The US intelligence agencies, or at least the heads of most of the intelligence agencies (who knows what the analysts themselves think), are still convinced that Russia
hacked the DNC (Democratic National Committee) servers and provided WikiLeaks
with the embarrassing emails (widely reported in the liberal media), though
independent experts think it was far more likely that it was an inside job (not
widely reported in the liberal media), perhaps by then-DNC-chair Wasserman-Schultz’s
favorite Pakistani IT expert, Imran Awan, now arrested and under indictment on multiple
charges.
Should we believe the US intelligence agencies? The torrents
of (largely illegal) leaks from the intelligence agencies to embarrass and
harass President Trump certainly shows their political bias. And of course
these are the same intelligence agencies that didn’t foresee the fall of the Soviet
Union, didn’t foresee the Eastern European “color revolutions”, didn’t foresee
the “Arab Spring” revolutions in the Middle East, didn’t foresee the rise of
ISIS, didn’t foresee the Tet offensive in Vietnam, didn’t foresee the 1973 Yom
Kippur attack on Israel, didn’t foresee the Iranian revolution, didn’t foresee
the rise of Al Qaida or the 9/11 attacks, didn’t foresee the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, was sure Sadaam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction, were sure
during the Kennedy campaign that the Soviet Union was ahead of the US in
intercontinental missiles and that the Bay of Pigs invasion would bring a general
uprising in Cuba, and didn’t foresee the Russian takeover of the Crimea, among
many other failures. Intelligence gathering
and analysis is a difficult business, and some failures are to be expected, but
it is notable how often these failures listed above resulted from the
intelligence community telling the powers that be what they wanted to hear, or
what the intelligence community wanted to believe.
And then of course there is the revelation that among the NSA’s
(National Security Agency) own hacking tools that outside hackers stole from the
NSA itself recently (another reason to wonder about the competence of our intelligence
community) were a sophisticated set of tools for making NSA hacks look like
they came from other places, like Russia. Presumably the Russians and the North
Koreans and the French and probably even some US teenage hackers have similar
tools, so any estimate of where a hack “came from” is now suspect.
We will probably never know the truth, but my own estimate
at the moment is that this whole Russian hacking thing is a red herring.
Liberals still can’t come to terms with having lost the election (and to a jerk
like Trump at that!), and are still casting about for some explanation - any explanation - other
than their own incompetence. And of course focusing on the Russians keeps people
from focusing on the content of the leaked emails, which showed a pretty seamy picture
of the inside machinations of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
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