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Saturday Night Shred: Steffen Schackinger, "Tumbleweed"

181
Anymouse 🌹🏡😷3/05/2017 1:29:59 am PST

re: #179 Nyet

It’s a very true point, and it shows why the IA’s public claims can be indicative, but don’t necessarily outright disprove the more concrete evidence that might be available to the public.

Yup, I agree. It’s also why Mr. Trump’s slurring of the intelligence agencies now (claiming they are working against him and such) is so dangerous on a number of levels.

All nations spy on other nations, and always have. To do that effectively, the nation has to be able to rely on its spy agencies.

What Mr. Trump is doing with his accusations of politicisation of US intelligence agencies is undermining the public trust in them.

There is a lot of crappy stuff our intelligence agencies have done in the past, and the Church Committee was empanelled to figure out what that was and how to put a check on them (that is, only doing stuff the government tells them to do rather than going off on their own during Watergate).

The result of that was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, designed to oversee the intelligence community.

Mr. Trump’s claims that the intelligence community is “going rogue” not only questions those agencies themselves, but the oversight of the Senate. Moreover, he has presented exactly zero evidence that they were somehow trying to undermine him: He makes the claim and expects everyone to believe it (and sadly, there are an awful lot of people willing to throw the CIA and IRS and FBI under the bus simply because they don’t like them).

Russia doesn’t have to win a war with the United States to get what they want. I imagine undermining confidence in the structure of our government (including the intelligence agencies) would serve Russia just as well. I imagine that Mr. Putin’s government is a whole lot more patient than Donald Trump and his comedy of errors he calls a cabinet.