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\u201cThe CIA says\u201d is never a great way to start a sentence. But that\u2019s the basis of the latest charge that Russia hacked the US presidential election.<\/strong><\/p>\n Members of Congress have now been secretly briefed by the CIA on \u201cthe Russian affair,\u201d and media, led by the Washington Post, are running with the story that Russia influenced the US election on the side of Trump.<\/p>\n Until and unless the denizens of Langley decide to show specific and convincing evidence for their claim, this is disinformation.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to assemble a circumstantial case. But each case has to be judged on its own merits, and the devil is in the details. If we aren\u2019t privy to those details in the \u201cRussian affair,\u201d no judgement is possible. Of course, major media outlets don\u2019t seem bothered by that. They\u2019re happy to cite the CIA as an authority\u2014conveniently ignoring the fact that people in the intelligence field are taught to lie. It\u2019s their stock in trade.<\/p>\n You might remember the Washington Post\u2019s role in defaming and destroying Gary Webb, who, in 1996, published a series of articles in the Mercury News about the CIA seeding black Los Angeles neighborhoods with crack cocaine. The Post basically asked the CIA whether the charge was true, and when the Agency denied it, the Post attacked Webb as a \u201cfake news\u201d reporter. The same Washington Post is now leading the campaign to tie the Russian government to Hillary Clinton\u2019s defeat. And the Post, once again, is using unproven statements from the CIA to back up their claim.<\/p>\n I could go on and on about the Post and its historic CIA ties. But now, right now, the owner of the Post is Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon. And Amazon has a $600 million contract<\/a> to provide the CIA cloud computing services (more here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Boom.<\/p>\n Ordinarily, that would be called a fatal conflict of interest, whenever the Post opens up its yap about the CIA in any context.<\/p>\n However, mainstream news outlets, the very big ones, don\u2019t go around criticizing each other\u2019s ownerships; so the Bezos-CIA relationship is conveniently ignored and left \u201cin the past.\u201d<\/p>\n