Where to Start Draining the Swamp

When I was a second lieutenant over 40 years ago at the US Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca in Arizona our instructors repeatedly drummed into our young heads that there could never be personal, political, or emotional bias in intelligence collection and analysis. Army commanders demanded and required unbiased and totally objective intelligence assessments concerning enemy capabilities and intentions, along with the ability of our intelligence collection system to find, fix, track, and target the adversary. To sugarcoat information and provide inaccurate intelligence to the commander was a sure-fire way for an intelligence officer to be kicked out of the command staff and banished to the mess hall. When I was stationed at Fort Bragg and assigned to the XVIII Airborne Corps I had to teach this lesson to one of my sergeants whose leftwing views caused him to cherry pick intelligence reports and present a biased and favorable view of El Salvadoran communist rebels that exaggerated their ability to overthrow the government. I told him that given the seriousness and intensity of our mission as paratroopers, faulty intelligence assessments could jeopardize our mission and the lives of American soldiers.  

Having been a lifelong intelligence professional, I have always adhered to this principle, which is why I was totally flabbergasted in October 2020 when 51 top intelligence professionals signed a letter addressed to the American public claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop affair “had all the earmarks of Russian propaganda.”   Before signing that letter, every one of those professionals could have easily checked with the FBI, which had gained possession of the infamous Hunter laptop in December of 2019, to see if the laptop story was kosher or not.  The fact that they did not – or did, and chose to mislead the American public – speaks volumes of their willingness to inject partisan politics into their “analysis”. 

As a private citizen, I will leave it to the incoming administration and its new Director of National Intelligence, Ms. Tulsi Gabbard, to determine how to deal with the 51 signatories of that infamously misleading letter, which in my view contributed to the election of Joe Biden, who is undoubtedly the worst president in the past 100 years. His tenure in the White House has been a disastrous fiasco here and abroad.  At a minimum, I hope the security clearances of those 51 intelligence professionals are revoked.  That should be the very first plug to be pulled in draining the swamp.