CIA, DNI boost Wuhan lab COVID-19 theory deemed “least likely” by WHO
The “annual threat assessment” is one of the few regular open-door hearings held by the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill. If they were honest, top ranking intelligence officials testifying before these committees would cop to the U.S. government being the biggest threat to peace around the world, according to assessments delivered by the inhabitants of said world itself.
But one can derive this reality from testimony by reading between the lines. Before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, top intelligence officials made no effort to downplay the likelihood of a long-shot COVID-19 origin theory pushed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), putting the blame for the ongoing pandemic on a hypothetical lab accident, for which the Chinese government is responsible.
“Researchers at the Wuhan institution of Virology have demonstrated from their publication record that they were skilled at techniques, in which they genetically modified bat coronaviruses in order to create new man-made viruses that were highly capable of creating disease in human beings,” Rubio said, in a bid to bolster the accident theory.
“We can't conclude definitely that the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged naturally until there's a transmission chain that has been identified: how the virus evolved and transmitted between species,” he added. “And to date, no such path of zoonotic transmission has been definitively identified.”
Rubio then pressed officials appearing before the committee for a response. They vibed with the senator. Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, said that Rubio was “absolutely accurate,” and that “the intelligence community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially.” CIA Director William Burns then said that he agreed with Haines.
“The one thing that's clear to us and to our analysts is that Chinese leadership has not been fully forthcoming, or fully transparent in working with the WHO [World Health Organization] in providing the kind of original, complete data in answering those questions,” Burns said.
It's true that, two weeks ago, the WHO called on the Chinese government to be more forthcoming with information about laboratories in Wuhan, in the inquest to determine COVID-19's origins. But Burns conveniently omitted that the WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also said (emphasis added): “the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis.”
Scientific American expounded on the likelihood of a lab leak, or lack thereof, two days after Dr. Ghebreyesus delivered these remarks. The publication noted that the lab hypothesis and the natural transmission hypothesis are both still “possible... [b]ut they are not, however, equally probable.” The leak theory, it said, rests on the idea that “any virus that comes from animals and became so efficient at infecting humans had to have lab help to do so in one quick jump.” Meanwhile, the natural transmission theory relies on much more than just one single occurrence:
That idea holds there are billions of bats in China, and millions of encounters every week among bats and other wild animals and, in some cases, humans. The virus has many chances to jump. In its original form, it is inefficient at replicating in people. But it has millions of chances to get better even before it infects the first human.
[...]
So which scenario do you think is more likely? [The] lab leak, relying on one speculative episode? Or the notion of a wildlife spillover, with a million or so chances to occur?
If you had to bet on a particular card turning up in your poker hand, would you put your money on the card that only has one chance? Or the card that has a million chances to show up? Both scenarios are possible. One is a lot more probable.
This context was totally omitted by Burns, Haines, and Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, a man who hardly ever turns down the opportunity to support an act of U.S. aggression. One hypothesis for this omission: the hearing was about an intelligence community paper on threats to the U.S., which featured “China's push for global power.” As if the world’s only hegemon and the perpetrator of some of the worst atrocities in modern history has any right to whine about anyone else engaged in a “push for global power.”
Destroying freedom to save it
There were other interesting tidbits from the “annual threat assessment” hearing--like one of the main pieces of evidence that China is “pushing for global power.” From page 6 of the intelligence community’s annual study:
China is touting its success containing the COVID-19 pandemic as evidence of the superiority of its system.
Oh, those nefarious Chinese and their refusal to march hundreds of thousands of people to their death so that Waffle House doesn't have to close for 60 days! What will they do next?
Also interesting, during the hearing itself, was the National Security Agency admitting that it would like to expand the U.S. government's warrantless surveillance capabilities. Not a great look for a hearing focused on a report warning of “new international norms that favor the authoritarian Chinese system.”
The admission came during the question round from long-time civil liberties advocate, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Wyden said he was concerned that the NSA was looking to erode privacy protections in the wake of last year's SolarWinds hack—a data breach that reportedly involved Russian government agents perpetrating one of the largest-ever data exfiltrations from the U.S. government. The agency's interest in expanding its warrantless surveillance capabilities because of SolarWinds first came up a few weeks ago. And Gen. Nakasome did nothing to quell fears, despite the NSA denying that it's seeking new powers.
Wyden told Nakasome: “I was concerned about a recent suggestion you made that the government's ability to detect and stop the SolarWinds campaign was hampered by the need to get a warrant before conducting surveillance of the domestic internet. My understanding is that the government has the ability now to watch every bit of data going in an out of a federal network, including the SolarWinds malware. And yet, the hacking of nine federal agencies somehow went unnoticed.”
The senator then pressed Nakasome on the government doing more “to detect hacking that's going on in our own networks” before it looks for new ways “to surveil the domestic internet.” Nakasome replied, saying that foreign intelligence agencies are using increasingly sophisticated methods. “And when they do that, we need this total and entire capability to bring to that.”
“As we take a look at our capabilities,” Nakasome continued, “as adversaries move into U.S. infrastructure, [we need] to make sure we can identify them and be able to be alert to what's going on, is [what's] going to have to be looked at, sir.”
Wyden was not impressed with Nakasome's failure to distance the NSA from, in the senator's words, bemoaning “the need to get a warrant before conducting surveillance of the domestic internet.”
“My point is only, General: let's look at ways to shore up our own house first before we start talking about approaches that could unravel some of these sacred constitutional rights that Americans feel so strongly about,” the senator replied. Wyden then said that he would bring up the matter again in a classified intelligence committee hearing, which was held later in the afternoon.
Surely a sign of a healthy economy
Finally, in non-national security state news: the Securities and Exchange Commission announced the second largest award ever doled out under a whistleblower program, which was launched after the 2008 financial crisis to incentivize the exposure of financial sector malfeasance.
Announcements of awards given out under the program obscure key details to protect the identities of those who blew the whistle. But among the things that we do know about this week's award: it was worth “over $50 million” and given “to joint whistleblowers whose information alerted SEC staff to violations that involved highly complex transactions and would have been difficult to detect without their information.”
The largest award issued by the program came last October. It was worth $114 million. Five of the top ten largest whistleblower awards issued by the SEC were given out in the last 12 months. Surely a sign of a healthy economy.
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