This NYT article is more carefully worded with more customary “unsubstantiated” and “unverified” disclaimers than usual. How trustworthy is last week’s intelligence report? To what degree has Donald Trump been compromised by Vladimir Putin?
In my view, the shadowy world of clandestine operations is poorly understood. Lawyers, for whom evidence must be convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, tend to dismiss such reports on legalistic grounds. A politician may compromise valid security concerns with denials, distractions, and cheap shots to serve a partisan purpose. All miss this point: Clandestine connotes secrecy and stealth with room for plausible deniability.
Most noteworthy are troubling inconsistencies surrounding Michael Cohen, a lawyer and advisor of Donald Trump. Did Cohen travel to Prague, or not? Either way, a shill is still a shill.
Journalists also fail miserably. Their work is often marred by faulty research, errors of omission, faulty nuance, and conclusions based on false equivalences. For instance, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald dismissed recent CIA reports on the basis of past failures — such as the bogus WMD claim that was used to justify the Iraq war.
Their error? The CIA did not embellish or mischaracterize the WMD data; the Bush administration did.
Shall one intelligence failure cast suspicion on all intelligence reports? For Taibbi and Greenwald, one rotten apple means all apples are rotten. Sometimes lawyers, politicians, and journalists are ego-invested in their own words and subject to motivated blindspots.
The hacking of DNC computer servers, Cyrillic fingerprints on trace metadata, the steady drip of embarrassing (but not incriminating) email, direct funding of National Front groups in Europe by Russia, and FSB/GRU efforts to destabilize the European Union … sometimes pervasive patterns of subversion speak louder than any smoking gun. Reader, beware.
In my view, the shadowy world of clandestine operations is poorly understood. Lawyers, for whom evidence must be convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, tend to dismiss such reports on legalistic grounds. A politician may compromise valid security concerns with denials, distractions, and cheap shots to serve a partisan purpose. All miss this point: Clandestine connotes secrecy and stealth with room for plausible deniability.
Most noteworthy are troubling inconsistencies surrounding Michael Cohen, a lawyer and advisor of Donald Trump. Did Cohen travel to Prague, or not? Either way, a shill is still a shill.
Journalists also fail miserably. Their work is often marred by faulty research, errors of omission, faulty nuance, and conclusions based on false equivalences. For instance, Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald dismissed recent CIA reports on the basis of past failures — such as the bogus WMD claim that was used to justify the Iraq war.
Their error? The CIA did not embellish or mischaracterize the WMD data; the Bush administration did.
Shall one intelligence failure cast suspicion on all intelligence reports? For Taibbi and Greenwald, one rotten apple means all apples are rotten. Sometimes lawyers, politicians, and journalists are ego-invested in their own words and subject to motivated blindspots.
The hacking of DNC computer servers, Cyrillic fingerprints on trace metadata, the steady drip of embarrassing (but not incriminating) email, direct funding of National Front groups in Europe by Russia, and FSB/GRU efforts to destabilize the European Union … sometimes pervasive patterns of subversion speak louder than any smoking gun. Reader, beware.
Sometimes lawyers, politicians, and journalists are ego-invested in their own words... .
ReplyDeletePride of authorship, a human tendancy that at one time or anothere seems to efect all. Even business folks.