The CIA Is An Embarrassment

The CIA has taken the position that the Russian government has interfered in a US Presidential election by hacking into the emails of prominent Democrats and spilling the beans to various sources. They are doing this despite possessing no evidence that this has happened.

Rather, CIA officials cite circumstances that lead them to believe this. One circumstance is that the Republicans were not likewise afflicted by the likes of WikiLeaks, QED, those pesky Rooskies are at it again and wanted Trump to triumph.

Problem is, other highly regarded intelligence sources cite decades of analytical/intelligence experience and think the CIA is full of shit.

[...]We are being misled to believe that there is irrefutable evidence that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and the basis for this conclusion, we now learn, is that some unnamed analysts THINK that Russia is behind it because the only emails released came from the Democrats and excluded the Republicans.

The stupidity of this is stunning. When I was an analyst my bosses did not care what my opinion about anything was. I was to report the intelligence and comment on what we knew.

But it gets worse. The CIA analysts predicated their goofy analysis on a false premise– they “THINK” Russia breached the RNC. Think? There was a time that the bosses at CIA required evidence or sources. Speculation was unacceptable. But this goes beyond speculation. The CIA is ignoring the proven fact that the RNC Chair Reince Preibus and the RNC Deputy Sean Spicer say there was no breach whatsoever. In fact, they said the FBI came into the RNC, examined the computer systems and then confirmed that they had not been hacked nor breached. The failure to consider all facts is the cardinal sin of an intelligence analyst. On this point the CIA is guilty.

It is the considered opinion of one intelligence expert of note that:

This is more than an embarrassment; it is an indictment of how corrupt and inept the CIA has become over the last 20 years. It has become so thoroughly politicized that it is no more reliable then your mediocre Washington think tank. In my view the CIA should be dismantled. We need to start over. This is not an isolated error. The failures of the CIA over the years are significant. But those did not include meddling in a U.S. Presidential election. This is the ultimate irony. The CIA is accusing Russia of interfering in the Presidential election when in fact it is the CIA itself that is now crossing that line.

Story here, more here on how it appears that this was leaked information from an inside source, not hacked remotely by a foreign agent.

And right on the heels of the above comes this - a disgusted democrat gave up the goodies.

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia. 

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September. 

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'