Re: [Salon] A Warning Congress Must Heed — Because the Intelligence Community No Longer Will

https://www.cfr.org/article/intelligence-communitys-politicization-dueling-discredit
The Intelligence Community’s Politicization: Dueling to Discredit

On Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 02:59:40 AM GMT+5, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:

CHARLES A. RAY
A Warning Congress Must Heed — Because the Intelligence Community No Longer Will
CHARLES A. RAY
NOV 19, 2025

The traditional mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is to provide our nation’s policymakers with warnings about threats from abroad, and when such reports are issued, Congress listens. But the Intelligence Community does not assess America itself—and even if it did, few would trust it to do so honestly today. Notwithstanding the tradition, an assessment of the domestic threats the nation faces is desperately needed.

Over the past months, under the leadership of DNI Tulsi Gabbard, the IC has increasingly demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to provide unbiased intelligence to its customers. What was once an independent enterprise—dedicated to objective analysis regardless of who occupied the White House—has become a politicized organ of the White House. Instead of informing policy, it too often echoes and amplifies the administration’s rhetoric. The result is that policymakers, legislators, and the public are deprived of the clear-eyed assessments that have long been essential to sound national security decision-making.

For this reason, independent voices must step forward. Recently, The Steady State—a network of more than 340 former senior national-security officials—released Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline. Drawing on the analytic tradecraft our members once used to evaluate fragile states abroad, the assessment turns that lens inward. Its findings are stark: the United States is exhibiting the same warning indicators that precede authoritarian consolidation elsewhere—politicization of justice, erosion of institutional independence, delegitimization of elections, intimidation of the press, and the centralization of power in the hands of one man.

The aforementioned document is not partisan. Our members include Republicans, Democrats, and independents who have served under presidents from both parties. I, for example, served in the military and in civilian roles from 1962 to 2012, serving under every president from Kennedy to Obama and every president in between. What unites us is a conviction that loyalty to the Constitution must come before loyalty to any individual.

We of The Steady State urge every Member of Congress—regardless of party—to read the assessment. Its purpose is not to attack, but to illuminate. Authoritarianism rarely arrives through revolution or coup; it advances through the normalization of exception, the steady corrosion of norms, and the quiet acceptance of power without accountability.

Congress remains the first and last institutional check. Oversight, appropriations, confirmations, and straightforward public candor still matter—but only if legislators recognize that the analytic institutions once designed to warn them have fallen silent.

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