) officers are, trained to give information to convince someone of a certain context. Whether that information is true depends on the situation. But it’s certainly not common for anyone to lie under oath, especially when they are testifying that specific people and corporations are involved in illegal operations. He’s opened himself up to not only perjury, but also lawsuits of false accusations. I don’t think the billion dollar defense contractors would have any trouble suing David Grusch if he’s lying.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  I think there is a pretty good record of high-level intelligence officials lying to Congress under oath, and a similar history of no consequences whatsoever when the lie was later revealed. WMDs in Irak and the inexistence of the PRISM program were both testified about in Congress, and later turned out to be lies. Which high-level intelligence officials were ever even investigated for perjury?
  - likeabbas 3y ago
    Even still, you’ve completely ignored the other half of my comment. Grusch is alleging specific people and corporations are involved in illegal activities. The corporations should have no trouble suing Grusch for false accusations and defamation, which in this case would be equivalent to jail time. So even if congress didn’t refer him to the justice department for perjury, those corporations absolutely will sue Grusch if he’s lying.
    - danenania 3y ago
      It's also a very different thing to lie to Congress with the backing of the IC (as happened with Clapper, WMDs, etc.) compared to lying to Congress against the IC's wishes. You are astronomically more likely to be prosecuted for the latter.
      - likeabbas 3y ago
        Do you have any evidence of this? The IC can refer you to the justice department on his own if you've lied to him/her.

blincoln 3y ago

> Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain. There are some other possibilities. My main theory for what Grusch specifically is talking about is that intelligence agencies probably deliberately sprinkle different fake programs into the lists that different people are given access to, so that when information leaks, they can track who is doing the leaking. Someone probably had a little too much fun creating fake documentation of alien corpses and crashed spacecraft instead of something less world-changing, and some of the folks who ended up being assigned material from that set felt like that was getting into territory that the public really did deserve to know about, because it would change everything if it were true. It would not only explain the entire Grusch side of this discussion, but the reactions it's gotten from different branches of government. Everyone who knew about the leak-detection mechanism would be tight-lipped because they wouldn't want to disclose its existence. So it would look like an attempted coverup, but it would be a coverup of a security mechanism, not space aliens. I actually found the story more believable until some of the specific testimony today. A red cube with sides as long as a football field? Where would Boeing even hide such a thing from other countries' spy satellites? Three-dimensional shadows of hyperdimensional objects? That's a really neat idea, but I think it fails the test of Occam's Razor in this case. Military pilots encountering strange phenomena is a separate bucket, IMO. The US military has some of the best pilots and equipment in the world. I trust that if a bunch of them say they saw something strange, especially with visual, radar, and thermal evidence, there was something strange out there. But OTOH, I think it's an enormous stretch to attribute it to space aliens. It's probably a mixture of rare natural phenomena, classified/experimental aircraft of one sort or another, and mundane objects behaving very oddly when they're far outside their normal context. When I used to work in a skyscraper, I once looked out the window and saw what looked like some sort of tear in spacetime dancing around the sky. Absolutely black, but with a chaotic silhouette that would smoothly ripple, then suddenly jerk into a new shape. I watched it for several minutes, and it kept going. Eventually it got close enough for me to see that it was just a black garbage bag that had somehow ended up in the right air current to be whisked around almost endlessly. I never did see it land, or even get close to the ground. I'd love for Grusch's story to be true, but at this point I'll believe it when I see it.

3y ago

wombatpm 3y ago

The existence of National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn would seem to support the thesis that we have crazy people who lie at the highest levels of government.

likeabbas 3y ago
Don’t you think congress should investigate these crazy people then?
- smolder 3y ago
  I wouldn't trust Congress to do a good job investigating practically anything. They have their share of crazies and chronic liars.
  - likeabbas 3y ago
    I used to think most politicians were cooks. Now I realize most of them are very smart and have very different private opinions from the ones they scream at their base. This topic is a good example of showing how intelligent some congressmen (who you thought were crazy) are. For example https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1684249806300905480?s=46&t=rYeJVDyUwUYdb7zdhjECnw https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1684249806300905480?s=46&t=...

flarg 3y ago

We had a crazy President