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by fatbird 211 days ago
Most civil servants are stand up people

I will agree with this from personal experience. I've worked with several gov'ts on various projects and found almost everyone to be simply interested in doing their job well.

The story of the Iraq War and how faulty intelligence played into it is very different from that view. You have George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling GWB that the intel was a slam dunk for Iraqi attempts to build nukes when there was no such intel. Colin Powell, the day before his presentation to the UN on the Iraqi nuke program, went to Langley and demanded to review the evidence himself. When shown the paltry shreds they'd collected, he blew up at Tenet, saying "this is all you've got?"

Cheney set up his own mini-intel operation in the White House, headed by Douglas Feith, to look at the "raw" intel and construct their own case because the CIA analysts were unwilling to produce a National Security Assessment saying the same. It was 100% a case of the admin claiming that the US IC supported their policies when they did not (and the IC wasn't free to publicly dispute it).

The integrity of the IC is not a reason to believe that any admin has their work product to justify their actions... especially when they won't reveal that evidence.
1 comments
anonymousiam 211 days ago
The problem with revealing the evidence is the risk it poses to the "methods and sources." For this reason, it's highly unusual for CIA to release "raw" intel to anybody. They always want to "process" it. This feature can be exploited by politicians, as it was by President Obama and John Brennan against their political adversaries.

South American governments that refuse to stop the cartels are in effect supporting them. The cartels are powerful, and use any and every means to get what they want. The US recently offered to help Claudia Sheinbaum, and that offer was rejected. Nicolás Maduro is most likely supportive of the cartels because they pay him, and their actions are destructive to his enemies (namely us).

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-confirms-he-off...

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