By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--December 13, 2016
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA's analysis - a deductive assessment of the available intelligence - for the same reason, the three officials said.There is good reason to be skeptical of the CIA's findings. This is the CIA of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and traitor Aldrich Ames. This is the CIA that failed to notice in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the economically sclerotic Soviet Union was disintegrating. "The CIA failed in its single, overriding defining mission, which was to chart the course of Soviet affairs," the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) observed in 1992. During the Cold War the CIA was penetrated repeatedly by Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies which supplied false intelligence to American decision-makers for years. The agency "bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times," according to Benjamin B. Fischer, the CIA's former chief historian. "The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure" that allowed double agents to spread disinformation and "wreaked havoc" on the agency. CIA officials have been criticized as incompetent, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to change for years. Bill Gertz writes at the Washington Free Beacon that:
Critics have charged the agency with harboring an aversion to counterintelligence--the practice of countering foreign spies and the vetting of the legitimacy of both agents and career officers. Beginning in the 1970s, many in the CIA criticized counter-spying, which often involved questioning the loyalties of intelligence personnel, as "sickthink." The agency's ability to discern false agents turned deadly in 2009 when a Jordanian recruit pretending to work for CIA killed a group of seven CIA officers and contractors in a suicide bombing at a camp in Afghanistan.More than four dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period worked secretly for Communist Cuba and provided disinformation to the CIA. "In East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi," Gertz wrote. The CIA reportedly didn't know the Berlin Wall was being planned in 1961 until the East Germans started building it and learned in 1989 that it was being torn down by watching cable television. So the CIA is far from perfect and it is filled with people who don't want change to come to the intelligence community. And it needs to be noted that after such a tumultuous campaign, it's easy to forget who took the lead in making a false connection between Trump and the Russians to begin with. It's a Big Lie originated by NBC reporter Katy Tur during the DNC convention in Philadelphia and then vigorously promoted by the New York Times and CNN. Recall that Clinton admitted to grabbing some 66,000 emails and then returning about half of them which she claimed didn't touch upon personal matters. She said those personal emails were deleted. At the July 27 press conference, Trump, half-jokingly, urged the Russians to hand over those supposedly personal emails. "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. He added sarcastically: "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press." A few minutes later Tur used a loaded question to introduce into the media ecosystem the lie that Trump had invited Russia to engage in cyberwarfare. "Do you have any qualms about asking a foreign government -- Russia, China, anybody -- to interfere, to hack into the system of anybody in this country?" "Hey, you know what gives me more pause, that a person in our government, crooked Hillary Clinton -- here's what gives me more pause," Trump said, as Tur tried to sneak in follow-up questions. He continued:
Be quiet, I know you want to, you know, save her. That a person in our government, Katy, would delete or get rid of 33,000 emails. That gives me a big problem. After she gets a subpoena. She gets subpoenaed, and she gets rid of 33,000 emails. That gives me a problem. Now, if Russia or China or any other country has those emails, I mean to be honest with you, I'd love to see them.A few minutes after the press conference, Trump restated on Twitter his point about the e-mails: "If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted e-mails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!" But almost immediately after the comments were made at the media event the New York Times lied on Twitter, writing: "Donald J. Trump called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's email, essentially sanctioning a foreign power's cyberspying." As Mark Twain said, "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." And so Katy Tur's Big Lie was engraved in deep relief into the Left's narrative, allowing it be repeated over and over again and hardening into fact in the eyes of the mainstream media. Now this lie is being used by Democrats, Never Trump Republicans, and the media to undermine the legitimate victor in the presidential contest. And this is only the beginning.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.