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Rebuild With Biden!
This should have all of us worried. It speaks plainly why Trump is viewed as a threat to our security. The entire read is a must, especially for skeptics.
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Community’s findings on Russian election interference has raised fears among experts that Trump will bypass intel analysts and demand that his personal team conduct its own analyses of raw data.
Tossing aside career analysts can create false conclusions, critics warn — like the George W. Bush administration’s incorrect assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
“The risk is that you request raw data to support a conclusion and you avoid seeing anything that contradicts it,” Rep. Adam SchiffAdam SchiffIntel experts worry Trump will go rogueDeclassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help TrumpCan an authoritarian state be tolerant?MORE (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Hill. “We can already see we have a president-elect who has difficulty with facts that are at odds with the narrative that he wants to tell or diminish his achievements.”
Presidents receive so-called “raw intelligence” all the time — recordings, satellite images and other data that hasn’t been evaluated and contextualized by career analysts. But there is also plenty of precedent for a president who wants to cherry-pick information to advance his own policies.
Onlookers doubt that the firebrand president-elect is likely to sift through data himself, but they are worried he will send a team of loyalists to go through the information and brief him themselves.
In a Trump White House, that could be anyone from retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, to Steve Bannon, the incoming White House chief strategist.
The problem with sending political appointees in to do the job of career analysts, intelligence experts say, is that they won’t know what information is significant and what should be discarded.
“Bannon is certainly the kind of person who would want to do that but that would be a disaster,” said Mieke Eoyang, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer who is now vice president of Third Way’s national security program.
“He has no idea how to weight the credibility of sources or understand them in the context of what’s likely or not likely in a geopolitical sense,” she said. “He would just be grasping at straws.”
Critics also see Flynn as a dangerous conduit. The former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) head has famously pushed conspiracy theories on Twitter, and was known at the agency for making dubious assertions with little basis in documented fact.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313123-intel-experts-worry-trump-will-go-rogue
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Community’s findings on Russian election interference has raised fears among experts that Trump will bypass intel analysts and demand that his personal team conduct its own analyses of raw data.
Tossing aside career analysts can create false conclusions, critics warn — like the George W. Bush administration’s incorrect assessment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
“The risk is that you request raw data to support a conclusion and you avoid seeing anything that contradicts it,” Rep. Adam SchiffAdam SchiffIntel experts worry Trump will go rogueDeclassified report: Putin ordered election interference to help TrumpCan an authoritarian state be tolerant?MORE (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Hill. “We can already see we have a president-elect who has difficulty with facts that are at odds with the narrative that he wants to tell or diminish his achievements.”
Presidents receive so-called “raw intelligence” all the time — recordings, satellite images and other data that hasn’t been evaluated and contextualized by career analysts. But there is also plenty of precedent for a president who wants to cherry-pick information to advance his own policies.
Onlookers doubt that the firebrand president-elect is likely to sift through data himself, but they are worried he will send a team of loyalists to go through the information and brief him themselves.
In a Trump White House, that could be anyone from retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, to Steve Bannon, the incoming White House chief strategist.
The problem with sending political appointees in to do the job of career analysts, intelligence experts say, is that they won’t know what information is significant and what should be discarded.
“Bannon is certainly the kind of person who would want to do that but that would be a disaster,” said Mieke Eoyang, a former House Intelligence Committee staffer who is now vice president of Third Way’s national security program.
“He has no idea how to weight the credibility of sources or understand them in the context of what’s likely or not likely in a geopolitical sense,” she said. “He would just be grasping at straws.”
Critics also see Flynn as a dangerous conduit. The former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) head has famously pushed conspiracy theories on Twitter, and was known at the agency for making dubious assertions with little basis in documented fact.
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/313123-intel-experts-worry-trump-will-go-rogue
