Posted on 04/05/2017 5:06:46 PM PDT by markomalley
The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect.
What I am talking about is the continuing “Wiretapgate” debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world — a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad — the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order.
The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a “trust gap” that can take years to bridge and resolve.
Truth, despite the naysayers, is objective and absolute. The intelligence community has a responsibility to provide the most informed truth to the president. The truth, warts and all, will always be the soundest basis for any foreign policy. This is what our multibillion-dollar intel leviathan owes the American people and its government.
It has become clear to the American public, however, that intelligence leadership learned long ago to stop listening to its own philosophy.
The twin serpents of politicization and political correctness — a Soviet term, by the way — walk hand in hand throughout the intelligence community, as well as every other government agency. The PC mindset that now dominates every college campus is also positioned firmly throughout our government — particularly within the intelligence community, which saw its greatest personnel influx ever in the post-9/11 environment. Today’s intelligence community, the average age of which I would estimate at 32, was raised under the beleaguered Bush administration and reached professional maturity primarily under the Obama administration, immersed in a PC environment.
In this PC world, all diversity is embraced — except diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of politicization that has never been seen before.
Watching Evelyn Farkas admit on TV that the Obama administration wanted the intelligence community to “get as much information as you can” before Donald Trump took office resembles some sort of social science experiment gone bad — and it frames the problems wrought by PC/political brainwashing. Here a mid-level official, permanently dwelling in a bubble of progressive liberalism, acknowledged being complicit in the breaking of U.S. ethics rules and perhaps law — because, as she explained, that’s what they needed to do!
Farkus has all the right credentials: a Ph.D. and a career shuttling between academia, the government and the press that is the hallmark of the anointed “Washington insider” class. What is lacking, however, is any level of self-awareness, common sense or judgment. She is emblematic of the denizens of the Deep State that everyone in Washington likes to tell us doesn’t exist.
I am here to tell you, having served in the CIA and the Naval Reserve, that the Deep State does indeed exist. And it’s not a bunch of centrally controlled drones in black robes meeting at midnight. The Deep State is made up of thousands of similarly credentialed, remarkably “un-diverse” civil servants and political appointees who saw themselves promoted rapidly during the eight years of the Obama administration. The appointees have left, but make no mistake — the progressive civil servants remain.
There is little doubt that intel leadership saw Obama’s relaxation of rules regulating the sharing of NSA raw intelligence — for which there is NO operational justification — and did nothing. They also saw the Obama administration’s demand for “incidental” collection on the Trump campaign at an unprecedented level — and still they did nothing.
Like some binary poisonous reagent, these dynamics combined to foster an environment ripe for political abuse and leakage — a fairly transparent attempt, from the point of view of any discerning intelligence officer. This weaponization of intelligence for the sake of discrediting the political opposition I have seen in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Moldova and elsewhere — sadly, it is now on our shores.
The present culture of the intelligence community and the shameless political shenanigans of the Obama administration combined to create this disaster. In earlier times, such a gambit would have failed; CIA leadership famously stood up to the Nixon administration when asked to domestically spy on Justice during Watergate, for example. It seems that today we lack the character and the competence to ensure that the intelligence community honors the trust of the American people.
Dennis Montgomery has the phone and financial records of millions of people who were spied upon using “The Hammer” - a supercomputer that the CIA hired him to build for the express purpose of spying on people without having to have a FISA warrant. And the people spied upon include (among TONS of other people) Chief Justice John Roberts, Joe Arpaio, and the judge whose drunken wife said he intended to destroy Arpaio in the lawsuit against Arpaio.
Some want to discount Montgomery’s claims because hit pieces have been written against him, but if his story isn’t true than where the heck did he get the passwords and records on that many people?
Someone in another thread posted a link to a page that has excerpts from an interview with Sharyl Attkisson, where she said, ““a source, first hand, has told me, ‘Presidents can issue ‘directives’ that make legal ‘ or allow people to do things that are otherwise illegal – almost anything – and that means & we would never know about it because the directive, I’m told, comes with a cover story indemnity for those involved and the permission to lie about it if they’re ever caught.”
That would explain how the NSA can have at their disposal (as proven by Wikileaks) the capability to PLANT FAKE EVIDENCE on innocent people’s computers - which they did to Sharyl Attkisson herself.
If what she has been told is correct, America has given the POTUS a signed blank check to commit any crime, any atrocity - while covering it up with lies so that the people who find out the truth (which can only really be done by the confessions of whistleblowers...) are maligned and ridiculed as “fake news”.
Most Americans would keel over in a dead faint if they had any clue the level of lawlessness we’re talking about here.
As someone who received a threat that my husband might be “caught” with child porn on his computer, I am not amused to find out that the NSA has exactly that capability - and that they used the capability of planting false evidence in order to try to frame/stop Sharyl Attkisson.
GWB added 8 new intel agencies after 911
DHS is the biggest fiasco ever
I want to faint everytime I board a plane in this country
I don’t know shit but I know it when I smell it, and I smell a lot of it lately
Scott has been called on often by all of the MSM but I bet that the frequency will decrease as liberal producers realize that he was not one of Obama’s chosen few.
What more needs to be said? Too bad the leading IC civil servants didn't have the balls to whistle blow on the Obama Administration. Snowden did warned us.......
Thanks...gonna check it out.
No argument to the contrary from me!
Thank you.
My definition of cynicism is “the conceit that negativity is objectivity.”Journalism has always claimed to be objective, and yet it has always known (“if it bleeds, it leads”) that it is negative. Thus, commercial journalism is cynical. Inherently.
They pulled the red light.
Don know if story offers much new.
Again thanks.
I have predicted the fall of the EU since it’s inception.
The most stunning thing I have seen in mylife so far is Our Gov setting up an Islamic beachhead in Africa to invade Europe.
I could have never predicted that though I did call it as it was/is happening.
Hopefully the EU will dissolve and the West will reunite to fight our common enemy.
At the moment the magic 8 balls says “it’s uncertain”
I know there are good men there but as John Locke said Evil thrives when good men do nothing
Notice we have kids in Syria on the news dying of sarin in detail.
Hmm don’t recall that in the media in 2013.
Remember the nightly body counts when GWB was in office?
Boom! They went away when Obama took office.
Never forget the MSM are the official arm of Dem propaganda.
Lots lose their livelihoods by saying something to the wrong person, thereby many are led by the nose
Seemed to be the same old, same old power struggle among the people at the top.
Nothing new.
The DemonRATs, seeing that Wikileaks had done an end run around their tight hold on propaganda, decided to weaponize the intelligence functions of the Federal government. They were not going to let the Republicans crack their wall of control even if it meant breaking the law.
Bookmarked.
it is easy, corrupt cabinet people appointed by a corrupt president and that is that..
founding fathers always said America would only survive with a decent and just people..
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