So if you disagree with Heather Hurlburt you are not a "Right Thinking American." Nice piece of rhetoric in an attempt to claim some high ground that is in the real world as mythical as the Unicorn. I don't think that it is a phrase that is designed to win converts from, Heather Hurlburt's rather generous "30%" allocation, of us that are "Wrong Thinking Americans." It could be her playful sense of whit and humor, but as I have seen little evidence of that in her prior dialogs, I have to discount that view and attribute it to her prejudaces.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Eli sure does like that talking point about "the core function of an intelligent service is to cause foreign nationals to commit treason," doesn't he? Sounds like someone was raised on too many Ludlum novels.

Quoting bjkeefe: Eli sure does like that talking point about "the core function of an intelligent service is to cause foreign nationals to commit treason," doesn't he? Sounds like someone was raised on too many Ludlum novels.

Technically speaking, that's espionage. There's obviously more to intelligence than espionage. I mean, it might be fun to be in the traitor-making business, but that's not the same as intelligence. Democracies aren't that great at espionage (it's a lot easier to turn somebody if you can threaten to rape their grandmother or bulldoze their entire town). Our best weapon during the cold war was being seen as the good guys and having idealistic people on the other side to come to us. Our paid sources were generally useless, or worse, double agents. However, you can't be the good guys when you're torturing, invading, and occupying.

Quoting claymisher: having idealistic people on the other side to come to us

Technically speaking, that's still getting those people to be traitors/inform on their governments. It's not espionage because we didn't go out and find them, but it is still the core of intelligence to find classified information from other countries. By and large, that involves getting information from people in those countries whether by trickery, payment or their willingness to inform. Regardless of method, it is a legal fact that a foreign national who tells us something his or her government has marked as classified is committing treachery.