Seeing the R/A of the Canadian foul-mouthed-pissed-off-granny taking the hood off the hood …prompted me to think that granny never was woke, or had to awaken to the fact that bad is bad…..and then I thought of yesterday’s exchange between a mealy mouthed worm in the form of Ned Price, spokesworm of the US Department of State, and AP reporter Matt Lee.
4 +minutes of pure bliss of an AP reporter actually doing his job, being skeptical and asking an authority for “proof”. The Cspan version is longer, but scoll to the back and forth, it’s worth it.
Imagine!
3 replies on “Grannies and AP reporters – A New Hope”
It’s always a problem to openly act on secret information. There’s always the issue of exposing the source of that information.
This isn’t as trivial as some might think. If you expose a source, you lose any future intelligence you might harvest from that source. If that source is deep in the Kremlin or something similar that loss of ongoing information may be catastrophic. You probably get him/her killed too.
Make a habit of that and you will get NO information because no one will help you. Why should they if they know you’re going to burn every source you get? Remember, these are just normal people who happen to be somewhere useful to us. They have families and such just like our guys do. They are not going to help us if they know we’re going to burn them and take down their family when the uglies find out what’s going on.
Sources are not American official persons acting undercover. They are people who are organically involved in the target’s organization. They are ‘turned’ by one of three usual means. Their motivation for helping us is most often either ideological, financial or personal. They either think we’re right and want to help, they get paid a lot of money, or something like revenge or blackmail is involved.
So as they are not our trained agents deftly winkled into the Kremlin or some such but rather just normal people who have access to information we need … They’re not very good at being professional spies either. They have to be taught and learn as they go.
Intelligence tradecraft is a well developed art. The people feeding us information are not trained in tradecraft. The American or allied Intel Officer handling them is the trained professional.
One well known, ubiquitous application of tradecraft is “tagging” information.
How that works is if I want to tell someone something in strictest confidence, I include a ‘juicy little tidbit’ that I only tell that one person. I know they will probably consider that tidbit of vital importance to the secret. Because that’s what I designed it to be. So if I hear that ‘tidbit’, which is a tag, I know exactly who repeated it and where he got it.
The Russians know this every bit as well as I do and the Russians are dog-nuts paranoid. They tag nearly everything.
The idea of trotting out raw intelligence as ‘proof’ is absurd thereby. It’s going to blow the source. Every stinkin’ time. Period. Full Stop.
The IC (Intelligence Community) doesn’t have to give you, or me, or an AP reporter any proof of anything at all. And they won’t. They don’t answer to you, or me, or the AP — They answer to the government.
Ok, so now the ball is in the government’s hands. The IC has provided information that is convincing and has a high degree of confidence. What does the government do with that?
They take action, that’s what.
The dilemma now is what action can they take that won’t burn the source? It’s a crapshoot because no one knows what little bit of information might be a tag. So the government has to be very broad in how it speaks publicly on Intel matters of National Security but …
The government, at least theoretically has to answer to you, me and an AP reporter. So solid proof isn’t likely to be something that goes public as long as the source is in peril but … The government doesn’t have to provide proof. The government has to make their claims believable. That’s not the same standard as proof.
That’s a serious challenge for the government because we all know they’re a pack of liars and we are to say the least skeptical about anything they say. Saying anything is so “because we say so” is not believable.
The government has a mechanism for dealing with that. You call the Senate Intelligence Committee into a closed session in a SCIF, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (pronounced “skiff”). Members of both parties are on that committee and they’re all vetted to have access to secure material.
You show those Senators what you’ve got. You ask them to back you up. If what you have is valid then they can be expected to do that.
They walk out and make a public statement, either individually or as a group, that what the government is claiming is true. They have seen the evidence and they concur with the conclusions of the government.
At this point the information is now believable. Note that I’m not saying you have to believe it, or even that you should. We’re talking abstracts here, the information has abstractly been treated so that there is some reason besides “we say so” to believe it.
That’s as far as the government can go. If you, I and the rest of America don’t believe it, then we don’t. The government has done all it can and now will act on it and either suffer the political fallout or bask in accolades. Depending on how things turned out.
I’m telling you all this so that I can point out that the Biden administration did not process the information in question to render it believable. They didn’t even try apparently.
Joe Biden might have the intellect of a baked potato but there are others in the government that know exactly how all this stuff works. They didn’t bother with the effort to make this information believable for a reason. I don’t know what that reason is but … Knowing how this stuff works I smell a rat. A big, stinky, flea infested, pestilent rat.
There’s a damn good reason why we should not take the word of a spokesperson using circular logic to provide himself as his own cited authority. That’s called, in the vernacular colloquialism —
Pulling a fast one and hoping no one notices.
Too bad for him a sharp AP reporter did notice and take exception.
Every word spoked by someone who knows a lot more than he/she/it/ is telling in this post. Very good point. I do remember the “skiff”. It’s been used before. A LOT more believable than Ned Price just saying so. I hear you, no proof is required. My point in my post was more that finally an AP reporter at least showed some skepticism and pushed back and followed up with more questions.
My point (which of course you got) was that the Biden Administration not only did not process the information in question by putting it through the stages that render it believable but also didn’t even bother to try to do that. That “didn’t bother to try” is significant. There’s a reason for that, probably a very good reason from their viewpoint.
I don’t know what that is but … It seems whatever the reason the Democrat Left has gotten to a point where they think they can say any ol’ thing they want and we’re supposed to swallow it and ask for more. This is a cognitive disconnect on the part of the people doing that and at that level of government it’s freakin’ dangerous as hell.
Which leads us back to your point, which I also got. It’s a very, very good thing that a reporter pushed back on that, hard, and insisted adamantly that the word of a government spokesman was not proof by any stretch of the imagination. That “the proof is I’m saying it” is circular logic and means nothing at all. (The circular logic being “it’s proven because I’m saying it and I’m saying it because it’s proven”.)
It’s also a very, very good thing that the reporter was from the Associated Press and not Fox News. If it were Fox, people would just blow it off.
Even a lot of conservatives would do that, Fox has foolishly made some errors that have impacted trust negatively. We absolutely do not want to take down the biggest conservative news and views outlet on the planet and Fox needs to clean that sort of thing up. That said, people who say things like “Fox is dead to me” are making a serious mistake.
However, an AP reporter who just wasn’t going to swallow a bag of crap is a whole ‘nother critter. He was not only telling the government something by doing that, he was also telling other news agencies that they ought to stop this ideological slanted soft ball approach and get back to being real journalists.
Expect to see more of that.