Is the U.S. Intelligence Community Putting the World at Risk?
by Pete Hoekstra • September 3, 2021 at 5:00 am
The Intelligence Community's COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears.
How can the IC seriously believe that China's active stonewalling of the international community's attempts to get to the bottom of what happened and thus learn better how to combat the virus can be reduced to its "uncertainty about where an investigation might lead" or its "frustration" about outside political pressure? If... this wishful thinking really reflects what our IC believes, the world is in deep trouble.
In sum, we can assess with a high degree of confidence that while the origins and initial awareness of the virus by the Chinese government cannot be clearly ascertained, the Chinese government has been intimately involved in most everything since then. It has used the pandemic to further its global economic and political agenda. Its behavior has been ruthless and malicious.
[T]he U.S. intelligence community's whitewashing of China's culpability puts us all at risk.... Every word is weighed and considered. The implication that China is essentially innocent of any ill will is in the report only because some senior official wanted to include it.
God help us if this signals the beginning of a Biden administration appeasement strategy. Judging from everything we have experienced over the last ten to twenty years, the attempt to placate China by writing off its malicious behavior as lightly as this report does... shows weakness. It rewards an aggressive China, and only invites more of the same.
The recent release of an unclassified summary by the Intelligence Community (IC) of its investigation into China's role in the COVID pandemic leaves one feeling that there is nothing there. Like Sergeant Schultz in the old TV series "Hogan's Heroes," the IC seems to be protesting "I know nothing! Nothing!" The report provided no real substantive insights into the origins of the pandemic. Yet the Intelligence Community's COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears. Without saying so directly, it encourages us to discount China's significant culpability in this disaster, downplaying its responsibility for the pandemic unleashed on its territory and its role in the deadly spread of COVID around the world.
