In devising a scenario for Epstein’s murder, you don’t explore how it might have further been facilitated, if the order for it came “from above”, i.e. from persons with authority over the prison and the subsequent investigations.
I don’t because I view that as less plausible than the scenario I came up with. The number of people that would have to be planted in the investigation is pretty immense; his death was carefully investigated by dozens of FBI agents and at least several people from the AG’s office. And if the security footage is genuine, and I really doubt it isn’t, those LEOs still have to contact and arrange his murder by a neighboring inmate. I also find it unlikely that Epstein just so happened to have some sort of direct incriminating connection with the warden or correctional staff of the prison he happened to be housed in, which would reduce the number of people involved. And I don’t think the FBI or the OIG is structured so poorly that one overseer, no matter how highly placed, can reach around both ends of an entire high profile investigation like this.
Something that I didn’t really get to in the post—as far as we know, all of Epstein’s victims are still alive. They have accused specific people of crimes. None of those people accused were involved in investigating his death. None of them even seem like people the CIA would be interested in blackmailing. Perhaps you’re suggesting his CIA handler(s) masterminded this, but a foot soldier in the CIA wouldn’t have any authority over the prison or FBI—they’re two distinct agencies.
Well, he may have had a kind of immunity, but it seems unlikely that his status as a brothel-master with the capacity to blackmail VIPs is something that he developed independently of his liaisons with intelligence agencies.
This is a tad too cynical a take for me. The furthest I’m willing to go is that perhaps at some point his status as a brothel master was, against CIA policy, used to blackmail and milk an agent for information. My impression talking to former officers and reading about it is that the modern CIA has way too much oversight for its employees to organize or facilitate an americanchild prostitution ring as an operation. You have to understand that there is an entire counterintelligence branch of the CIA devoted to going over assets, making sure they’re not double agents, and ensuring the information they’re passing is good. This is in addition to an internal affairs agency that all government bureaucracies have, and other special oversight that’s been added to the CIA over the years by Congress. If any of those people have any moral compunctions at all and decide to pursue the matter with the OIG or send an anonymous telegram to the New York Times, you’re going to jail. Even the most ambitious and psychopathic intelligence officer would have to realize that whatever professional boost he was after wasn’t worth this absurdly risky crime.
Designing an organization to overthrow your government is a dangerous form of “fun”.
I think you’ll find that a lot of what I will say throughout the sequence is already pretty well understood by the people trying to do this. Conspirators aren’t stupid; they think about this stuff too.
Perhaps you’re suggesting his CIA handler(s) masterminded this, but a foot soldier in the CIA wouldn’t have any authority over the prison or FBI—they’re two distinct agencies.
There would need to be existing relationships for that. It might be that the CIA has a relationship with the prison that they have facilitated to be able to put pressure on individuals of the prison. Bribe someone who actually controls cell distribution and put people from whom the CIA wants intelligence together with someone who’s likely going to rape them. Then blackmail the person to give up the intelligence in return for the rape to stop.
Such a relationship can then be used in a case like this to get the prisoner who’s otherwise bribed to kill Epstein into the right cell block. You also shouldn’t underrate the capability of the CIA to blackmail people to get what they want through their surveillance infrastructure.
If any of those people have any moral compunctions at all and decide to pursue the matter with the OIG or send an anonymous telegram to the New York Times, you’re going to jail.
That assumes that the New York Times would actually do anything with the information. If they got such a letter they would go to their CIA contact person and ask them for more information and then the pressure would be created to keep them silent.
The fact that Epstein could openly operate for so long without places like the New York Times holding him to account.
I don’t think the CIA has a general moral code where they have a problem with killing people who are clearly bad people if that’s required to keep secrets that the agency wants to keep secret out of the open. Torturing people is a strong moral violation and CIA officials who engaged in it weren’t punished after it came out in the open.
This is in addition to an internal affairs agency that all government bureaucracies have, and other special oversight that’s been added to the CIA over the years by Congress.
That’s like the nuclear safety rules that nuclear weapons have to have special codes to be activated. The US military set them to 000000000 in the beginning to fulfill the legal obligation. The CIA does not have effective oversight by congress.
I’m not trying to be condescending, but a hundred thousand people have worked for the CIA since its inception—you need to pick a book written by one of those people, or a historian, or an investigative journalist, or a defector, or a state department official, or politician, and read it. You do not have an accurate and discrete enough mental model of the incentives and pressures of CIA work, or a strong enough understanding of what CIA officers take up the job for or do, and so you’re supposing plots that make no sense. I could sit here and go over them mechanically, but I suspect you will just move onto a hypothesis slightly more outwardly reasonable that I ultimately find the premise for to be ridiculous. If you want to suggest the current layers of congressional oversight of the CIA are just for show, then need to know what those layers are. Or maybe you need to try to tell a traffic officer that you’re a CIA officer and have the special bribing authority the next time he tries to give you a ticket and see how well that goes.
The CIA is not a person, and it’s unhelpful to think of it as if it were. Just because you perceive a moral equivalence between the MKULTRA program in the 1970s, or torture of foreign terrorist detainees during the 2000s, and the “bribing” of an American prison warden to facilitate the murder of a high profile American prisoner in 2019, doesn’t make the latter at all plausible. I’m not trying to argue with you about how ethical the CIA is or whether or not Mr. CIA has the moral compunctions to do such a thing, I’m trying to explain why I don’t think with 80% probability three or four low level rat handlers have the means or motive to arrange the murder of an American citizen inside the country’s highest security jail.
Epstein was hanging out with a variety of billionaires and other very powerful people. There’s no reason to assume that only low-level people had an incentive to get rid of him. It’s again a similar strawman as focusing on Alan Dershowitz as being the height of people with incentives to kill Epstein.
Let’s just agree to disagree then, at least until I write the next few posts in the sequence. Again, I do think it is at least more plausible that a billionaire or one of the friends he made outside of his contact with the CIA arranged a murder, I just find it too just-so that they had much authority over the prison or his death investigation. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
I don’t because I view that as less plausible than the scenario I came up with. The number of people that would have to be planted in the investigation is pretty immense; his death was carefully investigated by dozens of FBI agents and at least several people from the AG’s office. And if the security footage is genuine, and I really doubt it isn’t, those LEOs still have to contact and arrange his murder by a neighboring inmate. I also find it unlikely that Epstein just so happened to have some sort of direct incriminating connection with the warden or correctional staff of the prison he happened to be housed in, which would reduce the number of people involved. And I don’t think the FBI or the OIG is structured so poorly that one overseer, no matter how highly placed, can reach around both ends of an entire high profile investigation like this.
Something that I didn’t really get to in the post—as far as we know, all of Epstein’s victims are still alive. They have accused specific people of crimes. None of those people accused were involved in investigating his death. None of them even seem like people the CIA would be interested in blackmailing. Perhaps you’re suggesting his CIA handler(s) masterminded this, but a foot soldier in the CIA wouldn’t have any authority over the prison or FBI—they’re two distinct agencies.
This is a tad too cynical a take for me. The furthest I’m willing to go is that perhaps at some point his status as a brothel master was, against CIA policy, used to blackmail and milk an agent for information. My impression talking to former officers and reading about it is that the modern CIA has way too much oversight for its employees to organize or facilitate an american child prostitution ring as an operation. You have to understand that there is an entire counterintelligence branch of the CIA devoted to going over assets, making sure they’re not double agents, and ensuring the information they’re passing is good. This is in addition to an internal affairs agency that all government bureaucracies have, and other special oversight that’s been added to the CIA over the years by Congress. If any of those people have any moral compunctions at all and decide to pursue the matter with the OIG or send an anonymous telegram to the New York Times, you’re going to jail. Even the most ambitious and psychopathic intelligence officer would have to realize that whatever professional boost he was after wasn’t worth this absurdly risky crime.
I think you’ll find that a lot of what I will say throughout the sequence is already pretty well understood by the people trying to do this. Conspirators aren’t stupid; they think about this stuff too.
There would need to be existing relationships for that. It might be that the CIA has a relationship with the prison that they have facilitated to be able to put pressure on individuals of the prison. Bribe someone who actually controls cell distribution and put people from whom the CIA wants intelligence together with someone who’s likely going to rape them. Then blackmail the person to give up the intelligence in return for the rape to stop.
Such a relationship can then be used in a case like this to get the prisoner who’s otherwise bribed to kill Epstein into the right cell block. You also shouldn’t underrate the capability of the CIA to blackmail people to get what they want through their surveillance infrastructure.
That assumes that the New York Times would actually do anything with the information. If they got such a letter they would go to their CIA contact person and ask them for more information and then the pressure would be created to keep them silent.
The fact that Epstein could openly operate for so long without places like the New York Times holding him to account.
I don’t think the CIA has a general moral code where they have a problem with killing people who are clearly bad people if that’s required to keep secrets that the agency wants to keep secret out of the open. Torturing people is a strong moral violation and CIA officials who engaged in it weren’t punished after it came out in the open.
That’s like the nuclear safety rules that nuclear weapons have to have special codes to be activated. The US military set them to 000000000 in the beginning to fulfill the legal obligation. The CIA does not have effective oversight by congress.
I’m not trying to be condescending, but a hundred thousand people have worked for the CIA since its inception—you need to pick a book written by one of those people, or a historian, or an investigative journalist, or a defector, or a state department official, or politician, and read it. You do not have an accurate and discrete enough mental model of the incentives and pressures of CIA work, or a strong enough understanding of what CIA officers take up the job for or do, and so you’re supposing plots that make no sense. I could sit here and go over them mechanically, but I suspect you will just move onto a hypothesis slightly more outwardly reasonable that I ultimately find the premise for to be ridiculous. If you want to suggest the current layers of congressional oversight of the CIA are just for show, then need to know what those layers are. Or maybe you need to try to tell a traffic officer that you’re a CIA officer and have the special bribing authority the next time he tries to give you a ticket and see how well that goes.
The CIA is not a person, and it’s unhelpful to think of it as if it were. Just because you perceive a moral equivalence between the MKULTRA program in the 1970s, or torture of foreign terrorist detainees during the 2000s, and the “bribing” of an American prison warden to facilitate the murder of a high profile American prisoner in 2019, doesn’t make the latter at all plausible. I’m not trying to argue with you about how ethical the CIA is or whether or not Mr. CIA has the moral compunctions to do such a thing, I’m trying to explain why I don’t think with 80% probability three or four low level rat handlers have the means or motive to arrange the murder of an American citizen inside the country’s highest security jail.
Epstein was hanging out with a variety of billionaires and other very powerful people. There’s no reason to assume that only low-level people had an incentive to get rid of him. It’s again a similar strawman as focusing on Alan Dershowitz as being the height of people with incentives to kill Epstein.
Let’s just agree to disagree then, at least until I write the next few posts in the sequence. Again, I do think it is at least more plausible that a billionaire or one of the friends he made outside of his contact with the CIA arranged a murder, I just find it too just-so that they had much authority over the prison or his death investigation. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.