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Trump Follows the Grand US Tradition of Ignoring Intelligence to Go to War
Trump’s cavalier attitude about the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies is just the most recent example of presidents ignoring what they did not want to hear.
Jun 28, 2025
I’ll never forget the day I was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. What does that have to do with President Donald Trump bombing Iran? I’ll get there, so indulge me.
It was the spring of 1983, and I was sitting in an auditorium at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia with my fellow classmates. We were a select group of Columbia University graduate students in the school’s International Fellows Program, and we were in Washington, D.C. for dog and pony shows sponsored by the CIA, State Department, and other federal agencies looking for fresh young talent. I was in the journalism program. Everyone else was studying law, business, or international relations.
After two CIA officers droned on interminably about China, which was not making much news at the time, an over-caffeinated HR officer took the stage. “We need people like you,” she said. “We can’t have good policy without good intelligence, so we’d like you to consider applying here.” She then mentioned that five of the fellows had interned at the agency the previous summer and asked them to hold up their hands, which they did reluctantly. Given the CIA’s terrible reputation at the time, it was understandable why they didn’t want to acknowledge that they had worked there.
Presidents don’t give a fig about what the CIA or any other intelligence agency tells them. They will do what they want, regardless, and Congress does little to nothing to rein them in.
The HR lady then asked if there were any questions. My hand shot up, and she called on me first.
Earlier that morning I picked up a copy of The Washington Post, which ran a story on its front page reporting that the CIA, under President Ronald Reagan’s direction, had dedicated millions of dollars to undermine the fledgling Nicaraguan government, which had overthrown a corrupt dictator four years before. I thanked her for her presentation and then said: “I’m really interested in applying to work at the CIA, but I’m not interested in doing intelligence work. I’m interested in covert action. I’m interested in destabilizing sovereign nations like Nicaragua. How do I apply?”
There was dead silence, and then students began to snicker. The HR lady, meanwhile, was speechless, but she quickly regained her composure and said, “I don’t know anything about that, but the application procedure is the same.”
After a few other, more serious, questions, the session was over. But before I could get up from my seat, I felt the steely grip of the man who ran the program, the extremely conservative dean of Columbia’s graduate school of international affairs. He was not happy. He squeezed my shoulder as hard as he could and said, “Mr. Negin.” (He never addressed us by our first names.) “I want you to know that everything that was said here today is off the record.”
I’m proud to say that, until today, I have honored his off-the-record request. There was nothing newsworthy to report, anyway. But given the incident happened more than 40 years ago, I’m not too worried about recounting it now, especially since it will help make a point.
I Don’t Care What She Said!
Of course, that CIA recruiter was absolutely right. To have good policy, government officials need good intelligence. What she didn’t say, however, is what we learned yet again this past week: Presidents don’t give a fig about what the CIA or any other intelligence agency tells them. They will do what they want, regardless, and Congress does little to nothing to rein them in.
On June 17, when a reporter on Air Force One reminded President Trump that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified before Congress in March that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, his reply was: “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.”
In response, Gabbard backtracked, posting on X on June 20 that “dishonest media” took her testimony out of context and Iran could produce nuclear weapons “within weeks to months.”
But that does not mean that Iran is building a bomb.
A handful of officials told The Wall Street Journal last week that the intelligence Israel provided the United States to make its case for attacking Iran did not convince them that Tehran is intent on building a nuclear bomb. “The [Israeli] intelligence only showed Iran was still researching nuclear weapons,” two officials told the paper, “including revisiting work it had done before its nuclear weapons program shut down in 2003.” Although the United States estimates that it would likely take Iran one to two weeks to produce enough enriched uranium for a weapon, “the consensus view among U.S. intelligence agencies,” the Journal reported, “is Iran hasn’t made a decision to move forward on building a bomb.”
Nevertheless, on June 21, the U.S. Air Force flattened three Iranian nuclear sites, and it remains to be seen if the attack will lead to any unfortunate, unforeseen consequences. Two days later, Iran lobbed missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar, which said its air defenses intercepted. Then, later that day, Trump announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a cease-fire, but as of the next morning, they both violated it.
Damn the Intelligence, Full-Speed Ahead!
Trump’s cavalier attitude about the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies is just the most recent example of presidents ignoring what they did not want to hear. One obvious example is when President Lyndon Johnson paid no heed to warnings about a potential quagmire in Vietnam. Another is when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses.
In early 1963, the CIA cautioned Johnson about intensifying U.S. intervention in Vietnam nearly a year before the now-disputed Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964. The agency suggested that bombing Vietnam would “provoke heavier troop intervention” rather than ensuring a victory. Three days after the incident, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, essentially giving Johnson a blank check to escalate U.S involvement.
We all know how that turned out. From 1961 through 1973, the United States spent more than $141 billion on the war, more than $1 trillion in today’s dollars, and as many as 3.4 million people died, including more than 58,300 U.S. servicemembers, between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, and as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides.
Pretty frustrating, no? To spend all that time trying to dig up “good intelligence” and then have it ignored. Especially when scores of lives are lost and survivors have to suffer with their injuries, both physical and psychological.
In October 2002, a month after al Qaeda stunned the United States by attacking New York and Washington, the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan to eliminate al Qaeda and topple the Taliban government. Two years later, the United States invaded Iraq, ostensibly because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was connected to al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), neither of which was true.
There is a mountain of evidence that the Bush administration cooked the books to justify invading Iraq, much too much to post here. Suffice it to say that senior U.S. intelligence officials and analysts have testified that Bush and his administration disregarded intelligence that didn’t support their goal of removing Hussein.
In an essay in the March-April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, for example, former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar accused the White House of manipulating intelligence on Iraq’s alleged WMD. He said the administration ignored any intelligence that did not align with its intention to invade. “It went to war without requesting—and evidently without being influenced by—any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq,” he wrote. The “broadly held” intelligence assessment, he added, was that the best way to address the Iraqi weapons issue was through an aggressive inspections program to supplement the sanctions already in place.
In late April 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who revealed that the agency had received credible intelligence from Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, that there were no active WMD programs. “We continued to validate [Sabri] the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Finally, a September 2007 article in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal confirmed Drumheller’s account. Two former senior CIA officers told Blumenthal that in September 2002, then CIA Director George Tenet briefed Bush on top-secret intelligence from Sabri that Hussein did not have WMD. Bush rejected the information, which turned out to be completely accurate, as worthless. The former CIA officers added that Tenet did not share that intelligence with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell nor with senior military officers planning the invasion. “Instead,” Blumenthal wrote, “…the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs.”
The Iraqi war’s toll was considerable. From 2003 through 2011, when the U.S. military officially withdrew, the United States spent $728 billion (in 2022 dollars) directly on the war, according to a Pentagon estimate. Nearly 4,500 U.S. servicemembers died, while nearly 32,300 were wounded, and some 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
A Bookend to My CIA Recruitment Caper
A few years after the Bush-Cheney Iraq debacle, I bumped into one of my classmates who had interned at the CIA before we met at the International Fellows Program. He showed up at my weekly yoga class, of all places. I hadn’t seen him since we were at Columbia. After exchanging pleasantries, I asked him if he wound up working for the CIA. Indeed, he had. “So, do you like working there?” I asked. “It’s less than inspiring,” he replied. Why? Because, he said, policymakers reject the agency’s findings if they don’t support their preconceived notion of what to do.
Pretty frustrating, no? To spend all that time trying to dig up “good intelligence” and then have it ignored. Especially when scores of lives are lost and survivors have to suffer with their injuries, both physical and psychological.
In retrospect, I’m glad I turned down that offer to apply to work at the CIA. I obviously made the right choice. No way I would ever be happy there, even with a job destabilizing sovereign nations.
]This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.
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After Trump's Bombing, Sanders Condemns 'Lies' Over Iran Nuclear Threat
"We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into another Middle East war based on lies."
Jun 22, 2025
While a number of statements by members of Congress in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities focused largely on the fact that the White House acted without congressional authorization—a constitutional violation—U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders expressed anger over another aspect of the unilateral military action: the "lies" that the Trump administration is telling the public to justify the bombing.
The White House's act of war against Iran, said the Vermont independent senator, was just the latest in a long line of military boondoggles that followed lies powerful politicians told about the threats posed by foreign countries—before taking action that ultimately killed millions of people while doing nothing to protect U.S. security.
"In the 1960s the United States government lied to the American people and took us into a terrible war in Vietnam," said Sanders. "The result of that war was that over 58,000 young Americans died and many more came back wounded both in mind and in spirit. Millions of Vietnamese were also killed."
Decades later, Americans were told by then-President George W. Bush that the U.S. must act quickly to stop Iraq from building "weapons of mass destruction"—with U.S. officials following the guidance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"The United States invaded Iraq and became embroiled in a long civil war there. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. That war was based on a lie—a lie which cost us 4,492 young Americans, 32,000 wounded, over half a million Iraqis and trillions of dollars," said Sanders.
"The American people are being lied to again today," he added. "We cannot allow history to repeat itself."
U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran is not attempting to build a nuclear weapon with its enriched uranium stockpile, backing up repeated statements from Iranian officials who have said the country's nuclear program is used only for peaceful civilian purposes.
Sanders' statement came several hours after he learned while speaking at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that Trump had bombed Iran, authorizing strikes on three nuclear facilities, which Iranian officials condemned as a violation of international law.
At the rally, supporters erupted in a chant of "No more war!" after Sanders read Trump's statement on the attack.
The spontaneous display of outrage over the latest U.S. attack on the Middle East underscored the reality of the moment, said The Nation writer Jeet Heer, as one poll released Thursday showed that just 8% of Americans favored the U.S. becoming directly involved in Israel's attacks on Iran that began earlier this month.
"There is only one off-ramp from Trump's mad rush to war: the quick mobilization of an anti-war opposition," said Heer. "The people are ready."
As the Trump administration boasted about the "severe damage" the strikes had done to Iran's nuclear program, progressive strategist Waleed Shahid called on Democratic lawmakers to tap into voters' palpable outrage—not about Trump's failure to seek congressional authorization for the strikes, but about the fact that the U.S. is pursuing a war in Iran at all while repeating Netanyahu's unsubstantiated claims about the Iranians' ability to produce a nuclear bomb.
"No one ever won a fight yelling, 'Congressional authorization.' Voters need clarity amid the chaos," said Shahid. "Lead with this: No more blank checks for corrupt and endless foreign wars, we're here to focus on fighting for working Americans."
Shahid's comments echoed Sanders' statement decrying Trump's lies.
"The U.S. faces enormous problems here at home, which we must address," said Sanders. "We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged into another Middle East war based on lies."
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Dissent Is Patriotic: Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy Demands Action
Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Jun 18, 2025
Two years ago this week, Daniel Ellsberg died at the age of 92. In the popular imagination, his legacy is often reduced to a singular act of conscience and courage: the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study that exposed the systematic deceit and misconduct of successive U.S. administrations in prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg had spent over a decade inside the national security apparatus, directly contributing to the planning and execution of that war. But over time, he came to regard the intervention as a criminal, imperial war of aggression. Reflecting on the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, he concluded: “We were not on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” He described the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—which involved dropping more than three and a half times the tonnage of explosives used by the United States in all of World War II—as “totally useless, unnecessary from any point of view, and thus unjustifiable homicide, murder.”
For telling the truth about a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and conscripted a generation of Americans in service of empire and the preservation of official credibility, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act and faced up to 115 years in prison. Asked why he had risked everything, he replied simply: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?” And of his transformation: “Killing is not something I’m going to do bureaucratically ever again.”
Radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward.
His defiance helped redefine patriotism itself. “Dissent is patriotic,” he insisted. “And to be loyal to this country does not compel us to be disloyal to [humanity].” His example paved the way for a lineage of whistleblowers including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.
But to limit his legacy to the Pentagon Papers is to flatten it into a story of individual heroism, severed from the mass movements that made it possible, and that remain vital today. Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Ellsberg understood this. He often credited the antiwar movement with awakening his conscience, and pointed in particular to the courage of draft resisters willing to face prison. Their example, he said, was decisive in his own decision to leak the Papers. “Courage is contagious,” he reflected. What he did was only possible because others had already taken greater risks.
He also believed that it was mass resistance that averted the war’s most catastrophic escalations. A turning point came on October 15, 1969, a coordinated day of nationwide civil disobedience. As many as two million people walked out to protest the unjust war, followed by another massive demonstration the following month.
At the time, the Nixon administration was preparing to intensify the conflict. Henry Kissinger, in private discussions, called for delivering “a savage blow” to North Vietnam, potentially involving nuclear weapons. But the scale of public opposition forced a retreat.
“The American people,” Ellsberg later recalled, “did not in fact, I think, buy onto the notion that it was all right to kill Vietnamese to an unlimited degree, and they stopped the bombing.” Nixon, he concluded, “did not lose the war. The American people ended the war. They took his victory away from him.”
Ellsberg’s story did not end in 1971. He never returned to government or academia. Instead, he spent the rest of his life as a public educator and dissident, arrested as many as 90 times for acts of civil disobedience, most often targeting U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
At RAND in the 1950s and ’60s, Ellsberg helped draft nuclear war plans, including first-strike scenarios that projected the deaths of 600 million people, what he called “a hundred Holocausts.” In the decades that followed, he made it his mission to dismantle The Doomsday Machine.
In 1978, he was arrested at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant alongside his son, Robert. “Not without arrests,” he declared. “Not anymore, invisibly… not without public question, controversy, challenge. Not, anymore, with the presumed consent of all American citizens.” The day before, while riding in handcuffs next to his father, Robert had looked out at the tracks and said, “You know, there should have been some Germans on the tracks at Auschwitz.”
Four years later, Ellsberg was arrested again, alongside 1,300 others, at the gates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he described as “the Auschwitz of our time!” The analogy was provocative but warranted. As he explained, a nuclear strike which they were making possible there would amount to “as deliberate and engineered annihilation of non-combatants as Hitler’s Holocaust in the gas chambers… it would be bringing the gas, the death, the radioactivity to the people, instead of herding them to it.”
This radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward. Reflecting on the public’s acquiescence to the “insanity” of nuclear policy and U.S. militarism, Ellsberg warned: “We all live in Guyana. And I say it’s mutiny time.”
His words remain a call to collective defiance.
Today, that defiance is as urgent as ever. It means standing for principle over careerism, a contrast to figures like Matt Miller. It means continuing to disrupt the flow of weapons to Israel, as workers have done in France and beyond. It means joining marches and freedom flotillas to break the siege of Gaza. It means rejecting war for what it is: organized mass slaughter. And it means defending our communities against the violent overreach of an authoritarian regime.
There is little doubt that this is what Daniel Ellsberg would be doing were he alive today. To honor his legacy, we must do the same—today and every day.
Note: Quotes are drawn from the Daniel Ellsberg Papers at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
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