...Buzzfeed were right to publish Christopher Steele's Trump Dossier.

[Banquet_Bear]

@Ravenman

First, I don’t care to learn much about this kind disaster thing, because the only relevant lesson so far as I can see is that you and many others once got mad at a reporter for asking a legitimate question.

…The United States of Fucking America invaded a country because of “patriotic fervour”. Rationality and objectivity went out the window. We got mad at a reporter. You guys started a war that is still having repercussions today and has affected millions of people.

But that fact really has nothing to do with Buzzfeed breaking standards of journalism and people reacting to it.

I know what the topic of this thread is. I did start this thread after all. I keep directing you to the OP. But you keep ignoring it. So are you finally ready to address some of the questions I posed in my OP?

To put it in different context, if you got mad at a cop for arresting a criminal who happened to be popular, and then later realized the cop was acting appropriately, doesn’t mean that people are wrong to be critical of a cop wrongly arrests an innocent person.

Apparently not.

The reason Curveball is a good thing to remember is that nobody in the public knew about any of the criticism of this source at the time that his phony intel was being promoted. The fact that he was a liar started to leak out in drips and drabs after his unsubstantiated allegations were already in the public’s mind.

We didn’t need to know about Curveball to know the case that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations was a load of absolute tosh. This is the earliest post I could find from 2005:

@Banquet_Bear

World Eater is exactly right regarding Powell’s presentation to the United Nations. It was a load of horse shit. The amazing thing from this little corner of the world was how few people saw it as horse shit. I couldn’t understand how chickenshit the US media were-you had a presentation that was the equivilent of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, and there were no critical questions asked prior to the invasion at all. Sanitised sites? Withn days we knew this was horseshit. Equally laughable were the radio intercepts: “We evacuated everything. We don’t have anything left.” or the equally laughable: " The Al Kendi (ph) Company: This is a company that is well known to have been involved in prohibited weapons systems activity." However, Powell knew that the Al Kindi facilities had already been checked by the inspectors, and come up clean. More horse shit.

The whole presentation was horseshit. HORSESHIT. Withn days of Powell’s presentation, myself, and many others had gathered enough information to debunk the whole thing using the INTERNET. Yet, still, no questions from the media. Noone raised a stink, questioned anything, they just let it go…

The media fucking failed back then. It is failing now.

Is the same thing happening today? I truly can’t tell for sure. Nobody other than Steele seems to be able to verify any of his sources:

I cited an ABC that ran with a statement from the Trump Administration that the ABC did not seek independent verification for. Does your “standards of verification” only apply to Buzzfeed?

I think you trust Steele because his story impungns Trump.

And I think that you are fucking wrong. I’ve made my case. The case is laid out is in the OP. I’ve made it clear that I don’t care if it was Buzzfeed or Breitbart, if it was Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

Can you please stop making assumptions about what I think? I’ve told you what I think.

Nobody in the media or apparently the intelligence community can say whether these sources are trustworthy or not.

Did you learn nothing from what happened in Iraq?

That’s why you’re at greater risk of being suckered than they are.

You just can’t help but attack me. Please either stop it or take it to the pit.