What I found so weird about the latest saga in the the flood of White House leaks yesterday, after the news about what Trump told the Russian ambassador, was the sound of some people blindly completely missing the point. The point is that Trump probably compromised sources of information, certainly did it without thinking about the allies who provided it, and probably did it for no better reason than he was childishly boasting to boost his ego – yet again.
New Zealand along with other allies has been in a long standing and pretty complex set of intelligence gathering and analysis arrangements with the USA since the end of second world war. These arrangements, like all similar information sharing arrangement from and with NZ and between many other other nations and groupings around the world, are done to minimise issues of accidental wars or actions due to a lack of clear information.
Surprises like Pearl Harbour, aircraft deliberately flying into buildings, or nerve gas attacks on subways. Each of these cases had previously unclear and uncorroborated intelligence across many nations that could have prevented the actions and their consequences if they’d been assembled in time.
Similarly foolishness like the second gulf war searching for mythical weapons of mass destruction could have been prevented if the intelligence had been clearer than a paranoid dictatorship playing bluffing games allowed. That matched with a foolish president and prime minister who in the absence of clear information believed what they wanted to believe caused a disastrous set of destabilising wars in the middle east and the after effects worldwide.
Of course these were the failures of intelligence gathering. Less well known and usually still secret are the successes of intelligence gathering at preserving the peace world wide.
But such information sharing arrangements usually depend on levels of trust and rules about sharing. That is because the people providing information are often very sensitive about the sources of the information – a detail that is usually passed to provide corroboration as to the information’s veracity. But the information and that the receiver trusts it also can pinpoint where, from whom, and how the information was obtained. That compromises the source(s) and the ability to gain information again. It also often gets sources shutdown, killed, tortured or imprisoned.
In this case, it appears likely to have been the Israelis providing the information about ISIS While they have their own well-known reasons for providing slanted information, they also have one of the best intelligence networks in the Middle East.
The officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Israel previously had urged the United States to be careful about the handling of the intelligence that Mr. Trump discussed.
Mr. Trump said on Tuesday on Twitter that he had an “absolute right” to share information in the interest of fighting terrorism and called it a “very, very successful meeting” in a brief appearance later Tuesday at the White House alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, told reporters that he was not concerned that information sharing among intelligence partners would stop.
Trump is, to be frank, a complete idiot. Meeting with the newly minted dictator of Turkey (on the back of an referendum that he nearly lost to get there) really does push that point across. You have to ask yourself – was Trump providing intelligence so that his fellow megalomaniac could lock up and torture more of his citizens. You really couldn’t trust this childish leaker of the free world not to do so in his attention seeking.
McMaster might not be worried about the effect on intelligence partners willing to trust the US with sensitive information, but he’d be a minority of about one.
Even NZ with its various operations around this end of the Pacific really doesn’t need its own intelligence gathering operations blown by the current incompetent blowhard of the White House. Bearing in mind that this appears to be the new norm in US executive politics, our intelligence community should start reviewing and adapting the existing doctrine of how and when we should share information with the US.
lprent: Bearing in mind the number of soapbox fools who didn’t read what the post was about before they started jumping to conclusions like George W Bush did about Saddam Hussien, I’ve now auto-moderated the post. Comments that don’t relate to the primary topics in the post will also be shunted to OpenMike. Excessively creating work to do that are likely to get you bans. The post is about the unconstrained leaking of 3rd party intelligence by Trump and specifically if NZ should change its policy about passing intelligence to the US .
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