Russia hubbub mostly about delegitimizing Trump election
The political world continues to get turned topsy-turvy. For as long as I can remember, and despite my approaching dotage that remains a long time, it has been an article of faith by the left that U.S. intelligence agencies were manipulative and untrustworthy.
Today, the left is pummeling Donald Trump. Over what? Well, pretty much everything. But, prominently, for expressing skepticism about the U.S. intelligence community.
Specifically, the recent “assessment” that Russia tried to rig the election in favor of Trump.
So, are U.S. intelligence agencies trustworthy? The answer is: Not always.
This isn’t about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, or an active program to produce them, in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein was consciously trying to create the impression that he had such weapons and programs. He was pretty good at it. He fooled not only U.S. intelligence agencies but the intelligence services of every other country in the world with one worth having.
An honest mistake isn’t the same as being untrustworthy.
However, in 2007, the U.S. intelligence community suddenly “assessed” that Iran had given up its effort to develop nuclear weapons in 2003.
At the time, the Bush administration was trying to gather domestic and international support for getting tough with Iran. The assessment was widely seen, both within and without the administration, as a purposeful effort to undermine Bush’s get-tough program, and particularly to ensure that it stopped short of military action.
The assessment certainly didn’t guide U.S. action for very long. Once the Obama administration took over, suddenly there was a great and urgent need to strike this big deal with Iran, to get it to give up a quest for nuclear weapons that supposedly had been abandoned in 2003.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is going before congressional committees bemoaning Trump’s disparagements.
You will remember Clapper. Before the National Security Agency’s program of collecting and storing the phone records of basically every American became public, he was asked, in a congressional hearing: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on mil-