Spies, lies and Donald Trump cries foul

Donald Trump was with Russian hookers in Moscow and was filmed by the spooks.

Donald Trump was the target of blackmail and so agreed to become a stooge for the Kremlin.

Donald Trump deliberately sold NATO allies down the river to ensure Russia's deadly meddling in Ukraine never became a campaign issue in the US election.

Extraordinary and salacious claims indeed. And who can really say the man who so infamously bragged he would "grab them by the pussy" wasn't wrapped up in some perverted sex romp that has changed forever the course of geopolitics?

But reading the supposed dossier of a supposed former British spy who has supposed top-level sources inside Russia's political establishment … well, the mud starts to stink far more than stick.

So what do we make of this release of 35 pages of outrageous and gossipy claims that are wrapped around a few maybe, could-he-have, sort-of-sounds-plausible types of tidbits?

Here's Donald Trump.

No shades of grey there.

But that will hardly end the matter. This is the nature of the dark arts of espionage, with truth obscured by lies and conspiracy deployed a deliberate weapon of deception.

At the most generous interpretation, the dossier published by Buzzfeed after a sensational CNN report alleging Trump was presented evidence on Russian efforts to compromise him might amount to what is know as raw human intelligence.

This is the kind of material that is never intended to be made public. It doesn't need to stand up as evidence in a court of law.

The main purpose in gathering such material is to provide a level of insight into activities people or foreign governments go to stringent efforts to hide.

And the value of such raw intelligence is really a matter of judgment.

Does the source have a reliable record of reporting?

Are they in a position to know what they claim to know?

Is the information corroborated by other independent sources?

That is basically the process of intelligence analysis. Those questions can be incredibly difficult to answer if the identity of the source is not known, and in this instance, we don't know who this apparent James Bond might be or who he/she has spoken to (sources A through D).

And we just don't yet know what the chiefs of the CIA, FBI and NSA have told Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and what other sources back up the Russian hacking claims.

It would be extraordinarily reckless for the spy chiefs to have based their judgments on this dossier alone, if indeed it forms any part of the evidence.

Maybe the whole dossier is a simply an invention created by the Russians, designed to sow doubt about the credibility of the hacking claims altogether, a kind of double-game? Or maybe it's hoax of the style that so spectacularly caught out Dan Rather on George W. Bush's service during the Vietnam War.

There is no need for spies or lies to discern the truth; that in just over a week a man named Donald Trump with a remarkable ability to win support through convincing delusions will take command as US President.

Everyone, everywhere, is stuck deep in the mud.