TRUMP MAY CHOOSE "ALTERNATIVE INTELLIGENCE" TO SUPPORT HIS "ALTERNATIVE FACTS," FORMER AGENTS WARN
Malak Habbak
March 2 2017, 12:12 p.m.
A FORMER CIA ANALYST assigned to work on the Bush administrations attempt to link Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda is warning that the Trumps administration may be adopting the same model of alternative intelligence that led to the Iraq war. They weighed false information. They also took raw reports and cherry-picked those from sources that we didnt deem reliable, and gave those to the president, said Nada Bakos, who worked at the CIA from 2000-2010, in an interview with Jeremy Scahill.
-snip- (recording of the interview)
Bakos said she is concerned that the Trump administration is operating with the expectation that you toe the line according to what they want versus the reality, the situation on the ground. That approach will politicize the structure of the intelligence community. So you can politicize the information that comes out, possibly develop your own team that feeds the bottom line that youre after, she said. That to me is one of the more concerning underlying factors in how [Trump is] treating the intelligence community. If its always serving his needs and serving his view of the world, he may as well not have one.
After 9/11, as Vice President Dick Cheney orchestrated the drive to war, Bakos was part of a CIA team charged with producing evidence to support the assertions of the administration that Iraq had an alliance with al Qaeda. That question did not come up organically through the intelligence we were collecting, Bakos told Jeremy Scahill in the latest episode of Intercepted. That question came up from the administration. We werent seeing indicators. We wouldnt have formed a team otherwise to evaluate this information.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also established the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, which carried out an effort to extract information from across the intelligence community that supported the case for war. Their findings were the opposite of basically what we were finding at the time, she said. So that in and of itself was the beginning of a backwards cart before the horse. We came to our conclusion. We delivered it to the White House, to Congress. The DOD did have a very different opinion on how they characterized relationships between Saddam and other terrorist organizations This model of politicized intelligence stove-piping bits of raw and unreliable reports, leads to bad information and tragic consequences. It led to war in this instance, said Bakos.
In the same interview, Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who worked on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, observed that Trumps initial strategy has been an attempt to defang the intelligence community and pump up the military and law enforcement community.
more
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/trump-may-choose-alternative-intelligence-to-support-his-alternative-facts-former-agents-warn/
still_one
(91,937 posts)Ilsa
(61,675 posts)Then trumputin will declare martial law.
Bill USA
(6,436 posts)Donald did that, then the Repugnants would agree to impeach him.)
LakeArenal
(28,713 posts)No Intelligence?