How to brief a President who doesn't trust intel

Politico has an interesting article that sums up the current worry in the intel community: how in the world do you brief a President on intelligence issues when he's more likely to dismiss them than listen to them?

Quote:

Donald Trump's insult-laced dismissal of reports that the CIA believes Russia hacked the 2016 election to help him is rattling a spy community already puzzled over how to gain the ear and trust of the incoming president. Some fear that Trump's highly public rebukes of the U.S. intelligence apparatus will undermine morale in the spy agencies, politicize their work, and damage their standing in a world filled with adversaries. After all, if the U.S. president doesn't believe his own intelligence officials, why should anyone else? "There is nothing more sacred to intelligence officers than their professionalism, honesty and non-partisanship. Trump's charges strike at the core of their integrity," said John Sipher, a former CIA officer with broad expertise on Russia. Trump, a career businessman with no national security experience, has long taken positions that have alarmed intelligence officials, such as supporting torture and suggesting that it's OK to kill the family members of terrorists.

Setting aside the fact that intel cannot always be right on the nose, one of the constants of intelligence analysis is that your analysis cannot and should not ever be politicized. When it's politicized, you get the disastrous results that led to, for example, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, where lawmakers cherry-picked info from intelligence briefings that supported their narrative. It's not the job of the intelligence analysts to be yes-men to whatever Trump wants to hear; its our job to take the information we are given and, given past history and current information, take our best shot at predicting the outcome of a particular situation. This means that we are not always going to be saying things the President wants to hear, but we are saying things he absolutely NEEDS to hear. And yet, we continue to see Trump hand-waving away reports of possible election meddling by Russia strictly because Putin is his BFF, not to mention he has only gotten, at most, one intelligence briefing a week since his election and has reportedly never read the Presidential Daily Briefing even though it has been made available to him since the election.

Now there's a quote from Kellyanne Conway that Trump plans to load the intel community with people who will owe him for their positions and will therefore be less than inclined to tell him the hard truths about the countries that are not our friends (Russia included). If Trump wanted to lead a country of panting, sycophantic yes-men, maybe he should have run to be the Dear Leader of North Korea, not the leader of the most influential (arguably) country in the world. I cannot begin to tell you how much I am loathing the idea of working in the intel community for the next four years, if my products and reports are either not going to be read or are going to be reduced to the equivalent of "Bad men here; make go boom", or worse, are going to be cherry-picked to find only the pieces that will make the toupeed nitwit currently occupying the position of President-elect happy. It pisses me off, to put it bluntly.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2hf9asO