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from the all-your-email-are-belong-to-us dept.
From NPR:
President Obama has ordered the intelligence community to conduct a "full review" of "malicious cyber activity" timed to U.S. elections, the White House said Friday.
The review will go all the way back to the 2008 campaign when China was found to have hacked both the Obama and McCain campaigns, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said at a Friday press briefing.
In the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence officials charged that Russia had interfered. In early October, they released a strongly worded statement saying they were "confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations." The statement went on to say "these thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process."
Shortly after that, WikiLeaks began posting emails hacked from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta's Gmail account. The slow drip of those emails, including transcripts of Clinton's remarks to Goldman Sachs, hung over the campaign in its closing weeks and proved embarrassing at times. Podesta said he spoke to the FBI about the hacking, and intelligence experts blamed Russia for that as well.
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @04:05PM
Bear in mind that the very same people that are making such claims without proof also claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which to this day have not been found.
It's worth noting here that this isn't correct. The Bush administration created a separate intelligence processing system [theguardian.com] for the Iraqi invasion run by Vice President Cheney which bypassed the usual intelligence processing provided by the CIA. And the spectacularly bad stuff they accepted over objections by the rest of the intelligence community is the real basis for the accusations that "Bush lied" going into the Iraqi invasion.
Of course, the same pressure to deliver a desired result may be going on. But Obama will be gone in a bit over a month. There just isn't that much he can do. I think more that he's creating a deliberately embarrassing situation for Trump which sadly is probably one of the best things Obama has done during his entire two terms.
And my view is that Russia did help (or at least give the appearance of helping) the Trump campaign. Whether that help was done with the knowledge of Trump or with the purpose of actually helping Trump win (rather than merely sowing division), is a different story.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jelizondo on Sunday December 11 2016, @05:58PM
Ok, the maybe the WMD were invented by someone else with Isreali help, per the column you linked.
However, the CIA has lied before, numerous times; some examples:
CIA lied about Iran-Contra [chicagotribune.com]
Convicted CIA officer for lying to Congress [independent.co.uk]
CIA lied about torture program [theguardian.com]
CIA was spying on Senate [theguardian.com]
Anytime a "high-ranking officer" talks to the press and his/her name is not given, my B.S. detector goes off. Anytime someone from the CIA talks to the press I know there is a good chance they are lying, evidence or not. (As they have fabricated "evidence" before.)
I think, the whole "the Russians are coming" charade was an attempt by the DNC and HRC to discredit Trump and scaring people into not voting for him. Putin is too smart for such an operation to be directly traceable to Russia. Maybe he did do it, but before I believe that I want to see some kind of evidence and not anonymous sources telling the media the CIA "thinks" Russia hacked the election.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 11 2016, @08:39PM
Putin is too smart for such an operation to be directly traceable to Russia.
Unless, of course, he wants such an operation directly traceable back to Russia. It's no skin off his teeth what we do with that information or the infighting that results.