Hearsay Evidence
The discrepancies go on. But this is what one would expect of a document based entirely of hearsay in which Source A claims to have gotten a juicy tidbit from Source B, who heard it from Source C deep inside the Kremlin.
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a state visit to Austria on June 24, 2014.
(Image by (Official Russian government photo)) Details DMCA
Grasping at straws, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington conceded that no news agency has been able to verify the dossier's findings. But, he said, they are "unlikely to be discarded as quickly or as conclusively as Trump would like" for the simple reason that "the flip side of information that cannot be classed reliable is that neither can it be classed unreliable."
But the same could be said for information that someone got from a friend whose brother-in-law heard from a park ranger that Barack and Michelle like to while away their evenings snorting cocaine. It can't be classed as reliable because no one can verify that it's true. But it can't be classed as unreliable because no one can prove that it's wrong. So maybe the best thing to do is to impeach Obama in the few days he has remaining just to be sure.
This not to say that the so-called President-elect's legitimacy is not open to question. To the contrary, it is questionable in the extreme given that he lost the popular election by more than 2.86 million votes. In a democratic country, this should count for something. But the intelligence community is not attacking him on democratic grounds, needless to say, but on imperial.
Trump is a rightwing blowhard whose absurd babblings about Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen reveal a man who is dangerously ignorant about how the world works. But he has managed to seize on one or two semi-good ideas over the years. One is that Obama administration's confrontational policies toward Russia are a recipe for disaster, while another is that toppling Syria's Bashar al-Assad with Al Qaeda and ISIS still up and about will only hasten their march on Damascus.
Both views are perfectly sensible. But because Washington's endlessly bellicose foreign-policy establishment is wedded to the opposite, it sees them as high treason.
This is very serious. U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a high degree of continuity since World War II as Republican and Democratic presidents alike pledged to uphold the imperial agenda. But Trump, as radical in his way as William Jennings Bryan was in 1896 or Henry A. Wallace in 1948, is bucking the consensus to an unprecedented degree.
Even though its policies have led to disaster after disaster, the foreign-policy establishment is aghast. Consequently, it is frantically searching for a way to prevent him from carrying his ideas out. The intelligence agencies appear to be running out of time with the inauguration only a few days away. But that doesn't mean they're giving up. All it means, rather, is that they'll go deeper underground. Trump may enter the White House on Jan. 20. But the big question is how long he'll remain.
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