Politicization of intelligence

"Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34)

Impeachment or not, the intelligence community is the real loser

First Congress and then voters will decide whether President Trump’s apparent effort to utilize U.S. aid to compel political favors from Ukraine’s government warrants his removal from office. Whatever happens, there is one certainty: One of the biggest casualties of the Trump presidency will be trust in the intelligence community.

Intelligence politicization has been a problem for decades. After Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter, for example, the intelligence community revised (against both evidence and logic) its earlier conclusions that the Soviet Union had used biological weapons, fearing that to maintain that conclusion would give Reagan an excuse to turn away from arms control talks.

Intelligence politicization became the heart of controversy in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, where so much pre-war intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program turned out to be false or exaggerated. Rather than address the root cause of the intelligence problems (human and signals intelligence both confirming false or exaggerated accounts, because Iraqis believed Saddam Hussein’s bluffs), the Central Intelligence Agency used leaks to credulous journalists to wage bureaucratic battle.

As CIA and Pentagon analysts drew different policy conclusions, many intelligence sources blamed the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (full disclosure: in which I served) for twisting intelligence...