The authors addressed your complaint on the final page of the report. Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.
They responded to it yes but they haven't resolved the issue I raised, which is that I'm not going to trust their conclusions without seeing verifiable evidence that would be accepted by a court and that I don't think anyone else should accept their claims either.
> Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.
According to [0]: "You said that the burden of proof lies not with the person making the claim, but with someone else to disprove."
I'm saying that the burden of proof lies with the party making the claim. How is that fallacious?
There's no good solution to this, it's unfortunate that they proved themselves untrustworthy in the past.
Yes there is, and it is already in place. There has been bipartisan oversight of intelligence from Congress for decades. A subset of the people's representatives with the necessary security clearances make sure that there are no Deep State shenanigans. Yes, it failed in the run up to the Iraq invasion, but it worked for decades before, during the Cold War.
- Partisanship in Congress has resulted in a government so dysfunctional that it's been shut down. We can't trust people who can't even keep the government running to watch over services so accustomed to keeping everyone in the dark.
- The committee may have been effective during the cold war but in recent times, the NSA was engaged in mass surveillance for while this committee was in place and it took an internal whistleblower for it to come to light.
- The head of the NSA lied to Congress. The oversight committee can't oversee if they can't get the truth.
You might be able to argue that this is a solution but you most definitely cannot argue that it's a good solution when it's recently been proven to be ineffective.
It's how foreign policy has worked in the past but I think it's demonstrated that it's not how foreign policy should work in the future.
> the solution to that is to elect officials we can trust.
That seems incredibly unlikely to happen. US elections seem to be mostly decided by who has the most political capital and media support rather than trustworthiness or merit.
> When the White House says the CIA has come to them with evidence that must be acted on, the White House can't turn to the populous and ask if there is enough evidence to act. They need to have the autonomy to act as they see fit.
I'd agree that this is the case but I don't think that the agencies themselves can be trusted anymore. The head of the NSA told a blatant lie in front of Congress and worse, got away with it. There's no accountability anymore so I don't think trust is wise.
I think the US as a country can only function when the people trust the government, the government respects the people and the people within the government trust and respect each other. None of these things are currently the case and I suspect things are only going to get worse. What that will cause I have no idea.
> In July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee (DNC) networks and maintained that access until at least June 2016.
The little that's backed up by evidence in there is Russia's public propaganda efforts, like Russia Today, which aren't really anything new (though certainly interesting).
What's controversial is the hacking and I haven't seen anything that attributes the hacks to Russia beyond reasonable doubt. If the evidence was taken to a US court and put before a judge and jury, I don't believe a prosecutor could get a conviction.
I understand that the US wouldn't want to give up its intelligence sources but I also don't think that the people of the US should let the government make foreign policy decisions based on hidden evidence. That's how Iraq happened.