You may want to note that I tried not to use selective quoting, but I can prove your point wrong like that just as well:
“As for hacking, I think it was Russian,” Trump said at a press conference in New York.
He just tried to take it back later when he realized that it could be used against him.
His prevous behavior indicates my interpritation; that being he's entertaining the idea of russia because he is less certain that it will turn out to not be russia and wants to cover his ass.
I would think you would agree, you are usually the first person to refute claims that "he means what he says" after all.
As for the allegations not being true at all, that's pretty ridiculous given that neither you nor I can definitely know the truth in that case.
I know that no proof has emerged in the months after the allegations were made and the people who propel it as irrefutable either have vested interest in it being true or were appointed by those same people. Strong bias towards false.
I would say thinking that it was the Russians is perfectly legitimate given that the US intelligence community said so. Whether they are always trustworthy is a different question.
Not allways trustworthy, proven liars for whichever administration apppointed them, same thing amirte?
there are plenty of people even in Trump's party and administration who believe just that.
I highly doubt that. Show me one that doesnt present it with some variation of "We cant say 100% that it isnt true".
If you say everyone is an idiot who believes that, then Trump's team of excellent people contains several idiots who were hand-picked by him.
I say anyone who presents it as indisputable fact at this stage is either too ill informed for the position of journalist, or a liar. That Shepard Smith also proved himself a blind hypocryte through doing so is a bonus.
Last edited by Greyblades; 02-17-2017 at 20:27.
Being better than the worst does not inherently make you good. But being better than the rest lets you brag.
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
Don't be scared that you don't freak out. Be scared when you don't care about freaking out
We can't expect evidence in the form of top-level government intercepts or public defections; what we have is more than adequate.
Is the level of evidence for this hack less than that for any of the other military-industrial cyber attacks of recent times? After all, the Obama administration acknowledged Stuxnet - Putin is unlikely to ever reciprocate unless as a threat during a moment of heightened tension. Or maybe acknowledging Stuxnet was just Western propaganda after all? Can't trust those spies!
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
The word of the organization behind iraq, once again saying what their president wanted to be true without so much as a russian IP (even as succeptable to faking as they are) to support it, isn't worth spit for proof.
Last edited by Greyblades; 02-17-2017 at 21:23.
Being better than the worst does not inherently make you good. But being better than the rest lets you brag.
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
Don't be scared that you don't freak out. Be scared when you don't care about freaking out
The word of the people behind iraq, once again saying what their president wanted to be true without so much as a russian ISP to support it, isn't worth spit for proof.
U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Bush administration before the Iraq war that al Qaeda and Iran could exploit a U.S. invasion to extend their sway in the region, a new Senate report said on Friday.
The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. In January of that year, the Senate report said, the U.S. intelligence community predicted al Qaeda "probably would try to exploit any postwar transition in Iraq by replicating the tactics it has used in Afghanistan during the past year to mount hit-and-run operations against U.S. personnel."
"Some militant Islamists in Iraq might benefit from increases in funding and popular support and could choose to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq," U.S. intelligence concluded.
The 2003 intelligence papers also said, "Some elements in the Iranian government could decide to try to counter aggressively the U.S. presence in Iraq."
The papers, which the report said were circulated widely in the Bush administration, also warned there was a "significant chance that domestic groups (in Iraq) would engage in violent conflict with each other."
The Bush administration disregarded intelligence reports two months before the invasion of Iraq which warned that a war could unleash a violent insurgency and rising anti-US sentiment in the Middle East, it emerged yesterday.
One of the prewar assessments said it would take years of tumult before democracy was established in Iraq, and the country could revert to its tradition of authoritarian rule. According to the New York Times, it also warned that the new authorities in Iraq could face a guerrilla war waged by remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime, and other militant groups.
Meanwhile, Washington could see a rise in anti-American sentiment across the Middle East, as well as support for some terrorist acts.
Mr Pillar also suggested that the Bush administration was so focused on going to war that it never considered the prospect of an anti-American backlash. "When Pillar was asked why this was not made clear to the president and other higher authorities, his answer was that nobody asked," Mr Novak writes.
Mr Pillar's frustration was widely shared yesterday by intelligence professionals who said they were undermined by an administration in which ideologues often had the final say over policy-making, as well as by the agency's management, which they believed was overly compliant with Pentagon and White House hardliners.
"The CIA had come out before the war, and had been telling the administration all kinds of things it didn't want to hear," said Melissa Mahle, a former CIA operative in the Middle East. "The CIA feels very embattled right now. They feel vulnerable to accusations of politicisation in the run-up to the war, and to a degree they are vulnerable because of the war [former CIA chief] George Tenet played."
Rumsfeld was not under any legal or administrative obligation to circulate an internal DoD report, but not doing so raises questions about whether the administration withheld key information that could have undermined its case for war. Time and again, in the fall of 2002 and into early 2003, members of the administration spoke forcefully and without qualification about the threats they said Saddam Hussein posed. The JCS report undercut their assertions, and if it had been shared more widely within the administration, the debate would have been very different.
On September 5, Shaffer sent Myers his findings, titled “Iraq: Status of WMD Programs.” In a note to his boss, he revealed: “We don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.”
And while the report said intelligence officials “assess Iraq is making significant progress in WMD programs,” it conceded that “large parts” of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were concealed. As a result, “Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence. The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.”
Rather than heed the JCS’s early warning — as well as similar doubts expressed by some CIA, State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency officers — and seek more reliable intelligence, Rumsfeld and Cheney turned to a parallel intelligence apparatus they created that relied largely on information from Iraqi defectors and a network of exiles led by the late Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.
As for administration officials’ repeated claims that Iraq had mobile bioweapons plants, which in one especially colorful version were disguised as milk and yogurt trucks, the report says: “We believe Iraq has 7 mobile BW agent production plants but cannot locate them.” It summarizes the knowledge of Saddam’s germ warfare programs by saying: “Our knowledge of what biological weapons the Iraqis are able to produce is nearly complete our knowledge of how and where they are produced is nearly 90% incomplete.”
United States’ knowledge of Iraq’s chemical weapons, according to the JCS intelligence report was just as sketchy. “Our overall knowledge of the Iraqi CW program is primarily limited to infrastructure doctrine. The specific agent and facility knowledge is 60-70 percent incomplete.”
inally, while advocates of an invasion also claimed that Iraq was developing longer range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel with weapons of mass destruction — Bush had made the claim before the U.N. General Assembly three days after Rumsfeld sent the report to Myers — the report says: “We doubt all processes are in place to produce longer range missiles.”
But just because the JCS report wasn’t seen by key officials who might have benefited from its more cautious tone, doesn’t mean it wasn’t available for inspection. Its middling “Secret” classification meant that, in theory, nothing would have prevented sharing the report's contents had any member of Congress requested a briefing from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
I dont see the relevance of the first two, whether or not they saw "a violent insurgency and rising anti-US sentiment in the Middle East" coming as a result of the war changes nothing about the CIA's complicity in justfying it.
As for the third, I would not be surprised if there were doubt, disagreement and discontent from within the aparatus of the CIA but the fact remains that the organization produced this report at the behest of Bush's admin that persuaded politicians such as John Kerry that Iraq was producing Nuclear weapons.
America has been publically kicking itself for over a decade that it had been fooled by the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi Nukes, which were based on such reports. To put stock in the Obama's admin claims of russian hacking out of hand whose proof comes soley from the same compliant source and founded on the same amount of proof, IE None, Indicates either an epic degree of gullibility, a hideous lack of historical awareness or a desire to believe that has overwhemed any rightful skepticism you posess.
Last edited by Greyblades; 02-17-2017 at 22:55.
Being better than the worst does not inherently make you good. But being better than the rest lets you brag.
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
Don't be scared that you don't freak out. Be scared when you don't care about freaking out
The point is that these are not the same sources, that there was much disagreement on how to report the intelligence between various agencies and actors within the agencies, and the conditions for proof are different considering physical scale of alleged activities. The administration chose to represent particular interpretations to Congress and the public which intelligence agencies overall disagreed with. On the other hand, the conclusions on these hacks have broad backing. It is difficult to see the intelligence community as a unified actor with single goals in these histories, let alone that there is some goal apparent now.
You shouldn't excuse partisanship as skepticism.
Vitiate Man.
History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
I remember a time when I was accused of being unpatriotic and was ridiculed at the university and at the internet for opposing the invasion of Iraq. A few agreed with me (including my professor fortunately), but I felt very lonesome when I was being hated by so many for such a long time. Of course, they all agree with me now. A few of the friends who agree with me now are war veterans. That's the thing. I tend to express my views regardless of what the majority of the people believe. It's because I tend to have experiences and witnessed the things that they didn't or don't remember. This still goes on with recent events. Whenever I have a debate with the people I strongly disagree with, I realize that they really don't know the issue much.
The point is that these are not the same sources, that there was much disagreement on how to report the intelligence between various agencies and actors within the agencies, and the conditions for proof are different considering physical scale of alleged activities. The administration chose to represent particular interpretations to Congress and the public which intelligence agencies overall disagreed with. On the other hand, the conclusions on these hacks have broad backing. It is difficult to see the intelligence community as a unified actor with single goals in these histories, let alone that there is some goal apparent now.
Whether the CIA is an actor or merely a tool in this is something I have come to change my mind on through this debacle, but the paralels are the same, claims with broad backing but containing precious little proof, being swallowed by those who we would want to be above such gullability.
You shouldn't excuse partisanship as skepticism.
Partisanship would have me believe one admin's use of the CIA to back thier theories and decry the other's. I decry both. You dont.
Originally Posted by Shaka_Khan
Whenever I have a debate with the people I strongly disagree with, I realize that they really don't know the issue much.
Were I you I would not advertise a habit to assume all your opponants are merely ignorant.
Originally Posted by Husar
Now you're changing the goalposts to something that even I did not claim, besides, you probably mean "We cant say 100% that it is true" because otherwise it sounds like you were trying to make them refute your own argument.
You said: "there are plenty of people even in Trump's party and administration who believe just that." it is not moving the goalposts to expect belief not to come with a disclaimer.
Hm, it seems I should have kept my skepticism to claims of the admin believing it.
A rather stupid mistake really; the republican rank and file contain such rabid anti russians, Mcain in paticular, who would automatically believe claims the russians were behind the sky being blue. Of course there'd be some that believe this.
You cannot live life with 100% proof and security in everything.
Whereas you can evidently swallow anything that has 0% proof as long as there is enough official looking names attached.
These accusations of partisanship is but a dodge; ridicule to avoid having to acknowledge the possibility that what you want to believe may not be true; as valid as accusations of being unpatriotic was 15 years ago.
Being better than the worst does not inherently make you good. But being better than the rest lets you brag.
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
Don't be scared that you don't freak out. Be scared when you don't care about freaking out
The point is that these are not the same sources, that there was much disagreement on how to report the intelligence between various agencies and actors within the agencies, and the conditions for proof are different considering physical scale of alleged activities. The administration chose to represent particular interpretations to Congress and the public which intelligence agencies overall disagreed with. On the other hand, the conclusions on these hacks have broad backing. It is difficult to see the intelligence community as a unified actor with single goals in these histories, let alone that there is some goal apparent now.
You shouldn't excuse partisanship as skepticism.
Do they have? You know they're having issues when they're listing "Putin's revenge on Clinton because she insulted him" as a motive on an official report.
Also, the NSA, which is, according to Snowden, the organization best equipped to get to the bottom of this, expressed least amount of certainty in the report.
In the end, it wasn't even a hack. It was phishing. Which brings us to another problem because one of the most important "proofs" was that it was conducted on such a scale that it could have been only been done by a country like Russia, which is contrary to what phishing is. You don't need anything more than a computer with an internet connection to do it.
It does seem like the report was actually about telling the politicians and parts of the public what they want to hear. In the end, all involved in writing the report refused to categorically state anything or offer any proof. Instead, they covered their own asses by saying that Russian meddling is a probable conclusion based on what they know, so that no one can actually call them on it.
I highly doubt that. Show me one that doesnt present it with some variation of "We cant say 100% that it isnt true".
Now you're changing the goalposts to something that even I did not claim, besides, you probably mean "We cant say 100% that it is true" because otherwise it sounds like you were trying to make them refute your own argument.
As Monty explained, your demands for 100% proof are just an expression of your own partisanship, all I said was that someone who takes Russian interference for granted does not deserve to be called an idiot, that's different from saying I'm 100% sure they're right or that they all have to agree 100% or that there were 100% proof. You cannot live life with 100% proof and security in everything.
Re: Trump Thread
Originally Posted by Strike For The South
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