It's no revelation that intelliigence agencies

Posted: Jan 19, 2017

Furor has arisen over President-elect Donald Trump's charges that our intelligence agencies are politicized. Spare us the outrage. For decades, directors of intelligence agencies have often quite inappropriately massaged their assessments to fit administration agendas. Careerists at these agencies naturally want to continue working from one administration to the next in "the king is dead; long live the king!" style. So they make the necessary political adjustments, which are sometimes quite at odds with their own agency's findings and to the detriment of national security. The result is often confusion -- and misinformation passed off as authoritative intelligence. After Barack Obama won the 2008 election, George W. Bush intelligence adviser John Brennan stayed on as Obama's homeland security adviser. He is currently the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Under Obama, Brennan loudly criticized the use of enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration. Brennan praised his new boss for his superior approach to combating terrorism. Brennan, who had served a year as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Bush, later assured the nation that enhanced interrogation techniques had helped "save lives" and were an important tool in combating terrorism. In 2010, Brennan inexplicably declared that jihad was "a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community," rather than the use of force against non-Muslims to promote the spread of Islam, as it is commonly defined in the Middle East. ;