A new Homeland Security report details orders to connect protesters arrested in Portland to one another in service of the Trump's imaginary antifa plot.
The headline is absolutely NOT overstating things.
From page 64 of the actual report:
Politicization of Intelligence Products.
This investigation revealed no evidence of politicization (roughly “write this analysis this way to support this political assertion”) 467 by anyone in the I&A chain of command or DHS Secretary’s office. However, Mr. Murphy did make other attempts to controvert the collection-analysis process. Particularly illuminative was the promulgation of the term “Violent Antifa Anarchists Inspired” (VAAI).
As discussed by several intelligence analysts, to understand the genesis for VAAl, one must take the events of the summer into context. In many conversations, Mr. Murphy stated that the violent protesters in Portland were connected to or motivated by ANTIFA. This may have made sense to Mr. Murphy based on his own beliefs, but 1&A did not have collections (evidence) to show it and absent reporting or some other evidence on motivation, 1&A analysts could not ascribe motivation to the violent actors as Mr. Murphy expected. Mr. Murphy would tell the analysts to cite to existing OSIRs as evidence of the motivation, but the OSIRs did not draw a connection to ANTIFA. For weeks, the analysts had been telling Mr. Murphy that because ANTIF A was not in the collection, it could not be put into the analysis. Notwithstanding this feedback from the I&A analysts, on July 25, 2020, Mr. Murphy sent an email to his senior leadership instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as VAAI, unless the intel "show[ed] … something different."468 The analysts stated that “if you lived through the process, you could see where this VAAI definition was coming from a mile away. He got tired of the analysts telling him they did not have the reporting and he was convinced it was ANTIFA so he was going to fix the problem by changing what the collectors were reporting.”
This is a pretty big fucking deal considering how much the GOP was crying about ANTIFA.
I’m not saying that this was no big deal, but I stand by my assertion that this was not “manufacturing fake terrorists”. First, Antifa (the idea of it, not the dubious reality) does not match the common definition of “terrorists”. Second, the word “manufacture” in this context implies a deliberate intent to deceive the public which may have been present in the mind of the person ordering this investigation (or maybe he was simply deluding himself) but clearly wasn’t present throughout Homeland Security, where the analysts investigated as they were ordered to but truthfully reported their (lack of) findings.
The headline is overstating things quite a bit. From the article:
I wouldn’t call that manufacturing fake terrorists.
The headline is absolutely NOT overstating things.
From page 64 of the actual report:
This is a pretty big fucking deal considering how much the GOP was crying about ANTIFA.
I’m not saying that this was no big deal, but I stand by my assertion that this was not “manufacturing fake terrorists”. First, Antifa (the idea of it, not the dubious reality) does not match the common definition of “terrorists”. Second, the word “manufacture” in this context implies a deliberate intent to deceive the public which may have been present in the mind of the person ordering this investigation (or maybe he was simply deluding himself) but clearly wasn’t present throughout Homeland Security, where the analysts investigated as they were ordered to but truthfully reported their (lack of) findings.
I’m see that the LHC is now being put to use in splitting hairs down to the quantum level.
Apparently, there’s no space between for your humility.