U.S. pauses intelligence sharing with Ukraine used for strikes on Russia
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
- Whether or not US intel agencies (or foreign proxies) will be leaking intelligence to Ukraine.
- Given what I’ve previously mentioned[1] as the unbelievably strong US intel penetration of Russian institutions, the likelihood that sources, and most especially HUMINT sources, will be disclosed to Russia. That would of course be catastrophic at multiple levels, and with enduring consequences.
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Notes:
1. For example <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31480538> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41273077>.
* is it possible, on principle, for a POTUS to be a Russian agent?
* if yes to above, what actions would such a POTUS take?
* how do Trump's actions differ?
It's much more likely that he his completely incompetent and inapt, espacially if he gets his advices from Musk and Vance
Were Musk and Vance key influencers there? If not, what elements are constant?
This is what's going on ^, people like you and me cannot agree on anything because whatever happens truth has no value whatsoever, there are two groups of people, being fed two flavors of reality
For that matter, what is your argument? You're being quite vague.
> How does his behaviour in this administration differ markedly from his first?
Was there a government purge during the first term ? Did we have 20 years old non vetted civilians getting access to critical systems ? Did we have the entire tech sector rallying behind trump ? Did we have a foreign billionaire melding with internal politics straight from the oval office ?
No, we had an old man selling cans of beans from the oval office: https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f1091ef3075b61a6e553443/...
We had people who mistook the "Four Seasons Hotel" with "Four Seasons Total Landscaping": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ee/Four_Seasons_...
It was a clown show with minor influence on the long term direction of the US and the world, it's hardly comparable to what we're witnessing right now.
The US media supportive of the present administration are a distinct anomaly globally.
There were numerous signs of pro-Russian sentiments in the first term, as well as a well-documented set in the Mueller report (see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Conspiracy_or_c...> for an overview), misrepresentations and denials notwithstanding. Your list is grossly deficient and spurious.
That could have been presented far more succinctly than with a meandering interview.
And is a topic I'm quite familiar with.
Countermeasure: cheap, fast, regret-free rejection:
ok but one of the bubbles lives in reality, and the information bombardment is of things that actually happen.
the other bubble is mostly just hateful delusion
things like immediately reversing course on military support for the only country at war with Russia? things like torching relationships with our closest allies we've spent decades, if not centuries building?
things like repeatedly and publicly praising Putin? things like both ex-KGB officers and current UK legislators publicly stating the possibility?
things like everything in this article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
I don't know why you think it's quite so far fetched. it's not a certainty but at this point I would say the preponderance of evidence calls it "likely"
America has a tremendous interest in not being at war with the world’s second largest nuclear power. We also have no interest in sacrificing good relations with Russia for the sake of Ukraine.
No problem sacrificing good relations with Canada, Europe, China, the entire Arab world, though... The mental gymnastic people go through lol
Lot's of americans and europeans are fan of Putin, because "he tells it how it is", he doesn't like gays, &c. Trump is a simple mind so it's not really surprising. He also sucks Saudi's and Israeli's balls all day long for the same reasons
Russia has been invading Ukraine for _14 years_, first under Obama/Biden then under Biden/Harris. Clinton was secretary of state. And the west continues to buy gas from them, etc.
Maybe there's some 4d chess I'm missing but feels like gaslighting on how tough we've supposedly been on Russia aside from Trump.
I don't really understand the rest of your comment, since it sounds like you haven't been reading the news since 2022.
If so, why didn't Putin mount a full invasion in 2016-2020? Why wait until 2022 when the supposedly tough Biden administration (which included veterans from the 2011 Crimea invasion)? It feels like gaslighting that, at minimum, we've been nothing but soft and ineffectual on Russia the entire time.
One possible explanation is that Russia is a petro-state. The average oil price between 2010 and 2014 was about $130/barrel. Then in a few short months it dropped by 50% and stayed there until this day (with a short exception around the start of the invasion when it was above $100 for about half a year).
[1]https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
In regards to the timing of the two Russian invasions, perhaps Putin felt those were his best chances to make such moves.
The first time when Russia invaded Crimea on February 20, 2014 was because of the Maidan Revolution. At the time Ukrainian government was a mess. The then Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, who was an ally of Putin, was to be ousted on the next day of the Russian invasion and eventually fled to Russia.
As for the timing when Russia invaded Ukraine again on February 24, 2022, I think one of the reasons was because of US troops chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan happened a few months ago. And after that, the US would be politically unlikely to get itself involved directly in another overseas war so soon; and Putin hoped this time it would be a blitzkrieg coup, and then he could replace Zelensky with a puppet president.
I am not saying that Putin intentionally invaded Ukraine at a time when Trump was or wasn't in office; I only feel that these are two very opportune moments for Putin to seize, which both happened to be at times when Trump was not in office.
The US helped support Ukraine for several years. That was nice. Someone else can now redirect domestic resources to that cause. We've had our turn.
The real question is who benefits from the tall apocalyptic tales told to taxpayers that if families part with their dollars to at least equally corrupt foreign lands, they will be safer from the evil russians. It's not clear to me that the international meddling of the US this century has performed the claims of the war cries, and we're exhausted of servicing them.
.... discredited by whom, might I ask? possibly discredited by those it investigated?
it was just a prank, bro!
> However, the House Intelligence Committee, then controlled by Republicans, released in 2017 a report that stated that the Russia investigation had not started from information in the Steele dossier, but from information that the FBI received on George Papadopoulos.
Do not draw a false equivalence between a private investigation self-admitted by Steele to be an unverified "starting point for further investigation" [2] and an official completed US investigation created by Republican Rod Rosenstein, led by Republican Robert Mueller. Republican William Barr, after preemptively declining to charge obstruction of justice, declining to release the executive summaries of the Mueller investigation to Congress, and omitting multiple details about whether Trump's actions were knowing vs. unknowing, still affirmed ten instances of potential obstruction [1][3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/mueller-report-recounts-10-e...
You're a physician, your patient is running a fever of 42°C, that's very quickly going to become fatal. Do you administer antipyretics and cold compresses now, or do you debate the likely causes, and attempt the root cause analysis?
The fist thing the doctor would do would likely be place their hand on the patients forehead and then take additional readings to confirm the prognosis.
Last thing you would want to do is cold plunge a patient when instrumentation has extreme bias.
This is known as rejecting the hypothetical. The only time it's a good faith argument is after you've agreed with the conclusion.
If you do agree with the argument, you should cite something verifiable that the white house has done that's incompatible with the original assertion. Which is the actions are indistinguishable from an ideal agent. Do you have any provable examples?
All of the actions that have currently taken place.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47630
Goes in to very good detail how Trump could be an agent. At this stage it's hard not assume so.
One of the keys of tradecraft is to convince people to assist a specific contracted officer (that is, a direct employee of an intelligence service) without necessarily being part of the service, or even aware of doing its bidding.
On usage within the CIA, specifically between "agent" and "asset":
An intelligence asset is an individual who provides information and services to the CIA but is not officially paid or technically controlled by them. An agent, on the other hand, is someone who officially works for the CIA. They are paid by the CIA and are under their relative control as an employee.
<https://rdctd.pro/cia-agents-versus-cia-assets/>
Interestingly enough, the CIA's own nomenclature is ... less clear:
Asset: a clandestine source; an agent.
<https://www.cia.gov/resources/spy-glossary/>
Either way, the relevant discussion is whether or not the subject is, knowingly/intentionally or otherwise, assisting a hostile power. And there's strong circumstantial evidence that this is the case, sufficient to be the topic of international chatter, e.g.,
"Tory MP: Trump is a ‘Russian asset’"
<https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/tory-mp-trump-is-a-russi...>
Paywall: <https://archive.is/k8Dr2>
I think it's good to try to be clear about Russian influence because they are so sneaky with it. Like with Brexit - the leave campaign was basically funded by the Russians but how it was done, probably is there was a businessman, Banks with a struggling business. He got befriended by the Russians and someone connected to them put tens of millions of investment into his business. He then funded leave and can claim it's all his UK sourced money. The actual money came through an opaque offshore trust in a secrecy enforcing tax haven so you can't prove it.
Probably Trump's dealings are similar - he has business issues which were sorted by Russian investment in an opaque way with favours down the line. Banks wife it seems by the way was an actual Russian agent ie recruited and paid salary by the Russian services.
That's not always the case, and omerta, (virtue/loyalty) signalling, and the like, also have value, but those most often move up, from lower ranks to higher. That is, it's the lower ranks which are interested in signalling virtue, trustworthiness, and/or loyalty to some boss.
A centralised intelligence service, state or otherwise, tends to operate clandestinely (often represented in name or descriptions, e.g., "clandestine operations" or "clandestine agency", etymology "secret, hidden", see: <https://www.etymonline.com/word/clandestine>). These also operate within existing control centres (hence, the everlasting problem of determining trust and institutional loyalty within government and other organisations, and the problem of moles or turncoats), and along existing social fracture, ideological, or affinity points (e.g., racist or nationalistic rhetoric, claiming religious preference, or narratives which people both want to believe and which act as "cold readings" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading) or "dog whistles" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)), where meanings may be fluidly interpreted according to audience background (this has long been a staple of Middle Eastern rhetoric, from both Israeli and Arabic camps, as well as of course numerous others), or where the actual meaning is, again, covert and clandestine, but apparent to the intended audience.
Of course, apologists for a side employing these tactics will point to all these obfuscations as proof of innocence, when they are in fact key elements of the offensive. What often reveals this is leaks of internal discussion which emphasise such points, or of words and deeds at odds. History of corporate disinformation (lead, asbestos, mercury, pollution generally, CFS/ozone depletion, cigarettes, alcohol, automobile safety, fossil fuels/global warming) reveal many such cases, see Oreskes and Conway's Merchants of Doubt for numerous examples and tells: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt>.
Awareness of such methods dates back to Aristotle and his Sophistical Refutations, essentially a guide to identifying and combatting bullshit: <https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html>.
[1] Precedent: The Iraq War
Removing material support to an enemy of the controlling agency also has great value.
Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, Rivalship, Interest, Humour or Caprice?
[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--how-does...
<https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-doc...>
Please cite and clearly delimit your quotes.