The Atlantic - "The High Cost of Politicizing Intelligence"

[TomCADem]

This is the clear national security risk of a Trump presidency given his rejection of evidence that does not support his world view.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/the-high-cost-of-politicizing-intelligence/517854/

The White House recently sought to enlist the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to build a case for its controversial and unpopular immigration ban, CNN reported on Thursday. Among intelligence professionals, the request to produce analysis that supports a favored policy—vice producing analysis, and allowing it to inform policy—is called politicization. It is anathema to the training most analysts receive and the values that lie at the heart of the vocation. There is a high cost to putting ideology over informed assessments of political, economic, and military realities.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, where I served as director of strategy in the Directorate of Analysis, the subject of politicization is introduced to analysts almost as soon as they enter into service. There is good reason for this: Politicization is not an academic issue.

During the Cold War, the Ford administration convened a Team B comprised of conservative foreign-policy thinkers to challenge the intelligence community’s estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Then-CIA director and future President George H.W. Bush later concluded the group’s work lent “itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.”

In the early 1990s, after a rocky confirmation process during which he was accused of politicizing intelligence analysis, Director of the CIA Robert Gates implemented a series of reforms aimed at guarding against political or ideological thinking coloring intelligence analysis. Gates described politicization as “deliberately distorting analysis or judgments to favor a preferred line of thinking irrespective of evidence.”