@DetroitDan @t0nyyates @yoyoel (i don't think it's right to blame stuff like Hamilton68 on the intelligence agencies per se. i see them as more like Dick Cheney et al's "Office of Special Plans". sure, they involve sympathetic individuals from the intelligence community, but they are the institutional version of motivated reasoning, founded by political actors for political purposes. most people in the actual intelligence agencies are doing their best to do the right thing, i think.)

@DetroitDan @t0nyyates @yoyoel (a tentative observation is that individuals with intelligence agency backgrounds who speak or act publicly, especially when they do so after or outside the formal boundaries of their service, should be taken with particularly large boulders of salt. they sell themselves as knowledgeable insiders when, in my experience, they can be unusually unreliable fabulists. i'd be careful taking these entrepreneurs as representative of their former institutions.)