NEWS: WH slams intel on Iran -- and creates a chilling effect
The Oval Office is becoming an echo chamber. That’s how foreign policy disasters begin.
Bottom Line Up Front:
New intelligence reportedly contradicts Trump’s claims about the Iran strikes — and the White House’s furious reaction could silence the very analysts we depend on to keep America safe.
WHAT HAPPENED
Over the weekend, U.S. warplanes dropped dozens of bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump called it “one of the most successful military strikes in history” and claimed Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely demolished.” But a leaked defense assessment reportedly said otherwise.
That early assessment by the Pentagon — reported by CNN and confirmed by other outlets — drew a blistering response from the White House.
Trump’s press secretary called the report a “lie” from a “low-level loser” in the intelligence community and accused CNN of undermining the president. Trump went further, rage-posting in all caps that the story was “FAKE NEWS” and that the targets were “COMPLETELY DESTROYED!”
In other words: the intelligence didn’t match the political narrative. So it got steamrolled.
WHAT IT MEANS
Politicizing intelligence is remarkably risky for the White House to do.
When I was Chief of Staff at DHS, I saw firsthand how White House meddling distorted security analysis. For instance, Trump officials tried to inflate the terrorist threat at the border, overstating the number of terror suspects apprehended, even after we (repeatedly) corrected them. They wanted headlines, not honest assessments. The result is that policymakers began making decisions with the wrong information, and intelligence professionals got the message: Say what the boss wants, or stay quiet.
That’s the real risk here: a chilling effect inside the intelligence community.
Already, the Administration has shown it will not tolerate dissent from the spy world. After agencies contradicted Trump’s claims about Venezuelan gangs fueling an “invasion,” the head of the intelligence community reportedly fired the officials in charge of the assessments.
The intimidation has a dangerous domino effect. First, analysts begin to self-censor for fear of retribution. Second, when they do make honest assessments, political appointees try to dilute those assessments to be politically “safe” and/or reassign and fire the truth-tellers. Third and finally, the bad news gets buried, and the president only hears what he wants to hear.
WHAT’S NEXT
Authoritarian regimes rot from the inside out in exactly this way.
Historians have written about how the Soviet Union collapsed in part because truth stopped flowing upward. Commanders told generals what they wanted to hear. Generals told the Politburo what was politically convenient. The results? Overconfidence. Miscalculation. Disaster.
We’re watching a similar dynamic take hold in Washington. The intelligence community delivers uncomfortable facts, and the President rejects them forcefully. Then he punishes the messenger. And the Oval Office becomes an echo chamber.
Attacks on intelligence officials won’t just damage those agencies. It will put American lives at risk. If analysts are scared to speak truth to power, power will stop seeing the truth. That’s when bad things happen.
Whether Iran’s nuclear program is operational or not should be a matter of patient analysis, not loyalty to the President. And if we punish truth-tellers, we’ll get what we asked for: silence.
This is horrifying (a word I find myself using all too often). Living in a world of alternative facts makes this regime incapable of protecting us from actual risk. As for that thoroughly unlikable press secretary, I hope she will live long enough to watch endless video footage of her days in the White House and feel so embarrassed by her ridiculousness that she will crawl under a rock.