There’s Something About Kirsten — Translating Gillibrand’s comments about Grusch’s testimony

Submission statement: Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gave an interview about the recent HOC hearing, and while the interview was mostly fine, things got kinda difficult to parse when she talked about Grusch’s testimony.

Here’s a breakdown of what she likely meant to say:

I have no ability to verify that testimony because we’ve not been told of any such programs.

This is bad. Really bad. To Gillibrand, “verifying” is only about asking the DoD for confirmation, or looking for it on a list of SAPs supplied to Congress (which obviously only includes SAPs that are not hidden from Congress). This is like going around and asking “Hello, did you commit any crimes? No? Okay, thank you, sorry for asking.”

This is willful ignorance at best. Grusch offered to tell everything, including locations and people’s names. But she refuses to acknowledge this, because she will not go around knocking on doors and delivering subpoenas. I’m not saying she’s in on the cover-up, but she’s certainly not willing to dig.

She’s essentially trying to use a conciliatory approach to solve a irreconcilable situation. Like a teacher who, when a student complains about being attacked by a bully, the teacher puts both students together in front of the class and says “now you two are gonna hug each other and be friends, okay?” Of course the victim will still be beaten into a bloody pulp when the class is over, and the bully will walk out laughing.

Now, the following is not about Grusch. What she said here is about the 40 people that Grusch interviewed:

One of three things are true: Either

it doesn’t exist and they worked on programs that were alien-related which weren’t, or they are making it up, or these programs do exist and the Department of Defense is not either read in on it, or the need to know is so small that the people that have been testifying in front of us don’t know about it, or they are just misrepresenting the facts.

Number 1 is about the people involved in the crash retrieval & reverse engineering programs being lied to about the nature of those programs.

Number 5 is about them having lied to Grusch about the nature of those programs.

Number 2 is about them having lied to Grusch about the existence of those programs.

Number 4 is about those programs actually existing and having oversight, but Grusch not having the need-to-know about them.

Number 3 is what Grusch actually claimed.

The rest of the interview was fine.