[joe_the_user]

I'm not making any assumption that I know for certain what US intelligence does though I know sometimes the US likes to embarrass it's enemies by describing bad things they do.

The thing I'm pointing out that it's problematic to automatically dismiss contradictions to ones' argument by saying that these are explained by secret government actions when there's no clarity about what would or wouldn't motivate those actions - ie, if you assume secrecy takes care of all contradictions to your theory, you can prove anything.

[janto]

The only thing secrecy would take care of is why we are missing information. If you rely on the absence of info to contradict a theory, without taking this variable into account, then you will come to a weakly supported conclusion.

A tricky thing about secrecy is that it exists to reduce clarity. If you had another sensitive way of gathering information (an insider, for example) you would not want an attacker to draw that conclusion by just sharing everything, by default. You will want to keep this motivation secret as well. Embarrassing the enemy has the lowest yield.