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riversedge

(69,708 posts)
Fri Aug 4, 2017, 11:09 PM Aug 2017

Trump is trying to politicize intelligence to support his Iran policy. Thats dangerous.

Whow. And Stephen Miller is in on this. crap!



Trump is trying to politicize intelligence to support his Iran policy. That’s dangerous.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-trying-to-politicize-intelligence-to-support-his-iran-policy-thats-dangerous/2017/08/04/ffb192e0-77b6-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na&utm_term=.618d9317e452

By David S. Cohen August 4 at 10:31 AM

David S. Cohen served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence during the Obama administration.


The relationship between the intelligence community and President Trump surely has been tested in the first six months of this administration. But the president’s reported demand for intelligence to support his policy preference to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal risks politicizing intelligence analysis, with potentially grave consequences not only for national security decision-making but also for our ability to address a wide range of international threats.

Under a 2015 law governing the Iran nuclear agreement, the president is required to certify every 90 days whether Iran “is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement,” “has not committed a material breach with respect to the agreement,” and “has not taken any action, including covert activities, that could significantly advance its nuclear weapons program.”

Although this certification is a political call, it necessarily is based on an intelligence assessment............................................


Trump apparently understands this.
Acting on the recommendation of his key national security advisers — the secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — he reluctantly agreed last month to certify that Iran was in compliance with the agreement. That uniform recommendation, of course, was based on the intelligence community’s collection and analysis.


But Trump then immediately commissioned a group of White House aides to generate a rationale for declaring Iran to be in violation of the agreement. According to a report in Foreign Policy, this group includes Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, who has no intelligence background. The president reportedly told them “that he wants to be in a place to decertify 90 days from now and it’s their job to put him there,” according to the magazine’s source.

This is not how the intelligence process is supposed to work. Certainly, policymakers should ask the intelligence community probing questions and challenge the community’s judgments. That not only is policymakers’ prerogative, but also it is the right thing to do, and the tougher and more topical the questions, the better.

But there is a big difference between asking a pointed question and demanding a particular answer.
When a president directs his staff to generate intelligence to support a preferred policy outcome, overriding the dispassionate analytic judgments of intelligence professionals, that is the very definition of the politicization of intelligence.

This is a dangerous place to go. At the most basic level,..........................................

That is one reason we have invested billions of dollars in our intelligence community over the past decades. Not only is the U.S. intelligence community unparalleled in its collection capabilities, we have devoted enormous time and attention to training our analysts — especially in the aftermath of the episode regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
— to ensure that finished intelligence is objective, properly qualified, based on all available sources and free of political considerations. When the president demands intelligence to fit his political desires, this investment is squandered and our national security endangered.

Moreover, .........................................

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Trump is trying to politicize intelligence to support his Iran policy. Thats dangerous. (Original Post) riversedge Aug 2017 OP
Guess he learned nothing from Bush/Cheney. Marie Marie Aug 2017 #1
A must read. K&R secondwind Aug 2017 #2
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