[vienna]

Originally Posted by u crank

Perhaps you didn't notice but the first two quotes are from the same article previously quoted. You asked for 'some refutation of the facts' from that article it so I gave it to you.

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...and what exactly are those verifiable facts supposed to be in the quote you gave? All I see are opiniions without substance to back them up (cites, references, etc.)...

Originally Posted by u crank

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As for the quote by Murray, it was not made in reference to Mayer's article. Again, perhaps you didn't notice..new paragraph and the header...



I'm well aware of when it was written but that has nothing to do with why I quoted a part of it. I noticed you made much of other parts of Murray's article but no comment on the section I quoted. Any thoughts?

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Any thoughts? Yes, indeed: you tried to used an outdated article with outdated "facts" to address a current issue, not exactly a good course of action. If you want to argue the here and now, argue it with the here and now; otherwise its like trying to do chemistry with an outdated Periodical Table or navigating a changed city with an outdated map....

As for this:

Quote:
A private company had minute by minute intelligence on the Manchurian Candidate scheme and all the indictable illegal activity that was going on, which the CIA/NSA/GCHQ/MI6 did not have, despite their specific tasking and enormous technical, staff and financial resources amounting between them to over 150,000 staff and the availability of hundreds of billions of dollars to do nothing but this.

A private western company is able to run a state level intelligence operation in Russia for years, continually interviewing senior security sources and people personally close to Putin, without being caught by the Russian security services – despite the fact the latter are brilliant enough to install a Manchurian candidate as President of the USA. This private western company can for example secretly interview staff in top Moscow hotels – which they themselves say are Russian security service controlled – without the staff being too scared to speak to them or ending up dead. They can continually pump Putin’s friends for information and get it.

I had thought it is quite apparent many nations, not just the US, Russia, China, etc., make wide and very substantial use of private security companies as sources of and for the collection of intelligence of interest to their concerns. Many times, a private concern will be far more informed about possible threats than the institutional governmental agencies; the mere fact Fusion/GPS developed as much intel on the shady dealings and criminality of some of those involved with the Trump campaign and/or administration as they did while the US Federal agencies were seemingly in the dark speaks to that reality. Governments have long depended on 'third-party' intel to supplement and reinforce their own agencies' efforts, in some cases actually 'hiring' private firms to do intelligence gathering the governmental agencies cant't accomplish, for a variety of reasons. Did it ever occur to Murray, or you, that Russia may have (in my opinion, must have) had a good knowledge of Fusion/GPS' activities and chose to allow them to proceed because they saw those activities as a means of gathering intel for themselves?; intel such as exactly who on the Russian side is talking and what are they saying and what are their connections to possibly exploitable opportunities. Sometimes you don't bust the junkie if his activities might lead you to the dealer(s)...

[/QUOTE]

Originally Posted by u crank

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Finally one more gem from Mayer's piece.

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She should be writing satire for The Onion.

Well, at least it got you to actually read something you want to criticize...

Well, let's see who Jane Mayer is (from her New Yorker bio):

Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1995. She covers politics, culture, and national security for the magazine. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent. She is the author of the 2016 Times best-seller "Dark Money," which the Times named as one of the ten best books of the year, and which began as a 2010 New Yorker piece about the Koch brothers’ deep influence on American politics. She also wrote the 2008 Times best-seller “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” which was based on her New Yorker articles and was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and one of the ten best books of the year by the Times. She is the co-author, with Jill Abramson, of “Strange Justice,” and, with Doyle McManus, of “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988.” In 2009, Mayer was chosen as Princeton University’s Ferris Professor of Journalism. Her numerous honors include the George Polk Prize, the John Chancellor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goldsmith Book Prize; the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, two Helen Bernstein Book Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Sidney Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, and, most recently, the Frances Perkins Prize for Courage.

Not a bad resume, at all and one I would trust over a niche blogger who rants rather than reports...


Regarding Obama and the situation he faced about the intel on Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 elections, here is a 23 June 2017 article about the details behind Obama's reluctance to act:


Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault --

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...=.9417b9c6a1b2















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