Pentagon Expands Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS Surge | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Expands Inquiry Into Intelligence on ISIS Surge

nytimes.com

43 pointsrandomname231 comments

People tend to think of there being a unified "US government", but the reality is that there's a large number of mostly separate organizations connected only loosely by a theme. Sometimes they lie to each other. Sometimes they lie to the politicians in Washington, who are nominally in charge but who seem to have less real power with every passing year.

God I wish more people knew this and understood that it's a feature, not a bug of our system.

In this case, that message is not quite exact because MAJCOM commanders have the POTUS as their boss. But between state governors, POTUS, Congrees and the Judiciary, there is an intentional and functional disconnect.

Federalism is great when your side benefits from it.

Not totally sure what your meaning here is. All frameworks of government could be put in your statement in place of Federalism and it would still be true.

To the citizens of nations that are being bullied by those organisations it's NOT a feature.

Right, but the concerns of those citizens quite frankly aren't a primary concern of the United States.

Governments that maintain such shortsighted positions will eventually find themselves superseded on the world stage.

Odd comment, in this context. Have you read the article?

I'm curious, do you have any examples to point to?

It's based on intuition and is only a response to the direct parent comment. If the US of .3 billion people ignores the needs of 6.7 billion people, eventually those people will find a way to escape the needs of the US.

I'll note that the HN article title used to be significantly different, so some of the conversation makes less sense without the "accused of lying to the president" in the title.

The US itself?

That's an incredibly dehumanising way of viewing the world. A view I guess is shared by the ones who conducts your tortures and carries out your murders. Shame on you.

Can you point me to any government in the world that cares more about non-citizens than it does about its own citizens?

That's not what the comment said. The word "more" wasn't used.

The original comment was "the concerns of those citizens quite frankly aren't a primary concern of the United States".

Right, that's basically saying that the US should care about other countries' citizens, not that they should care more about other countries' citizens.

I guess we just disagree on what that sentence is saying then. To me it says not that the US should care about non-citizens, but that, as a baseline, it cares about its own citizens more than it does about non-citizens.

> on you

Many Americans did not choose their burden and instead were born into it. Shame should be placed somewhere, but I think this person's got nothing to do with it.

Separation of powers is a feature; however, since we do have essentially feudal, warring states of government power, we also need to be aware of their infights and lies, and that they should trust the government no more than they would trust their neighbor, because the government is their neighbors.

And, yet, having been in dozens of states and many different rural, suburban, and urban areas, the U.S. is surprisingly homogenized. All that unnecessary political conflict, posturing, and inefficiency, just so we citizens feel like a good fight was won when we get our same crappy, mediocre policies, laws, and regulations.

It would be so nice if states / localities actually were somewhat different. Then, we could at least experiment and see the real effects of different policies.

FBI versus John Kennedy is one of those moments.

Not the assassination part. I mean the communist mistress part.

One funny example of this is that the US Government both funds and works to defeat Tor simultaneously.

Summary: US Central Command is accused of lying to the President and Congress about airstrikes and the ground fight against ISIS, obscuring the fact that America’s strategy to combat ISIS simply was not effective, as "senior officials" at Centcom were determined to "overstate the progress of American airstrikes against ISIS."

In September, The Guardian reported that the tendency for Centcom to provide upbeat assessments of the fight against ISIS may have been influenced by James Clapper (Director of national intelligence), who was "said to talk nearly every day with Grove – 'which is highly, highly unusual', according to a former intelligence official." (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/10/james-clapper...)

I don't understand why anyone would be surprised by this. This is par for the course in intelligence. The intelligence agencies exist to provide whatever fiction those in power wish to hear. In the 80s, the CIA determined that the USSR was a paper tiger destined for collapse. But Reagan wanted an enemy. So the higher-ups at the CIA took the report by the head of their USSR division and threw it away, crafting their own fictional representation of the USSR as a powerhouse. This is why every major world event comes as a huge surprise to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. It doesn't surprise any of the analysts working there, they actually know what is going on most of the time. But because the truth is not politically convenient, the agency as a whole cannot be made to seem like a danger to the political machinations of those who influence their funding. Some of the gymnastics this involves are sometimes funny. Reading the CIAs reports on Iran's 'nuclear weapons program', for instance, are an adventure in absurdism. Pile after pile of pages of extensive descriptions of total knowledge of Iran's operations culminating in not a single shred of evidence of any weapons program gets topped off with "but then again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There could be a super-duper-extra-top-secret weapons program buried 50 miles underground" which gives the politicos and media the ability to report it as "CIA says Iran may have secret weapons program in new report!"

Oh, and that head of the CIAs USSR division whose report showing the truth of the USSRs weakness was Aldritch Aimes. It was at that point that he realized the intelligence game was a sham and just being used to lend an air of mystique and 'secret knowledge' to whatever position those in power want to make seem legitimate and decided if everyone else was just playing a game, he might as well play to, and cut a deal with the Russians to act as a double agent.

The article says intelligence/Centcom lied to the President and to Congress, how exactly is this is par for the course?

I think the leadup to the Iraq war taught us everything we need to know about the CIA. They're appointed by the executive. They report to the executive. Yet every other branch of government relies on their assessments.

The CIA is merely a tool by which the President leads Congress around by the nose. It's their job to lie. What's harder to understand is why Congress continually falls for whatever they're selling.

It wouldn't suprise me to learn the Obama administration downplayed ISIS purposefully. Nothing builds a coalition like a common enemy, and apart from some disagreements over targeting, the key players (Iran, Russia, Europe, Turkey) are coordinating efforts to destroy ISIS. Economic necesssity requires the US defense establishment to downsize, and after decades of costly wars in the middle east, there really is no option but to let others lead this fight.

I suspect the administration is now rebuilding and retooling for high intensity conflict, and that Syria/ISIS is a distraction the US doesn't need but a conflict that requires regional actors to form a coalition. To which: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-22/russia-cal...

Since operations in Iraq are just a government fraud / boondoggle by the Pentagon and it's incestuous corporate leeches, this bad attempt at coverup isn't surprising

Is this not treasonous?

What person, owing allegiance to the US, is levying war against them or giving their enemies aid or comfort?

Since we call whistleblowers traitors, maybe we should call yes men traitors too.

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