[mac_truck]

"The Russians are right! We're wrong! Georgia started it, the Russians ended it," Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, a California Republican, told Assistant Secretary of State Dan Fried, who testified on administration policy to both the Senate panel and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Whose opinion would you give more weight to, the conservative congressman on the HFAC who has direct access to the testimony and the classified data behind it or some anonymous screen name who claims to know better?

[wideawake]

Apparently you give the most weight to Reuters, and trust them to report accurately about data from State. And you apparently trust state to accurately represent Rohrabacher - and implictly to suggest that Rohrabacher leaks sensitive intelligence.

That's not a chain of custody I can trust.

If even the in-Putin's-pocket Interfax admits that the Georgian police vehicle was hit, then it was hit.

[MarMema]

Not that I really care what you think, but wideawake is exactly right.

Russia has been paying South Ossetians to foment a response from Georgia, and there are a hundred zillion threads here on FR alone to prove that.

[MarMema]

The attacks originally starting to take place several weeks before the actual “intervention” with Georgia President’s web site coming under DDoS attack from Russian hackers in July

Cyber attacks on Georgia began a day before the actual invasion. On Aug. 9 Georgia’s largest bank was attacked and all electronic banking was stopped. The attack was sophisticated — hackers broke into the information site of the bank and started to change currency rates, devaluing the Georgian currency. According to the bank’s system administrator, they have retooled the system and should be able to resist new cyber attacks. Also targeted were the Web sites of the Georgian president and other governmental bodies. The aim of the attackers was to shut down all Georgian news sites, and for the first two days of the war, Russia was the world’s sole source of information on the situation in Georgia.

Burling said the distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks began in the weeks running up to the outbreak of the Russia-Georgia conflict