[FRIAM] Trump, truth, and politics: Why do we still think Trump is acting with respect to the truth?

[Prof David West]

Exactly why does anyone believe anything the "intelligence" community
asserts to be the "truth?"


Two concrete reasons I doubt their veracity at the moment: 1) I have met
several members of Cozy Bear (when I was in Moscow the week before the
election) who readily admit the DNC hack and demonstrated many others.
They also expressed frustration that they had not been able to hack
Donald - because he does not use email or much tech at all - except
twitter. Cozy bear is not a state agency and although the state is aware
of their existence and ignores it as long as their actions are outside
of Russia. It is at most state ignored/tolerated and most definitely not
state or state sponsored. 2) the power utility laptop reported as part
of some "Grizzly Steppe" Russian cyber warfare initiative. Intelligence
community said that they had code fragments to prove it. In reality the
only thing on the laptop was an IP address associated with a
"suspicious" site in Russia.


BTW - it is well known that almost the entire power grid is infected
with malware (Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and even North Korean) and has
been for the past 5-10 years. Just as the power grids of those countries
are infected with US malware. MAD has moved from nuclear to electric.


davew







On Wed, Jan 4, 2017, at 08:48 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

> CNN's home page is taken to clustering stories. In their big cover
> story at the moment, The main headline is that Trump mocks
> intelligence agencies over the claims regarding Russian hacking.
> "Mocks" is a not-egregious interpretations of thing things Trump has
> said, so that seems like straightforward reporting. A subheading says
> that Assange claims he did not get at-issue emails he posted to
> Wikileaks from Russia. This is still relatively straightforward
> reporting. What Assange stated was that he did not get the emails from
> a state or state actor, which (if true) still leaves open the
> possibility that person who performed the hack was Russian or someone
> in Russia at the time. The final headline in the cluster is "Ex-CIA
> spokesman: Trump believes Julian Assange over the CIA[1]".
> 

> The latter headline (and associated story) ports in an odd assumption
> not present in the prior stories: The assumption that Trump's
> statements are with respect to the truth of the situation. I'm not
> sure why that is still a thing people are thinking.
> 

> In contrast with that, I would say - based on the previous stories and
> other associated reports, and Trump's general behavior - that Trump's
> statements regarding Russian hacking evidences only that he thinks the
> best way to play the situation is to not publically blame Russia. That
> seems like a reasonable play, regardless of what Trump thinks and who
> he trusts. I can't see anything Trump would gain by publicly blaming
> Russia, and it is also unclear to me what the U.S. would have to gain
> by Trump publicly blaming Putin. If Trump thinks they hacked the DNC,
> one would think he would ask the spy communities and the diplomatic
> communities for advice about how to handle that behind the scenes,
> countering spycraft with spycraft. There is nothing for an incoming
> president to gain by trying to call Putin out, in public, with scant
> evidence, the details of which would be inaccessible to most of the
> public anyway. (CNN was recently called out for running a story about
> Russian hacking that used pictures for the video game Fallout 4,
> presumably because they thought people would connect with that as a
> representation of what "hacking" looked like.) Even if the
> intelligence community had iron clad proof, that everyone could
> understand and believe beyond a reasonable doubt (which they don't),
> it would only heighten questions about the legitimacy of Trump's win.
> At this point, that wouldn't be a win for Trump, or the country.
> 

> Are we really going to get four years of the media trying to treat
> everything Trumps says as if it is a factual claim he deeply believes?
> Was this ever a viable assumption for any president? Were are the
> commentaries we would see if it were any other (recent) president,
> talking about how he might or might not believe it, but he's backed
> into a political corner, and is probably making the right move?
> 

> 

> 

> 

> -----------

> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.

> Supervisory Survey Statistician

> U.S. Marine Corps

> 

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Links:

  1. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/politics/george-little-trump-tweet-assange/index.html
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