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US Intelligence Community Has Lost Credibility Due To Leaks (bloomberg.com)
Two anonymous readers and Mi share an article: U.K. police investigating the Manchester terror attack say they have stopped sharing information with the U.S. after a series of leaks that have so angered the British government that Prime Minister Therese May wants to discuss them with President Donald Trump during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Brussels. What can Trump tell her, though? The leaks drive him nuts, too. Since the beginning of this century, the U.S. intelligence services and their clients have acted as if they wanted the world to know they couldn't guarantee the confidentiality of any information that falls into their hands. At this point, the culture of leaks is not just a menace to intelligence-sharing allies. It's a threat to the intelligence community's credibility. [...] If this history has taught the U.S. intelligence community anything, it's that leaking classified information isn't particularly dangerous and those who do it largely enjoy impunity. Manning spent seven years in prison (though she'd been sentenced to 35), but Snowden, Assange, Petraeus, the unknown Chinese mole, the people who stole the hacking tools and the army of recent anonymous leakers, many of whom probably still work for U.S. intelligence agencies, have escaped any kind of meaningful punishment. President Donald Trump has just now announced that the administration would "get to the bottom" of leaks. In a statement, he said: "The alleged leaks coming out of government agencies are deeply troubling. These leaks have been going on for a long time and my Administration will get to the bottom of this. The leaks of sensitive information pose a grave threat to our national security. I am asking the Department of Justice and other relevant agencies to launch a complete review of this matter, and if appropriate, the culprit should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There is no relationship we cherish more than the Special Relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.
You know, apart from exile or being confined to a single building for multiple years on end. I mean apart from that nothing too serious.
There was a time when execution was a very real possibility for treason. I believe that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the last people to be put to death (officially at least) in 1953. I would guess that Julian Assange gets much better food, treatment, visitation and access to communications compared to what he would in a federal prison. Snowden as well.
Does anyone remember post 2000 when NSA stood for No Such Agency? It was actually before that. But it seems like they've almost become a bad joke since around 2000. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence, but ever since DHS was formed and everything was to be shared, the intelligence community leaks like a sieve.
I'm inclined to cut Snowden some slack for two reasons. First, he took pains to release the information in as responsible a way as possible. Second, what he exposed was a pile of crimes against the American people (whether technically legal or not). It has been a long time since I studied the Manning incident, but my recollection is that he was trying to hurt America by casting wartime battlefield events as if they should be held to peaceful homeland standards.
If I were President, I'd offer Snowden a deal where he can return home and serve 13 months under house arrest for stealing secrets in exchange for a pardon of everything else.
If I were Emperor, or had an agreeable Congress, I'd also make it a capital offense to abuse government against the American people as a whole or American citizens individually - including spying, IRS bullshit, etc.
See that "Preview" button?
... and yet leaking is almost never punished, much less prosecuted.
If you want to see why, look at one of the few cases of leaking that *was* prosecuted: Scooter Libby's leaking of the fact Valerie Plame was an active CIA agent. Note that his sentence was commuted by the president he served.
That's because despite leaking being characterized as disloyal, often it's the exact opposite. I'm not just talking about planted information, I'm talking about leaks that arise out of internal differences in strategy and policy. The insiders who do this aren't trying to sabotage the administration, they're trying to steer it using public pressure. And while embarrassment is often part of that pressure, leaks by insiders are usually carefully measured to limit damage. And given the infrequency with which they are punished I have to assume that insider are also careful about choosing their battles.
What's coming out of the Trump Administration feels different, more disloyal, and gratuitously embarrassing. It smacks of people out to personally undermine their colleagues.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Whose fault it that? It's the Times. You know there was a time when the press genuinely considered if there was a social good to publishing secret information. Now the only question is, could this possibly make the administration look bad? Print it.
Whether I like it or not, whether you like it or not, Donald Trump is the duly elected President of the United States of America.
This is a problem with the press, with their knowing, deliberate and systematic distortion of events, their malignant omission of facts , their supression of any counter-argument which happens to be effective, their misuse and abuse of unnamed sources, the total elision of local, natinoal and world events which would in any way contravene their preferred narrative.
What we're witnessing is the death throes of the MSM. The New World Order looks like citizens exposing fake documents based on a font. It looks like citizens hunting down terrorist professors by their eyebrows. It looks like people deserting the organs of officialdom, the universities and the MSM with their Fake ledes and their Fake social sciences, and their Fake degrees and their Fake labor shortages, their Fake immigration numbers, their Fake crime statistics, their Fake voter registrations , their Fake accusations of racism and sexism and nazism, their Fake phobias, and their Fake polls.
People are choosing to put the time and effort into educating each other, informing each other, and committing to a disintermediated, disinterested pursuit of truth, previously knowns as Western Civilization.
The NYTimes, like the rest of the MSM. like the university system , the entire industrial-liberal complex , which cannot say Islamofascism, which cannot say clash of world views is an adult-free cult of groupthink committed only to hurting this administration, even if it means a terrorist attack is made more likely by their actions, even if it means little girls get blown to bits.
They are a self-hating death cult and they need to need to have their deepest wish fulfilled.
The White House Staff wouldn't know the name of the Libyan suicide bomber: that had to come from one of the TLA agencies. The White House staff leaks have been about each other - Jared about Bannon, Priebus about Jared & so on
I suspect that's the policy going forward. As it stands, the UK has already now decided it will not be doing any free information sharing over the Manchester suicide attack, and so far as I'm aware, that's the first time that such a suspension between these two allies has ever happened, or at least has ever been publicly acknowledged. This is the damage the leaky Trump administration is doing, so my assumption going forward is that the three letter agencies, to maintain critical intelligence links with close allies like Britain and Israel, will now know longer be making such information readily available to the President. In other words, the process of sidelining President Trump has begun. Within a few months, impeachment will likely be irrelevant, as he'll be left with little real power, and he'll be like Ronald Reagan and Woodrow Wilson were in the final years in the presidency; figureheads while subordinates take on the role of the functional presidency.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.