Dump junk intelligence

The US intelligence community hit a new credibility low when it saw fit to draft a twopage summary of a 35-page document on the alleged “capture” of president-elect Donald Trump by the Kremlin, reportedly compiled by a “former British Intelligence official”, and presented it to both President Barack Obama and Trump.

The document, allegedly compiled for some of Trump’s Republican Party opponents in the primaries, has reportedly been circulating at the highest levels of the US government and media for some months now, but had not been quoted given its unverifiable status. Even the Hillary Clinton campaign avoided its use.

However, the US intelligence community saw fit to use the report to bolster the propaganda war being waged against Trump by the US establishment and mainstream media, to desperately prove that he is Putin’s lapdog.

Having already failed to prove conclusively that Russia hacked the Democratic Party’s servers (the party refused to hand the servers over to the FBI for forensic analysis to prove such allegations), the US intelligence establishment, with billions of dollars at its disposal, relied instead on the musings of a foreign national to take yet another moribund pot-shot at the Trump-Putin link.

So while Trump was reportedly briefed on the contents of this report last Friday, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to even verify the contents of such explosive allegations. A basic rule of intelligence gathering is verification of the facts, which in this instance was seemingly junked by the US intelligence establishment.

This kindergarten effort would be laughable were it not for the serious ramifications that such sloppy investigative assessments can have on US decision-making. It follows a long road of US intelligence failures including the determination that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, its failure to stop the 9/11 attack on New York, despite evidence that such planning was taking place, despite making false allegations that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda following 9/11, and “politicising” and deliberately underestimating the strength of Isis and Al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria.

An appropriate ending for this unverifiable intelligence evaluation is the dustbin. Its authors should be “fired” by incoming president Trump himself.