The Fatal Cost of Twisting Intelligence

Tulsi Gabbard's firing of top intelligence analysts sets a very bad precedent

News that DNI Tulsi Gabbard had fired two senior intelligence officials because their findings on Venezuela had displeased her sent me scurrying for the origin of the phrase, “Don’t kill the messenger.“

Tulsi Gabbard (NatonalGunForum.com)

Turns out there are lots of strands to its provenance,  but one I’m partial to was the story told by Plutarch about an ancient Armenian general, Tigranes, who so disliked a messenger’s word that a Roman general was close on his heels that “he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information.” The ensuing battle did not go well for the Armenian.

Gabbard’s dismissals of Mike Collins, who was the acting head of the National Intelligence Council, and Maria Langan-Riekhof, a career senior CIA and NIC intelligence analyst, was merely a virtual beheading, Washington-style.  But her imperious act was an unmistakable warning to other top intelligence professionals not to “dare”—quoting Plutarch here—to cross her with information that contradicts the Trump administration’s narrative, however false, on any subject related to national security. Similar dismissals have been carried out at the CIA.

Certainly to many outsiders, the episode was no more than a bureaucratic kerfuffle in a Washington teacup—merely a routine demonstration that, as partisans of all stripes like to say, “elections have consequences.” The public’s attention quickly moved on to other Trump amusements, like his gleeful acceptance of an old 747 from Qatar’s clever monarch.

But fence sitters on Trump’s foreign and national security policies need reminding that skewering intelligence to fit an administration’s story can have fatal consequences, measured in staggering body counts, as well as unexpected,  devastating reversal of fortunes.