RUSSIAGATE : HOW HONEST IS U.S. INTEL?

Just suppose your job depended upon finding threats to the United States and you needn’t explain in much detail your reasoning, don’t you think you’d find a few?

How difficult do you think your conscience would find it to perhaps exaggerate just a little and use a lot of qualifying words such as “we believe”?

What if you could leak certain information through unidentified sources, perhaps through ex-employees willing to help you out?

The CIA is well known for its ability to lie. As a certain Mr Pompeo said fairly recently they have entire courses. This is partly how the CIA staffers earn a living. Don’t you think they might be tempted to tweak whatever suspicions they have just a little? They don’t have to say very much in fact, a few words telling of their “suspicions”, their “beliefs” and their “conjectures” in the manner that their audience wants to hear.

If your entire status is dependent upon you showing how on guard you are against exterior threats are you going to go anywhere near saying you can’t find any hard evidence that there are any? This is pretty unlikely. The most likely thing you will say is that you have these ‘suspicions which confirm our beliefs based on past activities’. Lots of that. Nothing specific as you have nothing specific. Just ramble on about threats that just may exist and the fear that everyone should feel... but not TOO much as they are on guard protecting the poor vulnerable souls. And may we have another $200M to protect you even better?

The CIA has a history of lying. Let’s look at a few examples.

‘CIA agents lied to White House officials and others about the use of torture and its effectiveness in obtaining information from detainees, according to an explosive report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.

The lies began during the first term of the George W. Bush administration and continued into the presidency of Barack Obama.

The CIA told Powell and Rumsfeld on September 16, 2003, that torture (or "enhanced interrogation," in the report's parlance) "produced significant intelligence information that had, in the view of CIA professionals, saved lives."

To back up those claims, they cited the capture of Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Agents said they nabbed Khan after obtaining "major threat" information from a detainee identified as "KSM."

But the torture report says otherwise.

"There is no indication in CIA records that reporting from detainee KSM—or any other CIA detainee—played any role in the identification and capture of Majid Khan,” according to text on page 335 of the report.’

Mashable. Dec 9th 2009 - https://mashable.com/2014/12/09/5-times-the-cia-lied/?europe=true

‘The CIA lied to the Department of Justice

The Department of Justice was supposed to determine the legality of the CIA's torture program, but from 2002 to 2007 it relied only on information provided by the CIA to do that, according to the report.

CIA officials said that the Agency's methods were justified because they obtained information vital to protecting the United States, and the DOJ cited the "necessity defense" in a memo to the White House on August 1, 2002.

The DOJ also stated that its conclusions could change based on new information, but the CIA often kept the DOJ in the dark, especially in regard to the effectiveness of torture. That way, the "necessity defense" could remain intact.

The report strikes a massive blow to the credibility of former CIA Director Michael Hayden. According to text on page 450, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on April 12, 2007, Hayden "provided extensive inaccurate information" on the background and training of CIA interrogators, the number of detainees, the intelligence gained from tortured detainees, how prisoners were tortured, injuries the detainees suffered, whether agents threatened the families of prisoners, and more.

After the former president was briefed on the torture program, the CIA gave Bush inaccurate information about the effectiveness of torture that he used in a speech on September 6, 2006, according to the committee's findings.

"This is intelligence that cannot be found any other place," Bush said during the speech. "And our security depends on getting this kind of information."

The CIA gave Bush the example of Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti. The Agency said intelligence gathered through torture stopped a strike against a Marine base there, but the Senate committee said that claim was baseless.’

Mashable. Dec 9th 2009 - https://mashable.com/2014/12/09/5-times-the-cia-lied/?europe=true

‘The CIA duped Obama's national security team

In January 2009, President-elect Obama's national security team had a sit-down with the CIA. The agency said it had gathered "key intelligence" from torture, according to page 342 of the report. To back up this claim, the CIA cited information gathered from detainee Janat Gul, even though other CIA agents had determined years before that Gul had no valuable information.’

Mashable. Dec 9th 2009 - https://mashable.com/2014/12/09/5-times-the-cia-lied/?europe=true

\O/

IRAQ'S NON-EXISTENT WMD

From ‘Legacy of Ashes’ The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner of The New York Times.

 (You can listen to the entire book here: https://archive.org/details/LegacyOfAshes)

The CIA reported in October 2002 that the threat was incalculable."Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons," the top secret estimate said. Saddam had bolstered his missile
technology, bulked up his deadly stockpiles, and restarted his nuclear weapons program.

"If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad," said the estimate, "it could make a nuclear weapon within several months." And most terrifying of all, the CIA warned that Iraq could conduct chemical and biological attacks inside the United States.

The CIA confirmed everything the White House was saying. But the agency was saying far more than it knew. "We did not have many Iraqi sources," Jim Pavitt, the chief of the clandestine service, admitted two years later. "We had less than a handful." The agency produced a ton of analysis from an ounce of intelligence. That might have worked if the
ounce been solid gold and not pure dross.

The CIA as an institution was betting that American soldiers or spies would find the evidence after the invasion of Iraq. It was a hell of a gamble.

The clandestine service had produced little information on Iraq. The analysts accepted whatever supported the case for war. They swallowed secondhand and third hand hearsay that conformed to the president's plans. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence for the agency. Saddam once had the weapons. The defectors said he still had them. Therefore he had them. The CIA as an institution desperately sought the White House's attention and approval. It did so by telling the president what he wanted to hear.

"FACTS AND CONCLUSIONS BASED ON SOLID INTELLIGENCE"

President Bush presented the CIA's case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ warfare agents. "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," he said. "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.’

Colin Powell at the United Nations:

"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

‘Powell had spent days and nights with Tenet, checking and rechecking the CIA's reporting. Tenet looked him in the eye and told him it was rock solid.’

‘The CIA sent the best of the American inspectors who had hunted down Saddam's arsenal in the 1990s back to Iraq. David Kay led a team of 1,400 specialists, the Iraq Survey Group, working directly for the director of central intelligence. Tenet continued to stand by the CIA's reporting, rejecting the growing criticism as "misinformed, misleading, and just plain wrong."

But the survey group scoured Iraq and found nothing.

When Kay returned to report that, Tenet put him in purgatory. Kay nonetheless went before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28, 2004, and spoke the truth.

"We were almost all wrong," he said’

'The CIA had reached its conclusions on Iraqi chemical weapons solely on the basis of misinterpreted pictures of Iraqi tanker trucks. The CIA had based its conclusions on Iraqi biological weapons on one source—Curveball. The CIA had based its conclusions on Iraqi nuclear weapons almost entirely on Saddam's importation of aluminum tubes intended for conventional rocketry. "It's almost shockingly wrong to conclude that those aluminum tubes were appropriate or designed for centrifuges for nuclear weapons," Judge Silberman said.
"What was such a disaster," he said, "was for Colin Powell to have gone to the United Nations and set forth that absolutely unmistakable certain case which was based on really bad, bad stuff."

Judge Silberman and his presidential commission received unprecedented permission to read every article on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction from the president's daily brief. They found that the CIA's reports for the president's eyes were no different from the rest of its
work, including the infamous estimate—except in one regard. They were "even more misleading," the commission found. They were, "if anything, more alarmist and less nuanced." The president's daily briefs, "with their attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition, left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were
very few sources. .. . In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be 'selling' intelligence—in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested."

Does any of this sound familiar? Plenty of people in positions of power wanted there to be ‘Russian interference’. It was vital for several reasons. Hilary Clinton needed a fig-leaf of distraction due to her shame and humiliation and that of the Democratic National Committee in being defeated by an orange-faced business thug and reality TV host. They also needed a big stick to keep beating that orange baboon with.

It was also vital for the CIA who wanted the Donald Trump who had downplayed its importance out and as quickly as possible. The Democrats had become the primary party for war during the preceding four years, the primary party too for the beefing up of the intelligence community and NATO and creating the kind of “Free World” ethos of the Cold War. All this was good news for the intelligence community and everything to do with Donald Trump, bad.

So, take some time and contemplate the history of the CIA and its behavior in recent years. Does it strike you that it stands aloof and independent, especially now when there is a president in the White House that seems minded to downgrade it? When the party of opposition seems to be offering you increased status, respect and not least in importance, more money with which to expand your empire? Do you think you’d maintain a strict observance of the facts communicating only what you are stone cold certain of... or would you embellish things a little to aid the cause?

I leave it with you.

Just how honest is U.S. intel? And how much truth is there in the entirety of Russiagate?