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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Let me be the first to welcome people with more diverse substance abuse problems to our beloved secret police. My greatest regret is that I can only declare a mere hour of applause for their great personal sacrifices and worthily earned pensions.

Tbh, I kind of liked the idea that decriminalization and liberal attitudes were starving them for talent.

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Spying prevents war. It's easier to get into a war if you don't really understand each other. Not to mention if you don't know who has missiles pointed at you.

Like Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine...

Yes, the first two were caused by Cheney ignoring CIA advice and the third was caused by Putin doing the equivalent.

Are you claiming the US shouldn't help Ukraine know where the missiles being shot at their civilians are coming from?

CIA said 4 days RUS will be in Kiev! Honestly, CIA has one of the worst human intel. My only hope is these pot-heads in their hope of scoring some weed would actually learn the local languages.

I'm saying spying doesn't really seem to prevent war in the modern era. When inconvenient, intelligence gets ignored. When it lines up with the party narrative, it gets exaggerated and used to fan the flames, then thrown back under the bus after the dust settles.

Meanwhile all that capability gets turned against us, surveilling US citizens instead.

Who is pointing the CIA and NRO at you?

The CIA.

They have a history of attacking American citizens for constitutionally protected acts like anti-war activism.

Why specifically them? The article mentions the NSA as well, which has done its fair share of domestic spying. As a taxpayer, it doesn't really matter to me how those lines are drawn, how budget/intel/personnel flow between them, what they call a mass surveillance program in any given decade, etc. In my short life, they've failed to prevent an attack, failed to prevent two major wars of false pretenses, failed to foresee, much less prevent, a major Russian invasion...

Has the intelligence community, regardless of agency, actually prevented any recent wars? Or why do you believe that "spying prevents war"?

> failed to foresee, much less prevent, a major Russian invasion...

They absolutely did foresee it, we spent months announcing everything Russia was going to do before they did it. It's actually a brand new strategy Biden tried; usually we'd keep everything to ourself to protect how we got the info.

But it didn't prevent it because nothing would have except assassinating Putin. That would be pretty destabilizing too!

That's a fair point.

If the Russians listened to American intelligence, or hell, their own intelligence instead of wishful thinking, they wouldn't be the second-best army in Ukraine right now.

The director of the CIA went to Moscow and tried to get the Russians to see sense. Ah well. I guess having intelligence is not the same as acting intelligently.

I don't think spying is the only thing these agencies do. Try asking Guatamala, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, the list just goes on.

The United States is constantly at war.

If spying prevents war, it's not working. LOL...

No, we're not in a war. Thanks Biden.

What's your counterfactual?

Proxy wars are still wars.

Tell that to all our infantry who aren't in any danger. Selling used military equipment is not being at war.

US weapons, US intel, US alliances and organizations... I doubt Russia looks at it and thinks "Oh, OK, the US is totally not involved. They're our friends!"

Even when we're not actively sending troops, we're busy making enemies for the next war...

they regularly declared the US was their primary enemy well before invading Ukraine, and actively leveraged aggressive information and political influence operations to destabilize the US

there is no "making enemies for the next war" -- they were always enemies

Tell this to the loved ones left behind by those killed in "not war".

Who?

They've just off-shored the lives lost. It's not any different than off-shoring manufacturing and poisoning some third world country with the waste chemicals and runoff instead of the homeland.

The lives are being lost because Russians are shooting at them. They're the ones who decided to do that.

"Proxy war" implies the US put Ukraine up to this. The US did not. Russia put Ukraine up to it by invading them.

The US has had a heavy hand in this situation for a decade. You can argue that it's the right thing to do, but it's not like the US just got involved once Russia invaded.

> The US has had a heavy hand in this situation for a decade. You can argue that it's the right thing to do, but it's not like the US just got involved once Russia invaded.

It’s worth remembering that this war actually started close to a decade ago and not in 2022.

Based on that it does sound like the US got involved around the time Russia invaded.

I mean, a decade ago Ukraine was de facto Russian territory.

If by that you mean Paul Manafort helped install a Russian puppet as president who was ousted by the Ukrainian people, then you could argue that, but Ukraine is a sovereign and has been since the 90s. Your argument is the same as Putin's, claiming it isn't an invasion because Ukraine is Russia's!

This has gotta be the most intellectually dishonest comment I've ever read.

Nobody trusts U.S. intelligence agencies anymore, bro. Whatever.

You may want to look up WW1 & WW2 or even Ukraine ...

The US isn't in war. No declarations have been made. No draft is required. No war shortages exist.

Oh, man, is this what the future looks like? We provide the weapons, get other countries to do the fighting, wash our hands clean of the whole thing and call our global adventures not-wars as long as we can still buy gas and toilet paper? Somehow, this euphemistic imperialism of proxy wars feels even sketchier... at least the old empires were honest about their intent.

Today it's Ukraine, tomorrow Taiwan, and then what, back to the Koreas and the Middle East? Our constant involvement in cyclical non-wars sure doesn't feel the same as "peace" to me. Maybe that word just doesn't mean what I think it does anymore. Or maybe we have our tentacles in so many places that warmaking and peacemaking have become indistinguishable.

I guess as long as it's not Americans in body bags, we're in the clear? The world is our mercenary. But even that won't last long, I'm willing to bet. The world's not getting any stabler, and our competitors aren't just sitting idle.

> I guess as long as it's not Americans in body bags, we're in the clear?

More American private military contractors died in Afghanistan than American military. I don't think anyone noticed.

So I'd amend that to "American troops in body bags".

You can call a spade a spade but if you did a hole with a backhoe that backhole doesn't magically become a spade.

I'm a bit confused on how you think the USA got Ukraine to do the fighting considering Russia invaded (did USA pay off Russia to invade?). But regardless, yes Ukraine is at war and USA is not. It's just like if I drove to the dry cleaners and had them wash something. I didn't wash it; I'm not a dry cleaner. Playing the dry cleaners money or etc doesn't change that fact.

> Our constant involvement in cyclical non-wars sure doesn't feel the same as "peace" to me. Maybe that word just doesn't mean what I think it does anymore

I mean my whole argument is that you're using war to describe something that isn't so I guess this makes two of us.

> Or maybe we have our tentacles in so many places that warmaking and peacemaking have become indistinguishable.

Yes, because the USA is not at war. Russia warmakes with Ukraine so Ru & UA are at war and efforts by other countries China/USA/etc would likely be peacemaking efforts because China/USA/etc aren't at war. If USA declared war on Russia then it'd be a warmaking effort.

> The world is our mercenary.

Which countries did the USA hire to fight another one? That's also a word not being used correctly.

This is needlessly pedantic. Technically, yes, the United States hasn't "Declared War" in the style of a president standing before congress making a speech. Instead, the country has been engaged in "police actions" authorized by congress, which (at least to me) is a distinction without much of a difference.

> No draft is required.

The draft was re-instituted during Vietnam, so the presence of selective service isn't an indicator for being "in a war". To this day every adult male of draftable age is only an itchy trigger finger away from being called up

> No war shortages exist.

the powers-that-be have been placing a good amount of blame for "supply chain issues" on the war in Ukraine. "Supply chain issues" being newspeak for "shortages".

A war shortage would be because we're using our resources to produce war equipment. We have chip shortages because Russia is attacking Ukraine so they can't export neon gas to chip fabs. That's not something we're doing.

And "supply chain issues" obviously aren't the same thing as "shortages"; a traffic jam at the port is a supply chain issue.

lmfaooo, "weapons of mass destruction" anybody?

US intelligence did not support Bush's wars, which is why they had to go and make up new intelligence in order to start them.

They did. The CIA in their NIE rated high confidence in the continued existence of Iraq's WMD program. 'High confidence' is intel speak for 'confident enough to go to war over'.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/259216899/Iraq-October-2002-NIE-o...

Calling pot "a substance abuse problem" goes to show how politically you feel about this.

That’s genuinely stupid. Do you apply the same to people that imbibe?

My goodness.

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