re: #172 Nyet

BTW, I don’t know what the US intel services said about Nemtsov (I’ve never seen them accusing Putin, but maybe I missed something), but when the US intel services don’t cite actual evidence, their claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Never forget the Iraqi WMD claims.

I don’t know about Nemtsov.

As for Iraq, the intelligence services argued against the Bush Administration’s claims of WMDs in Iraq. CIA agent Valerie Plame was outed by the administration for holding forth on the very point that the information obtained from so-called “Curveball” was unreliable.

Bush (or more likely Cheney but who knows) overruled the intelligence services.

There is an article about Curveball, who has now admitted he lied (essentially to get a green card) at Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org

Information surrounding Valerie Plame (who warned the administration that there was no uranium flowing from Nigeria to Iraq as the Bush Administration was claiming):
en.wikipedia.org

It was not an intelligence failure on the part of US intelligence. It was a political failure, trying to make the facts fit the narrative instead of the other way round.