Peter Bergen: No, President-elect Trump: Russian hacking is not like the CIA's WMD fiasco

[spanone]

(CNN)President-elect Donald Trump says that he doesn't believe the US intelligence community's assessment that the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was the work of the Russians. To bolster his point, Trump cites the CIA's faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In a statement about the CIA that he issued late last month, Trump said, "These are the same people who said Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." On Sunday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump made this point again to reporters, saying, "if you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster and they were wrong."

But there are some significant differences between the CIA's weapons of mass destruction fiasco 14 years ago and the evidence that is now being offered by the American intelligence community about the Russian hacking.

The WMD fiasco did much to harm the standing of the George W. Bush administration and its key figures, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, who famously made the case for the impending Iraq War to the United Nations. The war resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions in wasted US spending, and fomented chaos that continues in the Middle East. It was such a black eye for US intelligence that large changes were made to the process of making intelligence assessments.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/opinions/russian-hacking-is-not-another-cia-fiasco-like-iraq-wmd-bergen/index.html

[Trust Buster]

1. The Bin Laden intelligence was spot on. Notice how Republicans hold us responsible for their

phony pax-Americana strategy that actually ignored any intelligence that conflicted with their strategy ? See Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.

[TeddyBear 1]

2. most on the right..

Are not taking hacking serious and making fun of it now.. they do not think it is a big deal.. Like it is a big joke now..

[Martin Eden]

3. Bush didn't invade Iraq on the basis of "faulty" intelligence

Cheney and the White House Iraq Group pressured the agencies and manipulated the intel to fit a decision that had already been made.

Additionally, they ignored the dissents & caveats and deliberately misrepresented the available intel in their false marketing campaign to sell the war to Congress and the American people.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

5. EXACTLY! THIS!

The Office of Historical Revisionism has been working overtime to make Americans forget about the last Republican (mis-)Administration. Those of us paying attention back then knew what was going on.

[TheBlackAdder]

4. Only one of the dozen and a half analysis reports suggested that, the others refuted. Cherrypicking.

.


Most every report said that if Saddam was working on a bomb, it was years off, and would not be used against the US unless we attacked and there were grave losses on the Iraqi side. Only one report said that he might have it, and that's the one Cheney and GWB picked to use. In the Intel Community, it's called cherrypicking.

.

[bigtree]

6. k&r