Trump's Distain over US Intelligence

11/28

President-elect advisor Conway says not to worry about Trump's turning CIA briefers away since he is receiving information from a variety of sources. I guess Trump feels CIA cadre were all hired by Obama and are peddling what must be biased analysis (since said analysis does not square with his personal convictions/understandings).  I would be amazed if he even  understands how the intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination cycle has been honed over decades to cull out false information and analyst bias.

If Trump disdains considered analysis from experienced intelligence professionals in favor of the views of those who are peddling their points of view and/or unverified "facts" we are in real trouble. The Iraqi intelligence 'failures' were due, in part, to the Pentagon's use of sources deemed unreliable by the CIA. Can you imagine establishing our policy towards Iran based on the views of Israelis and the Iranian diaspora? At least Pence is receiving the briefings, but we don't know what role Pence plays in decision making.

This sad state of affairs was predicted by Robert Gates in a September WSJ editorial.   He criticizes the GOP standard-bearer as “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself.” “He has no clue about the difference between negotiating a business deal and negotiating with sovereign nations,” Gates writes. “A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.”

Catch 22

Catch 22:  a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule.


The logic going into the Trump presidency is clear and documented by a number of recent actions.

1. Donald Trump makes a statement that is factually false.
2. The mainstream media researches and documents the falsehood.
3. Trump supporters, who believe Trump's ongoing characterizations of the media as biased and dishonest, either don't follow mainstream coverage -print, TV, or cable- or take their refutation as an example of their dishonesty and biased coverage.
4. Republican leaders, including those who are not in the Trump camp, do not acknowledge what they know to be falsehoods.  To do so would be to acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes.
5. Right wing media either perpetuate the falsehood or ignore it.
6. Those on the right assume he is telling the truth or approximately so: those on the right see him as ill informed or deceptive: the two grow further apart.

On a number of issues this discordance doesn't matter.  It does matter however when Trump's statements go to the heart of our democratic norms.  A good example is his Tweet stating that three million undocumented immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton.

• The mainstream media conclusively documented that this claim was totally without merit.
• Mitch McConnell refused to directly address the issue of voter fraud:  "So, it's an interesting discussion but it strikes me as totally irrelevant. Time to move on." 
• Fox News coverage pointed out that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
• On 60 Minutes Paul Ryan refused to repudiate Donald Trump's claims. When asked he said he didn't know and that he wasn't really focused on these things. 
•  Reince Priebus, currently the chairman of the Republican National Committee and Mr. Trump’s pick for chief of staff, told CBS’s John Dickerson that “no one really knows” if millions of people voted illegally. “It’s possible.”

The bottom line seems to be a nation where some 50% of the people talking past the other 50% percent with no means of even reaching agreement on what is true, never mind the role of government.

The Politics of Not and the Absence of Republican Alternatives

 Its one thing to oppose President Obama and Democratic initiatives, but quit another to do so without offering an alternative.  Immigration is a case in point.  Republicans are adamantly opposed to President Obama's executive orders, and refused to vote on a bipartisan Immigration bill past by the Senate during the last Congress.  The electorate is entitled to compare and contrast the Democratic proposal against a alternative 'fix'.  Letting the problem fester, is not a viable solution, and the Democrats have done a poor job in pointing out the implications of doing nothing.   President Obama has laid down the challenge to Congress to come up with its own bill, but has not been as clear to the costs of doing nothing at all.   So far Republicans have been able to obfuscate what they would do on immigration,  and thus obscure the political downsides of any position they may take.  The same can be said of health care: what, exactly, is the Republican position?  What bill would they pass?  The same can be said regarding Iran: are the Republicans willing to risk an escalation of the conflict with Iran rather than compromise on US preferences for a solution?  

Two Bites at the Debt Apple

Negotiations over raising the debt ceiling effectively gives Congress two bites at the apple.  The President does not create debt.  The President has no Constitutional authority to spend monies not specifically appropriated by Congress.  If he did than President Reagan's team would never have resorted to selling weapons to Iran to fund the Contras after Congress cut off funding.

If Congress does not want to increase the national debt, than they should   pass legislation that either increase revenues or decreasing expenditures.  If they haven't the political will or power to do so via specific debated legislation- say by cutting back on entitlements while allowing military spending to grow - than they should not be able to do so by negotiation with the executive branch. 

Previous Congressess have understood that increased indebtedness was caused by their passage of legislation and thus routinely increased the debt ceiling limit.  Only this Congress has tried to have it both ways.  President Obama is correct in taking Congress on: he should have done so before.

Provocative Re-Post

Most of the problems in life are because of two reasons: we act without thinking or we keep thinking without acting.

It's Not Rocket Science

It's doesn't take much to ascertain the motivations behind Republican criticism of Susan Rice.  It's not that she is unfit to serve, although she is not necessarily the perfect candidate.  Clearly Ms. Rice's mis-statements pale compared to Condezela Rice's over Iran, and she was easily elevated to become George Bush's Secretary of State.   Perhaps, just perhaps, Republicans are trying to force President Obama into nominating John Kerry, the sitting Senator from Massachusetts.  Could all of this be over the opportunity to gain a Republican Senator in the election that would follow his selection?  Could it be?

Ethics is About Doing Not Training

The Secretary of Defense has ordered a review of ethics training for military officers in the wake of the Petraeus affair.  Ethical behavior, however, is not trained.  To be sure, everyone who takes the training will be able to cite chapter and verse of what is ‘expected’ of a military officer.  I'm also quite sure that officers will pay much more attention to the unwritten rules regarding behavioral expectations.

Sometime after the Iran-Contra affair, as the CIA’s Director for Training and Education, I was instructed by a senior CIA official to develop and ethics course of all CIA officers.  In reply I stated that the content of the 'ethics' to be 'trained' had to come from the seventh floor and that senior officials had to be careful in delineating the ethical guidelines they wished to be promulgated.  I pointed out that the first thing people were going to do was speculate whether the Agency’s senior leaders were walking the talk.  Not surprisingly, I never heard back from the requester.   In truth I would have loved to have received a mandate to oversea the generation of a set of ethical norms that could be blessed from the top.  In truth it is probably better to do without a set of written norms than to publish norms which are routinely violated without sanction.  Extramarital affairs by military officers would probably fall into this latter category.

 In the best of all worlds, organizational leaders would establish and maintain ethical norms by walking the talk and punishing transgressors.  Ethical norms do exist, and often these norms serve as the glue that binds and defines organizations.  These norms, however, are a subset of what is often put down on paper.  The review called for by the Secretary of Defense will likely be a paper exercise with little impact on the behavior of military officers.

The ethical rules governing the Petraeus are clearly stated.  The fact that General Petraeus sought to keep his position once the affair was exposed speaks to the divergence between ‘rules’ and acceptable behavior.  He decided to resign only after being told by another former general officer, James Clapper (The Director for National Intelligence) that ”resigning was the honorable thing for him to do", given his former rank and present position as Director of the CIA.