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| Home Front: Politix |
| How the intel community was turned into a political weapon against President Trump |
| 2017-04-07 |
| [The Hill] The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect. What I am talking about is the continuing "Wiretapgate" debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world -- a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad -- the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order. The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a "trust gap" that can take years to bridge and resolve. Truth, despite the naysayers, is objective and absolute. The intelligence community has a responsibility to provide the most informed truth to the president. The truth, warts and all, will always be the soundest basis for any foreign policy. This is what our multibillion-dollar intel leviathan owes the American people and its government. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |