The failure of the western intelligence services

[Shady]

6 minutes ago, Rue said:

That is a likely scenario.  A mistake covered up by more mistakes.  What I do not get is complacency China has shown in not preventing virus outbreaks  that led to this one as well. 

Complacency for implementing proper food handling practicesc starts in China. Coming clean about this must start and end with China and as well  as all governments havingculpability for poor pandemic  planning.  have zero confidence in the  Chinese government.   

China needs to clean up its act. Its now acting as if this is a minor annoyance it quickly cleaned up.

Not this time. China can hide behind the Who it bought off, spread spambot with false stories but this ain't over because China says so.

The biggest problem was that the data China released indicated the virus was more like the SARS outbreak from several years ago, so the worry wasn’t all that high.  The problem was taking China as an honest broker,

[WestCanMan]

41 minutes ago, eyeball said:

You're stirring the waters to make them look deep.  A report lands on your desk about a potentially cataclysmic outbreak of disease from a intelligence unit whose job it is to keep an eye out for exactly that and so you start juggling a myriad of other issues.  Okay. That only adds weight to the sense this is just one more failure of competency in the scheme of things. 

No. Military intelligence is often wrong, compromised, misleading, you can't always take decisive action on it. There probably would have been a nuclear war with Russia by now if everything was taken as gospel truth. 

People can't even come to an agreement on what the mortality rate is after the virus has been here for two months. There may be several x as many people infected as originally thought, putting the death rate down with the seasonal flu. Still don't know yet. 

[eyeball]

5 minutes ago, Shady said:

The problem was taking China as an honest broker,

That occurred decades ago.  The market roared in approval as I recall.

[Rue]

8 hours ago, Shady said:

The biggest problem was that the data China released indicated the virus was more like the SARS outbreak from several years ago, so the worry wasn’t all that high.  The problem was taking China as an honest broker,

I can see it making mistakes..but it has no excuses. It grew complacent. It made no efforts after repeat virus outbreaks to clean its wet markets up. That is inexcusable. You know  China  is like a guy repeatedly driving when drunk and now China says it did  not know it woul kill as many as they did?driving drunk? No I ain't in the mood to be nice and understanding. Its blatant negligence.  Until those markets are cleaned up and radically altered China is a drunk driver and Trump so far is  the only one calling China and  its apologist the WHO out.

Edited April 20, 2020 by Rue

[WestCanMan]

15 minutes ago, eyeball said:

Cite?

https://www.foxnews.com

That's your one-stop shop bro. You'll thank me later, when your lib friends start to regard you as a visionary due to your newfound ability to get things right. 

[Rue]

3 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

https://www.foxnews.com

That's your one-stop shop bro. You'll thank me later, when your lib friends start to regard you as a visionary due to your newfound ability to get things right. 

We have to wait for his laxatives and shrooms to kick in. Or he could just do both at once and order  Chinese take out.

[eyeball]

1 minute ago, WestCanMan said:

No. Military intelligence is often wrong, compromised, misleading, you can't always take decisive action on it. There probably would have been a nuclear war with Russia by now if everything was taken as gospel truth. 

Thank goodness for indecisiveness then. 

Quote

People can't even come to an agreement on what the mortality rate is after the virus has been here for two months. There may be several x as many people infected as originally thought, putting the death rate down with the seasonal flu. Still don't know yet.

Well just keep stocking up on post-it notes, string and big red sharpies and get back to us when you get it all figured out. There'll be a Nobel Prize and a big pile of panties with your name on it for sure when you do.

[WestCanMan]

5 minutes ago, Rue said:

We have to wait for his laxatives and shrooms to kick in. Or he could just do both at once and order  Chinese take out.

I just ordered Chinese take-out. Thanks for the tip.

Edited April 19, 2020 by WestCanMan

[WestCanMan]

3 minutes ago, eyeball said:

Well just keep stocking up on post-it notes, string and big red sharpies and get back to us when you get it all figured out.

I'm not pretending to know the exact mortality rate. We can't possibly know it until we figure out how many people were infected. Deaths per TOTAL NUMBER OF INFECTED PEOPLE is the stat we need. Until we find out what people developed antibodoes for it we won't know hw many were actually infected. Deaths per confirmed cases is a misleading stat. 

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There'll be a Nobel Prize and a big pile of panties with your name on it for sure when you do.

Stop putting my name on your panties or I'll get another restraining order. 

[Rue]

36 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

I just ordered Chinese take-out. Thanks for the tip.

I love Hakka which is on the border with India so it uses a lot of hot pepper. Now I doubt my wife will ever let me eat anything Chinese. I thought it was spicy beef. Rat, cat, bat, disappeared Hong Kong dissident...could have been any of those... the Jains are right we should stay away from meat..except now I have a sudden craving for smoked meat..actually since this lock down  I eat only fish and chicken.

I swim better and I was always a peckerhead.

[WestCanMan]

1 hour ago, Rue said:

I love Hakka which is on the border with India so it uses a lot of hot pepper. Now I doubt my wife will ever let me eat anything Chinese. I thought it was spicy beef. Rat, cat, bat, disappeared Hong Kong dissident...could have been any of those... the Jains are right we should stay away from meat..except now I have a sudden craving for smoked meat..actually since this lock down  I eat only fish and chicken.

I swim better and I was always a peckerhead.

Chicken. Mmmmmmmmm...... Nandos.

I actually like Mexican more than Chinese. Chipotle's Barbacoa is awesome. I make that stuff at home. 

I haven't been eating any takeout food aside from pizza since covid started though. I figger that if anything survives a pizza oven it will kill us all soon enough anyways. 

[Rue]

7 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

Chicken. Mmmmmmmmm...... Nandos.

I actually like Mexican more than Chinese. Chipotle's Barbacoa is awesome. I make that stuff at home. 

I haven't been eating any takeout food aside from pizza since covid started though. I figger that if anything survives a pizza oven it will kill us all soon enough anyways. 

Yah I see no one getting hamburgers.  

[Independent1986]

7 hours ago, Argus said:

"Ugh. Reading hard. Ugh" is, I understand, the motto of the Trump cult.

I am not sure which cult is more dangerous, the Trump cult or the Never Trump cult ?. How can a man be wrong 100 % of the time ? He does some terrible things and some good things, you people are fanatics no matter what Trump says he is wrong, your no different than the Trump sheep with the MAGA hat.

Politicians and the intelligence community are like a symbiotic relationship, they both need each other to survive, is very unlikely a politician will go against national security warnings from his or her intelligence community. The initial reaction from Macron, Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson and so on it clearly shows that they had no warning and when things got serious they were scrambling to do damage control. This is probably one of the biggest failures in the intelligence community since 9/11.

 

 

[Rue]

17 hours ago, Independent1986 said:

I am not sure which cult is more dangerous, the Trump cult or the Never Trump cult ?. How can a man be wrong 100 % of the time ? He does some terrible things and some good things, you people are fanatics no matter what Trump says he is wrong, your no different than the Trump sheep with the MAGA hat.

Politicians and the intelligence community are like a symbiotic relationship, they both need each other to survive, is very unlikely a politician will go against national security warnings from his or her intelligence community. The initial reaction from Macron, Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson and so on it clearly shows that they had no warning and when things got serious they were scrambling to do damage control. This is probably one of the biggest failures in the intelligence community since 9/11.

 

 

All governments knew about Sars and other viruses coming out of Chinese wet markets and were supposed to implement pandemic protofols after Sars. They chose not to. That is the failure. 

China failed in cleaning up its wet markets and implementing proper food handling protocols knowing its markets were spreading viruses long before covid.

Other governments also  failed in implementing post Sars pandemic  protocols as they were told to by their health experts.

Health reports and recommendations were ignored. 

You make it seem as if  no one knew viruses were dangerous.  Hanta virus , Ebola, Zika, sars, many other viruses were well known. The need for better pandemic control was well known.

Blaming doctors because their health reports and recommendations for not being followed isn't a failure of those doctors it's a failure of the politicians that ignored their recommendations.

We knew since Sars another virus was coming as there will be more in the future.  Whether our governments learn from this mistake.. we shall see.

Further  more China covered up its reports.  It didn't fail to understand their gravity..they hid their gravity.  

Claiming a drunk driver is not culpable for killing people when he gets in a car drunk I do not buy. Hundreds of contagious viruses have come out of Chinese wet markets. What because the drunk driver killed less people in the past compared to this time it's the fault of a doctor  for not predicting the exact no. of deaths  the drunk driver would cause?  Nonsense.  Its the failure of politicians ignoring ireports they already had and the Chinese government  refusing to implement proper pandemic procedures, i.e., closing down the wet markets, I.e., taking the keys away from the drunk driver that csused this.

Edited April 20, 2020 by Rue

[OftenWrong]

18 minutes ago, Rue said:

Blaming intelligence reports for not being followed isn't a failure of th reports its a failure of the bureaucrats and politicians that ignore the reports.

Or they didn't ignore them at all, but they didn't have a solution. Certainly a sensible man would hesitate to be sure, before stopping everything. Hence "ignore" in the past might have included refusing to do things that are arguably as bad for society as the virus itself. The only sensible answer is mitigation. Reduce the harm, but not to the point you introduce harm.

Edited April 20, 2020 by OftenWrong

[Rue]

11 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:

Or they didn't ignore them at all, but that didn't have a solution. Certainly, a sensible man would hesitate to be sure before stopping everything. Hence "ignore" in the past might have included refusing to do things that are arguably as bad for society as the virus itself. The only sensible answer is mitigation. Reduce the harm, but not to the point you introduce harm.

The post Sars pandemic plan all countries should have implemented was ignored.  The failure to clean up wet markets was ignored. The Chinese cover up was deliberate. All 3 led to this current crisis.  Proper planning protocols would have contained the virus far faster and may have even avoided the need a lock down.Ths issue is not guaranteeing viruses never exist... it is however in containing and treating them as early and  quickly as possible which we chose not to do. Pretending we did not see a repeat Sars type virus coming is just not true. We knew and did nothing. This was not 9 11 where we had a general idea but no specifics.  We knew from Sars what we were expecting again and we knew it would come out of Chinese wet markets. No one was blind sided.

Edited April 20, 2020 by Rue

[eyeball]

1 hour ago, OftenWrong said:

Or they didn't ignore them at all, but they didn't have a solution. Certainly a sensible man would hesitate to be sure, before stopping everything. Hence "ignore" in the past might have included refusing to do things that are arguably as bad for society as the virus itself. The only sensible answer is mitigation. Reduce the harm, but not to the point you introduce harm.

You should tweet that to Hannity.  It'll probably end up as a footnote just about word for word in Trump's memoirs...they'll be beautiful won't they? So beautiful they'll be perfect.

[Argus]

15 hours ago, Independent1986 said:

I am not sure which cult is more dangerous, the Trump cult or the Never Trump cult ?. How can a man be wrong 100 % of the time ?

When he's a drooling moron with less knowledge of how the world, government and institutions function than a retarded corn farmer who's never gone to school.

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He does some terrible things and some good things,

I'm wholly uninterested in your fantasies about what 'good things' your God has done. If you want to brag about him go into the US topics and bore people there. This is not a US topic. Discussion about how he failed to listen to intelligence agencies is, however, on topic. Discussion of how wonderful he is are not.

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Politicians and the intelligence community are like a symbiotic relationship, they both need each other to survive, is very unlikely a politician will go against national security warnings from his or her intelligence community.

Trump has already repeatedly demonstrated he does not trust his intelligence community, and that he thinks he knows better than them, just as he knows better than the generals. He is not a politician so much as a blustering narcissistic demagogue who lives in his own world.

Quote

The initial reaction from Macron, Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson and so on it clearly shows that they had no warning and when things got serious they were scrambling to do damage control. This is probably one of the biggest failures in the intelligence community since 9/11.

Bullshit. They had warning. They just ignored it. Johnson's health minister was holding emergency meetings about Covid19 in early January.

For all of Hancock's current difficulties – from testing targets to an ongoing PPE headache – one thing it's difficult to seriously accuse him of is brushing off the virus in January. If anything, he was boring people about it back then (as those who met him at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards dinner can attest). He held his first Covid meeting in the Department on 6 January and discussed it with the PM the next day. A meeting of Nervtag the 'New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group' was held on 13 January. 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/did-the-government-really-brush-aside-the-coronavirus-threat-in-january-

 

Edited April 20, 2020 by Argus

[Independent1986]

57 minutes ago, Argus said:

When he's a drooling moron with less knowledge of how the world, government and institutions function than a retarded corn farmer who's never gone to school.

I'm wholly uninterested in your fantasies about what 'good things' your God has done. If you want to brag about him go into the US topics and bore people there. This is not a US topic. Discussion about how he failed to listen to intelligence agencies is, however, on topic. Discussion of how wonderful he is are not.

Trump has already repeatedly demonstrated he does not trust his intelligence community, and that he thinks he knows better than them, just as he knows better than the generals. He is not a politician so much as a blustering narcissistic demagogue who lives in his own world.

Bullshit. They had warning. They just ignored it. Johnson's health minister was holding emergency meetings about Covid19 in early January.

For all of Hancock's current difficulties – from testing targets to an ongoing PPE headache – one thing it's difficult to seriously accuse him of is brushing off the virus in January. If anything, he was boring people about it back then (as those who met him at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards dinner can attest). He held his first Covid meeting in the Department on 6 January and discussed it with the PM the next day. A meeting of Nervtag the 'New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group' was held on 13 January. 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/did-the-government-really-brush-aside-the-coronavirus-threat-in-january-

 

I normally don't engage with fanatics regardless If they are left or right but I can give you a list: "the most liberal progressive measurements for the criminal justice system was done by Jared Kushner with the full backing of Donald Trump, the lowest unemployment was achieved in 40 years and no major war. "

You have to look into these issues deep down to understand there is a difference between how someone talks and what his policy is and what things are being done. People like you just look into Trump's mouth 24/7 and they latch out with whatever stupidity he says and jump on forums to make fun of Turmp voters. I had a friend once he said to me it is harder to come to Canada as a refugee than in the USA however because Trump says things a certain way it looks like the US does not allow anybody. It is all a PR job to satisfy his base but is hard for you to understand these things because you only look at the surface. My father is an engineer I love looking at things with details.

Because you are a person that is driven by emotions not by facts which makes you not intelligent, it is never too late to understand that the key to freedom is not swearing at Trump 24/7 is to see politics as flawed done by flawed people, and they do good and bad things. When they do good things that's great when they do bad we have a democratic system which allows you to vote and criticize someone. 

[Argus]

2 minutes ago, Independent1986 said:

I normally don't engage with fanatics regardless If they are left or right but I can give you a list: "the most liberal progressive measurements for the criminal justice system was done by Jared Kushner with the full backing of Donald Trump, the lowest unemployment was achieved in 40 years and no major war. "

You have to look into these issues deep down to understand there is a difference between how someone talks and what his policy is and what things are being done. People like you just look into Trump's mouth 24/7 and they latch out with whatever stupidity he says and jump on forums to make fun of Turmp voters. I had a friend once he said to me it is harder to come to Canada as a refugee than in the USA however because Trump says things a certain way it looks like the US does not allow anybody. It is all a PR job to satisfy his base but is hard for you to understand these things because you only look at the surface. My father is an engineer I love looking at things with details.

Because you are a person that is driven by emotions not by facts which makes you not intelligent, it is never too late to understand that the key to freedom is not swearing at Trump 24/7 is to see politics as flawed done by flawed people, and they do good and bad things. When they do good things that's great when they do bad we have a democratic system which allows you to vote and criticize someone. 

I already told you I don't argue with truthers. Keep your praise of trump in the US politics sub-group, or at least the US-Canada group. It's out of place here and I will not engage with you people further on this as it's off-topic.

[Rue]

13 hours ago, OftenWrong said:

Or they didn't ignore them at all, but they didn't have a solution. Certainly a sensible man would hesitate to be sure, before stopping everything. Hence "ignore" in the past might have included refusing to do things that are arguably as bad for society as the virus itself. The only sensible answer is mitigation. Reduce the harm, but not to the point you introduce harm.

What is in a word..ignored some reports outright...dismissed some outright... uderestimated some..."lost"   or "misplaced" or "hid" some...I worked in government so we had ways to be ordered how to ignore things we should have done but someone else did not want done .

Smoke and mirrors. Little bureaucratic fiefdoms each with a leader trying to preserve power. A lot of dysfunction, contradiction,  redundancy, conflict.

Trust me when I say you should have never trusted me or any one in an institution especially when we claimed or claim to be divine.

From top to bottom there is a lot of deliberate and unintenional blindness...and in the end run..we screw up  and we molest.. the question is can  we learn from our mistakes.

Probably with the unintentional ones..probably not with the intentional ones .

You need to expose corruption and hold its creation and institutionalization publically accountable. Easier said than done

Did anyone learn anything from Nuremberg?

 

Regards,

Cawk Roach

Edited April 20, 2020 by Rue

[WestCanMan]

29 minutes ago, Argus said:

I already told you I don't argue with truthers. Keep your praise of trump in the US politics sub-group, or at least the US-Canada group. It's out of place here and I will not engage with you people further on this as it's off-topic.

But you are a truther.

We know what governments did to protect their citizens from covid, and what they didn't do, but you operate under your own "truth" that Trudeau did more than Trump. 

Canada, The US, and Taiwan are 3 little pigs.

Canada didn't even build a straw house. We put up a tent. We basically did nothing at all, we didn't even screen passengers flying into the country, the government just asked travellers to self-quarantine if they were sick.

The US built a house from sticks. They stopped travellers from bad areas, they screened at the airports, but the cat was already out of the bag on Jan 31.

Taiwan exists right beside the source of multiple flu outbreaks which killed millions of people before 2020. They knew they needed a brick house. They built a brick house, and the doors were locked when they herd the first sneeze. Their flu preparedness cost them billions over the years, and it saved them 10x that much. 

 

The US actually acted on the advice of some reliable experts, be they from the intel community or medical community, because they enacted a Plan A (stop the virus before it gets into the country). Their plan A was just too late to be effective, and they fell back on plan B (social distancing and shelter in place to reduce the spread of a virus that's already in the country) too late.

Canada never implemented a Plan A. That was a complete and total failure. What resembles a Plan A (shutting down incoming international travel) was actually implemented just as part of the Plan B strategy - closing airports at that time was no different from closing down schools - the fox was already in the henhouse for 2 months. 

[Argus]

24 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

Canada didn't even build a straw house. We put up a tent. We basically did nothing at all, we didn't even screen passengers flying into the country, the government just asked travellers to self-quarantine if they were sick.

The US built a house from sticks. They stopped travellers from bad areas, they screened at the airports, but the cat was already out of the bag on Jan 31.

None of the above is related to this topic. It ought to be in the 'trump vs trudeau on coronavirus' topic in the US/Canada group. I'd invite you to go there.

24 minutes ago, WestCanMan said:

The US actually acted on the advice of some reliable experts, be they from the intel community or medical community, because they enacted a Plan A (stop the virus before it gets into the country). Their plan A was just too late to be effective,

No, they didn't. First, as has been pointed out repeatedly, the US ignored the early warnings from its intelligence community because Trump only trusts what FOX news says. Closing down travel from China (except for the 430,000 people who have come here since he 'closed it down') was not a move which harmed the US. But doing nothing else AT ALL did.

[Independent1986]

You who know what really bothers me. The clown that is president down south, at the beginning he said that "this is a democratic hoax" YET HE CLOSED THE BORDER before Trudeau did. If I remember correctly it was several days until Canada closed it like the US did. I guess the fax at CSIS was not working that week.

[WestCanMan]

Just now, Argus said:

None of the above is related to this topic. It ought to be in the 'trump vs trudeau on coronavirus' topic in the US/Canada group. I'd invite you to go there.

You're 100% wrong. 

What countries did to fight covid is the strongest indicator of what type of information they were reacting to. 

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No, they didn't. First, as has been pointed out repeatedly, the US ignored the early warnings from its intelligence community because Trump only trusts what FOX news says.

That's just childish and stupid. 

In order for the seemingly adult part of that statement to be a legitimate point, it would need to reference the info contained in the early warnings, and outline that America didn't actually follow the warnings. Your pattern of making wrongful accusations against Trump makes specific cites from you an absolute necessity. 

Schiff was privy to any info received from the intel community, why didn't he come out ahead of the pack and say that America needed to be doing something that they weren't? 

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Closing down travel from China (except for the 430,000 people who have come here since he 'closed it down') was not a move which harmed the US. But doing nothing else AT ALL did.

430,000 people flew to China from the US after coronavirus broke out in China, but that's from before Jan 31 when Trump "shut it down". It is "shut down". Can you find me a cite that shows 430,000 people flew to the US from China since Jan 31? This is the second time you mentioned it.