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U.S. Intelligence Institutionally Politicized Toward Democrats via @freebeacon freebeacon.com/national-secur…
John Gentry who spent 12 years as a CIA analyst, criticized former intelligence leaders, including John Brenan, James Clapper, and former deputy CIA director Michael Morell, for breaking decades-long prohibitions of publicly airing their liberal political views in attacking Trump
The institutional bias outlined in a lengthy article in the quarterly International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence risks undermining the role of intelligence in support of government leaders charged with making policy decisions.
Gentry stopped short of saying the widespread liberal bias of intelligence officials has influenced intelligence reports and products. However, he concludes that "bias may have crept into CIA analyses."
"But in 2016 observers of U.S. intelligence began to wonder if the CIA's once-firm prohibition on partisan politics had changed, and to ponder whether a new kind of politicization had arisen: namely, institutionally embedded, partisan bias," Gentry wrote.
Gentry points to the activities of senior retired intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign that "universally" criticized then-candidate Trump and supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
"The attacks on Trump were unprecedented for intelligence officers in their substance, tone, and volume," he stated. "Critics went far beyond trying to correct Trump's misstatements about U.S. intelligence; they attacked him as a human being."
Gentry, currently a professor at Georgetown and Columbia Universities, provides a detailed analysis of whether the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community and the CIA in particular have become institutional partisans supporting the Democratic Party.
Books by Clapper and Michael Hayden appeared to justify political attacks on Trump based on both former officials' claims that the president has adopted a different world view. "For senior former intelligence officials to make such blatantly partisan statements is unprecedented,"
Gentry wrote that further investigation is needed into whether there is a liberal political institutional bias at CIA. Such bias would damage the agency's ability to carry out its primary missions of defending against threats and helping senior leaders in making policy decisions.
Unless the questions about bias are answered, Republicans may trust CIA less and give the agency a smaller role. For Democrats, the bias will lead to using the CIA as a tool to support its liberal agenda.
Leaks have increased sharply in an apparent bid to undermine Trump, and Gentry said a long-held prohibition against discussing partisan politics in the office has been set aside. Anti-Trump conversations are common in CIA analytical units, and on Facebook.
Politicization during the Obama administration also was evident at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, long criticized for its shortcomings in intelligence analysis and reporting on China's military.
According to Gentry, under Obama, editors of the DIA's primary current intelligence report were notified to "avoid specifically identified terms that might trigger criticism of administration policy."
"That clearly stated policy of politicization provoked no apparent reaction of any sort from analysts," Gentry said. "DIA analysts seemed comfortable with politicization by omission."
The anti-Trump "resistance" by Democrats refusing to deal with Trump on any issue also contributed to the problem with intelligence officials joining the Deep State. "This attitude is incompatible with a core principle of established democracies
"In the US liberals during the Cold War years often worried that unaccountable intelligence and security agencies were running amok. Now, ‘progressives' welcome an ideologically center-left ‘deep state,' built in part upon policies like Obama’s as a check on Trump
An example was former CIA director Brennan's announcement in July 2017—six months after leaving office—that CIA officers had an obligation to "refuse to carry out" Trump administration orders if Trump fired Mueller. Brennan further decried Trump as unstable.
"The US gov'thas traditionally and wisely declined to ask its job applicants and civil service employees about their political affiliations but President Obama especially, got around the policy by mandating hiring from demographic groups known to be generally pro-Democratic,"
"‘Affirmative action' programs may therefore merit reconsideration. Another avenue for exploration is the attempt by some major technology firms that have developed leftist, intolerant corporate cultures to re-introduce intellectual diversity.
Kenneth deGraffenreid, former National Security Council intelligence director in the Reagan administration, said Gentry's excellent summary of CIA politicization "confirms what those of us who have been working for intelligence reform have observed on a daily basis."
"Politicization of intelligence begins when the work of the massive intelligence bureaucracy deviates from the focused definition of intelligence—the gathering and interpretation of foreign secrets," deGraffenreid said.
"Today the IC and especially the CIA jealously envision themselves as the purveyors of all foreign policy wisdom. In this role it does not welcome other opinions and believes that U.S. officials should limit their reading and thinking to the CIA-provided intelligence analysis."
The proper role of intelligence is perverted further when some in the intelligence bureaucracy believe their role is to provide a check on the actions of elected leaders and see their job as figuratively "poking a finger in the policymaker's eye," he said.
"Do I think CIA officers as a whole are guilty of taking sides or slanting analysis? No. Do I think we have seen senior CIA officers guilty of using their positions to favor the Democratic Party? Beyond a doubt, and I'm not sure they're all former officers," he added.
"From Trump's election to this date, a common topic of conversation in the hallways of CIA headquarters at Langley is how best to ‘resist' with no fear of backlash and no recognition of just how wrong it is," said Johnson, head of the group Americans for Intelligence Reform.
"It even appears more likely with each passing day that a former CIA director was directly involved in a plot to overturn a legally elected U.S. president, which certainly seems to define treason.
I am greatly saddened to say that while reforms to the intelligence sector are desperately needed, I don't think it can be fixed anymore with who is there."
