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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Like Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine...

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.

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.

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