War on terror

Donald Trump’s Choice for National Security Adviser Has One Priority: Combatting ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’

Flynn was the consummate military man. He distinguished himself during the war in Afghanistan where he was General Stanley McChrystal’s intelligence chief. In the early phases of the war on terrorism, Flynn, as director of intelligence for Joint Task Force 180, was in charge of intelligence-gathering and collection for most of the forces leading the battle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. As Marc Ambinder noted in The Atlanticin May 2011, McChrystal and Flynn “introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable intelligence. … Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding” in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It’s in that position Flynn also angered the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment, writing a report in which he called many intelligence analysts “ignorant,” “incurious,” and “disengaged”—assessments he stood by even when he was criticized for them.