Wednesday, February 7, 2018

My Team Your Team

"Hero or hired gun? How a British former spy became a flash point in the Russia investigation" reads the headline in the Washington Post.

What could be wrong with that? Two sides to every issue.

First of all, the headline is a distortion. In a different universe, more like the world in 2010, Republicans and Democrats alike would have been concerned (and were concerned) about Russian active spying operations in the U.S. When the "Illegals Program" was uncovered and arrests were made, no Republican was saying - "How do we know these people are really spies? The Obama administration is biased."

But that was then. This is now.

I have read hundreds of pages of detail in testimony and articles about Steele and the so-called dossier. The relevant material does not call him a "hero". Chalk that up to our media compulsion to call people heroes. But why in this case?
source:apnews

Context matters. Who is Christopher Steele? He was the head of the Russia desk for U.K. Intelligence agency, MI6, before retiring. So he is a professional who has great contacts and tremendous expertise at ferreting out the truth about Russia.

The rational:
Steele was hired as a consultant to research Trump's close relationship with high place Russians.
Steele possesses the expertise to perform faithful research on this issue.
The credibility and professional reputation of Steele as a consultant requires faithfulness to the truth.
The findings of Steele or any researcher can be made the subject of distortions and cherry-picking by anyone acting in bad faith for political purposes, but such actions do not and would not impugn the integrity of Steele's work.
The research by Steele could also be made subject, at least in part, to attempts by Russian agents to provide bad information, but not only is Steele expert on assessing sources and information, but the information he provided in the dossier has held up remarkably well to severe scrutiny, especially given the raw nature of the intelligence in the document.

Calling Steele a "hired gun" and therefore potentially unreliable does not pass the smell test. That charge conflates two different types of operations: Consulting as research and Consulting as marketing. The conflation is intentional on the part of the accusers, acting in bad faith to the truth. Marketing would be the work of someone like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone.

If WaPo wanted to tell us "How a British former spy became a flash point in the Russia investigation", they would be better off telling us - every issue related to politics is treated by us as a he said/she said debate between two equal and opposite sides, with the truth left to the reader based on his or her own presumed bias.

Christopher Steele is a lifelong British subject. Any reasonable person would assume that he does not normally care about American politics. Why would Steele care about U.S. domestic policy? Even on foreign policy, his concerns would exist at a high level where, at least traditionally, in the U.S., Republicans and Democrats normally agree on such matters as the importance of the Western alliance. But if a candidate for the U.S. presidency seemed to be under the thumb of the Russian government, Steele would surely be horrified and anxious to share that intelligence. In normal times, we would not call that bias.

Yet this turn of events leads to headlines that read "Hero or hired gun?" which is misleading. Steele became a "flashpoint" due to the necessity of one "side" to discredit the intelligence he has provided.
Efforts to discredit him line up with a growing list of distinguished and credible experts including Robert Mueller who must be vilified for the current administration and their lackeys in Congress to prevail.

Put differently, with Trump as president, accusations of bias become a.most a tautology when speaking about anyone who opposes an adversarial foreign power imposing its will on the United States.

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