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So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but we can assume - Trump and his people have openly communicated, planned, and followed through on it - that the actions of executive branch agencies are politicized. Here we are told that the "C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, ... wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate."; that he's long favored the lab-leak theory (which is a politicized issue); and of all the things a brand new new CIA…
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released the following statement about the CIA’s findings on the origins of the Coronavirus: “I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theor…
So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…
The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here. A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
The announcement of the shift came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News he no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate over the origins of the Covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes that the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology....
Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis. There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.....
To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.
Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.
Neither piece of evidence has been found.So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It did though. Animal origin only stopped being the most favored explanation because we haven't found the link in 5 years.
I'm confused, do you mean the animal origin had no evidence either, but was favoured? But not having evidence for 5 years suddenly makes the other theory favoured instead? So basically neither had real evidence, but one was favoured?
Animal origin still seems more likely to me, but less than 5 years ago, since we have a missing link one would expect to see.
So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?
So what you're saying is that we shouldn't put our trust into people who pride themselves on being master manipulators and deceivers?