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Originally Posted by JiggyMac
I thought the Left laughed at the Intelligence Community's "WMD" assertions. Now they're the good guys?
I alluded to the Iraq war when I mentioned that I think it's reasonable to calibrate one's level of distrust to the significance of the action upon which intelligence is based. However, there are also relevant differences between the two cases. First, there was both less consensus and less public evidence in support of the case for WMD. There was nothing like the leaked NSA documents, or the private security analyses in that case. There were not multiple intelligence agencies making public statements in support of the conclusion, there was basically only the Bush administration. Secondly, there were other legitimate sources of information that contested the conclusion, like Hans Blix and the UN inspectors.
The point about the significance of the action being argued for is still relevant, as well. In 2002, my argument was that rather than supporting an act of war, the contested intelligence supported working with the UN to send weapons inspectors back in. I would also argue now that the available evidence wouldn't support a war with Russia, but it does support further investigation. As I said, I'd want more information to be comfortable with a stronger response than that. However, we weren't arguing about what level of response is justified, we were debating your claim that there was absolutely no evidence.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JiggyMac
I don't think it's as compelling as the CrowdStrike article, but then it is clearly intended to be an outline of security concerns and recommendations related to Russian hacking in general, rather than an analysis of the DNC hack specifically. So for example I don't think the discussion about SQL injection applies to the DNC hack, as far as I understand how that hack was performed. If you want to argue that this document isn't particularly useful that's fine with me, but I don't see how that is relevant to the question about evidence that Russians were involved in the DNC hacks, since the document doesn't provide an argument for that in the first place.