Donald Trump Rejects Intelligence Report on Travel Ban

[highplainsdem]

Source: WSJ

The report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, came from Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. It said that its staff “assesses that country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.” The White House on Friday dismissed it as politically motivated and poorly researched.

-snip-

“The president asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for,” a senior administration official said. The official said intelligence is already available on the countries included in Mr. Trump’s ban and just needs to be compiled.

“The intelligence community is combining resources to put together a comprehensive report using all available sources which is driven by data and intelligence and not politics," said White House spokesman Michael Short.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security also took issue with the quality of the report, describing it as “commentary” based on public sources rather than “an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-rejects-intelligence-report-on-travel-ban-1487987629

[bucolic_frolic]

1. What's the sense of compiling a report

if he already knows what he's looking for and disagrees with anything that
is contrary to his preconceived beliefs?

[Equinox Moon]

2. I guess that is what dictators do.

I don't know, America has not ever had a dictator before. We are supposed to be a democracy. The original democracy.

[duhneece]

9. It's what Cheney did when he wanted an excuse for the Iraq Warr. nt

[OliverQ]

15. Courts

He's trying to get the Intel agencies to create a report that can be used to pass muster with the courts, since they said the evidence of these 7 states posing a high risk has not been presented yet. So Trump is trying to create the evidence to bypass that argument.

[CincyDem]

3. The president has a conclusion - and by golly, we need to have the data to support it.

I had a friend who worked in the analysis business. The greatest quote I ever heard relative to this topic...

"...we'll torture the data until it confesses what we want to hear".

That's exactly how they're treating intelligence data these days. Conclusion in hand and cherry picking data to support it.

[underpants]

4. Snowflake never gets told no in the bubble

[dalton99a]

5. Donald Trump Rejects Intelligence

Period.

[Third Doctor]

8. You beat me to it.

[susanna]

13. Bingo. n/t

[dchill]

6. "Send this back. It's not what I ordered."

Waiter! Waiter!

[Sebasdad22]

7. Heeza Expert

Just askim.

[Blue Idaho]

10. "This is not the intelligence assessment the President asked for."

Dick Cheney would be so proud.

[Doodley]

11. Oh my. Trump has gone the full fascist.

[Skittles]

12. he's so pathetic, he needs his idiotic supporters to keep swooning for him

and that means doing shit like this

[Solly Mack]

14. Trump is mad the report wasn't written to favor his delusions.

So, of course, it's a fake report.

A "real" report would back up every lie Trump has ever told.

[GReedDiamond]

16. Fake Administration calls for Fake Intelligence Report...

...to generate Fake News to support their Fake Policies.

Who coulda seen that coming?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

17. tRump will keep ordering reports until he gets one he likes.

Either he will have to wait until he is out of office or it will be an intelligence report from Jeff Sessions. Which is a bit of an oxymoron.

[DeminPennswoods]

18. This is a grounded analysis

Just reading the excerpt posted above as someone who did analyses for the federal gov't, it's a decent piece of work and credible.

Whoever wrote it used concrete facts in all people who were involved in some kind of known terrorist act in the US as identified in DoJ reports although over what timeframe isn't clear. (If it was me analyzing the date, I'd have gone back to the earliest known terrorist attack, maybe the 1993 WTC event.) Everything else flows from there and is just spreadsheet data. It looks like the author also gathered data on people inside the 7 countries who committed some kind of local vs external attacks although the source of that data isn't stated.

I'm going to guess that what Trump wants is to include attacks that might have been thwarted in addition to those that actually happened. Maybe he also wants to include individuals who are being monitored by the intelligence community as being on the radicalized spectrum, but who haven't carried out any attacks and who may/may not live in or travel to the US. I think using any other data like social media activity is unreliable because who really knows who is who on the internet.

However, the problem with trying to cook the books here is that this data is going to be used in a trial and is therefore subject to discovery. We now have the original conclusions out so any subsequent conclusions can be compared/contrasted/questioned by litigators and the court.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. "This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for,"

[Bayard]

20. What exactly does he have against these 7 countries?

Is it because they won't let him build hotels there?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

21. Intelligence is elitist in Trumplandia