Intel politicization

The risk of a politicized national intelligence director

President George W. Bush signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Act into law some 15 years ago, creating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Counterterrorism Center and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Designed to increase collaboration and transparency across the Intelligence Community (IC), the reality has been greater competition for resources and increased bureaucracy. More grave is the ODNI’s potential to be politically weaponized, as some argue Attorney General William Barr has done with the Department of Justice. 

The ODNI was conceived to address inherent flaws that the 9/11 Commission believed had accounted for the tragedy’s intelligence failure. Recommendations focused on six principal weaknesses, foremost of which was reforming structural barriers and addressing the lack of common standards and practices to pool overseas information with that collected domestically.