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The CIA’s Mutating Opinions

Paul Jacob on what the spooks “believe.”

As January closed, the CIA changed its story on the origin of the SARS-​CoV‑2 virus.

But was it big news? 

Most people had given up any hope of finding a natural origin, and evidence favoring the virus’s creation in Wuhan, China — partly funded by U.S. taxpayers courtesy of Big Pharma bureaucrat Dr. Antony Fauci — has been clear for a very long time.

So the CIA saying it now “believes” that COVID-​19 was leaked from the Chinese lab looks, suspiciously, like a convenient change of opinion upon the beginning of the 47th presidency. 

New beliefs for a new president!

Note that the CIA certainly offers plenty of reasons to make light of the turn.

  1. The agency expresses “low confidence” in the new opinion.
  2. The spokesman admits that no new evidence was behind the shift.
  3. The spooks say they continue “to assess” both theories of coronavirus origination.

Very political. 

The change of mind looks like this: the CIA had pushed the natural origination story because it had an agenda, and Americans have largely given up on that agenda. Left pushing a wet noodle, the CIA now tries to recover some of its cachet — or prevent further erosion of public opinion in the institution — by siding with the once-​derided belief.

And the “low confidence” warning is there to allow mainstream news media to downplay the story. The whole thing smacks of propagandistic manipulation rather than honestly informing the president, Congress, the Pentagon, or the American people.

Oh, and what of that agenda? 

Let’s just say that the agency always seeks to keep us ill-informed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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8 replies on “The CIA’s Mutating Opinions”

So far the sum of the publicly disclosed evidence for the lab leak hypothesis (in large part because it’s hard to get reliable information out of a totalitarian society) is that some people want the lab leak hypothesis to be true.

And maybe it is.

But in the absence of evidence beyond “but I waaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnt it to be true,” I’ll go with Occam’s Razor and suspect that was probably what it’s always been before — a zoonotic virus naturally making the jump to humans.

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false.”

William J. Casey, former director

You have been harping on this forever! Why does it matter? Tell us what you would do to China. If you can’t/won’t, move on!

Write about Trump and tariffs.

Appropriate measure for prevention of outbreaks and for response to outbreaks need to be informed by the source of outbreaks. So, even were the perpetrators entirely outside of reach of the US officials, determining as clearly as possible what happened would remain quite important. 

But the perpetrators are not simply in China. The research that led to the development and release of the virus was largely funded at the direction of an official of the United States. And other Americans were part of the project in other capacities. 

Moreover, extensive efforts were undertaken by US officials, UN officials, and people at some of the commanding heights of culture to suppress or to distort discussion of the origin of the outbreak. Guilty officials need to be removed from power and in some cases ought to be prosecuted. Corrupt state institutions need to be reformed or eliminated. People who have abused their social power need to be exposed.

Pam, you’re willing continually to change your position, as you seek some basis for attacking your opponents.

You’ve insisted that the theory of a lab leak were stupid; that the question is moot if nothing could be done to the Chinese perpetrators; and, now, that those who explain how the question would not be moot even if not much could be done to those perpetrators are somehow cowards.

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