Editorial,
The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion
12.31.2016
I saw a meme on Facebook
today. It highlighted the weirdness of the political mood in the United States
today. It suggested that a large segment of the population who voted for the
T-Rump, Donald Trump, trust Vladimir Putin, and the Russians more than they do
the intelligence agency charged with keeping our country safe.
It is a bizarre
development. Polling suggests that at least 35% of people who voted for T-Rump,
which is about twenty-one million people, or 6.5% of the total population of
the country, believe that Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, and current
strong-man dictator of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is more
trustworthy, and more interested in the wellbeing of Americans that the CIA.
Even some sitting members
of congress have taken up this line of reasoning, as have many high level
republican operatives working with or for the burgeoning T-Rump administration.
I never thought
presidential leadership could be so persuasive. Out of a desire to publicly
back the president elect, millions of people who voted for him and dozens of
high level party officials who hope to work with or for him, have abandoned
decades of cultural conditioning in order to embrace the line of reasoning that
suggests Russia is a better friend to us than our own intelligence services.
The world has slipped its
moorings.
This week a report was
issued jointly by the FBI and the CIA, indicating the degree to which the
Russians attacked our cybernetic security infrastructure, hacking into banks,
political party offices, targeted individuals, and even state run utilities.
Those two agencies gave
an official report about the people involved the techniques they used and even
spoke to their motivation. President Obama leveled far reaching sanctions
against members of the Russian government. They ordered the removal of
thirty-five diplomats from the country.
Many members of the T-Rump
team are upset about this. They are accusing President Obama of trying to
interfere with the incoming administration. Many other analysts on both sides
of the political divide have suggested that the President did T-Rump a favor.
He took action, putting T-Rump in the position of being able to negotiate a new
more favorable position for the Russians in the months and years to come.
President Obama took some
ground away from them, T-Rump can parcel it back out if the Russians behave.
But his team is not seeing it that way. They continue to malign the CIA,
suggesting that the CIA is just playing politics, complaining about President
Obama, while exchanges friendly tweets and letters with the Russians.
It is bizarre.
In moves that smack of
rank partisanship, the T-Rump people continue to focus their suspicion on one intelligence
agency, the CIA, suggesting that this agency is responsible for the false
reports and faulty analysis blaming the Russians. This is a deliberate move,
and every time they make this intimation someone needs to be there to stop
them. It is not the CIA making these allegations; it is the CIA, the FBI and
ten other agencies, along with seven other analytics that are responsible for
this consensus report.
The conundrum I am
experiencing is this. I want to support the position of the Obama Administration,
I want to support the reports provided by our intelligence services, but I do
not want to be placed into a partisan fight where on the one hand the Russians
are the bad guys, and on the other hand we have to trust the CIA.
The CIA has in fact
furnished bad information to the people of the united states in the past. The
CIA, or its operatives, have broken United States laws, international laws, committed
crimes against humanity and many times in their past.
We cannot allow ourselves
to occupy a place where the disjunction is CIA goo, Russia bad. That will not
help us in the long run.
We must, as in all cases,
rely on a preponderance of the evidence, sound analytics, and good information.
All of that speaks to the Russians, and that is enough. We need to follow that
story down to the smallest bits, until we find out just how much the T-Rump
campaign was actually working with the Russian’s all along. I suspect they
were, and the evidence for that is out there.
Let that investigation
begin with Ivanka Trump and her friendship with Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend.
Lets go there.
