Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Wed 05/28/2025 View Tue 05/27/2025 View Mon 05/26/2025 View Sun 05/25/2025 View Sat 05/24/2025 View Fri 05/23/2025 View Thu 05/22/2025
2020-03-21 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
WAPO and Intelligence Community - 'We told you so'
[MSN] U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
"failed to take action" now supercedes "TrumpHitler is racist and xenophobic for profiling people travelling from the Wuhan Virus zone"
The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans. Lawmakers, too, did not grapple with the virus in earnest until this month, as officials scrambled to keep citizens in their homes and hospitals braced for a surge in patients suffering from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Intelligence agencies "have been warning on this since January," said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration, and who, along with others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information.

"Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were ‐ they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it," this official said. "The system was blinking red."
Posted by Besoeker 2020-03-21 12:52|| || Front Page|| [11129 views ]  Top

#1 "Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were

And they call kept silent and cleared their financial portfolios.
Posted by Besoeker 2020-03-21 12:59||   2020-03-21 12:59|| Front Page Top

#2 Somehow, I have trouble believing this.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-03-21 13:03||   2020-03-21 13:03|| Front Page Top

#3 I have no trouble believing the intel community is claiming this.
Posted by Matt 2020-03-21 13:07||   2020-03-21 13:07|| Front Page Top

#4 Is this the story they're shopping now?
Let's just ignore all those totalitarian TrumpHitler slurs when he did take action.

And to be fair to the IC, while they didn't predict the collapse of the fUSSR, they did track it after it happened.
Posted by SteveS 2020-03-21 13:13||   2020-03-21 13:13|| Front Page Top

#5 and if Trump had done anything the exact same people would be calling him a racist xenophobe.
Posted by Herb McCoy 2020-03-21 13:14||   2020-03-21 13:14|| Front Page Top

#6 Yeah, sure. They probably had all scenarios covered in their brief so whatever happened they could claim that they predicted it.

President Truman once complained about trained economists: “Whenever I ask their opinion, they say on the one hand, so-and-so; but on the other hand, so-and-so, On the one hand, — but on the other hand. I would like to meet an economist with one hand!“
Posted by magpie 2020-03-21 13:22||   2020-03-21 13:22|| Front Page Top

#7 President Trump was doing all sorts of things, though the Washington Post and certain members of the intelligence community choose to forget. All that travel from affected countries shut down despite the outcry, not to mention the planning that has gone on since 2018 and the Johns Hopkins pandemic gaming exercise that was put on last autumn.

As for the lawmakers not grappling, thanks to the Democrats our federal lawmakers were shut up at close quarters in the Senate for the impeachment farce during the critical period — how many will fall ill because of that particular vicious bit of pointless, time-sucking idiocy?

It should be noted at this point that as a group the Democratic congresscritters and senators are older and in worse health than their Republican counterparts. This should worry those looking further than November.
Posted by trailing wife 2020-03-21 13:34||   2020-03-21 13:34|| Front Page Top

#8 I'm still not convinced the economic disruption is worth it.
Posted by Abu Uluque 2020-03-21 14:10||   2020-03-21 14:10|| Front Page Top

#9 Or, should I say, not convinced it's worth the economic disruption.
Posted by Abu Uluque 2020-03-21 14:11||   2020-03-21 14:11|| Front Page Top

#10 ^Don't think of it as economic disruption. Think of it as an opportunity to reshuffle the cards.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-03-21 14:14||   2020-03-21 14:14|| Front Page Top

#11 Just hope I don't end up with the two of clubs.
Posted by Abu Uluque 2020-03-21 15:23||   2020-03-21 15:23|| Front Page Top

#12 H/T InstiProf

reading the key graph shows it to be based on one anonymous source, plus the opinions of anonymous “others:”
Posted by Procopius2k 2020-03-21 15:39||   2020-03-21 15:39|| Front Page Top

#13 This relates directly to the art of the intel briefing. The part where you may well have predicted some event unfolding at the moment. But you also gave so many other possibilities and variables that whatever useful information conveyed was reduced to the appearance of mere ass covering.
Posted by Cesare 2020-03-21 15:47||   2020-03-21 15:47|| Front Page Top

#14 Otherwise known as fortune telling, Cesare.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-03-21 15:54||   2020-03-21 15:54|| Front Page Top

#15 The US "Intelligence" Community is too busy trying to cover its ass, protect the deep state, and get rid of Trump, to actually do their job.

Time to disband all of those agencies, and rebuild them in a much more efficient, less domestically focused, and accountable fashion.
Posted by Marilyn Tojo7566 2020-03-21 19:30||   2020-03-21 19:30|| Front Page Top

09:43 Mullah Richard
09:27 Warthog
09:11 Mercutio
09:07 AlmostAnonymous5839
08:52 Matt
08:24 Matt
08:20 SteveS
07:43 Procopius2k
07:42 BrerRabbit
07:42 Procopius2k
07:39 Procopius2k
07:36 Procopius2k
07:35 Procopius2k
07:34 trailing wife
07:31 Procopius2k
07:30 NN2N1
07:22 NN2N1
07:18 trailing wife
07:14 Richard Aubrey
07:10 NN2N1
07:09 Besoeker
07:03 NN2N1
06:58 NN2N1
06:58 Besoeker









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com