Since 2009, America's counterterrorism infrastructure, which calls itself the "Intelligence Community" and favors the abbreviation "IC," has been radically changed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden appointees.
From the FBI's participation in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, to the CIA's efforts to discredit Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell," to the Secret Service's recent failures, the IC is straying from fulfilling its mission "to collect, analyze, and deliver foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to America's leaders so they can make sound decisions to protect our country." The newly-partisan IC may be failing in its assigned duties, but it is making great progress on its DEI objectives. Information coming out of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in particular shows just how far the IC has devolved in 15 years.
Born from the small Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII when the motto "Loose Lips Sink Ships" reflected the priorities of its leaders, today's massive IC is comprised of at least 18 "three letter agencies" whose motto seems to be "Inconsiderate Words Hurt Feelings."
Post-9/11 IC Expansion
The 9/11 attack caught the IC off guard. In response, Cofer Black, the CIA Director's Special Assistant for Counterterrorism, famously announced to the 9/11 Commission (and elsewhere) that "the gloves are off." He meant to signal a new era in which preventing Al-Qaeda attacks was the number one priority. The Marquis of Queensbury counterterrorism rules were declared obsolete, and the "Wall" between intelligence and law enforcement was lowered.
Following the governmental principle that more is better, the IC subsequently became flush with money, attention, and new hires. In November 2001, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act brought the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) into existence. In 2002, the Homeland Security Act created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which immediately took over the TSA.
The Counterterrorism Center (CTC) created by William Casey in 1986 was deemed insufficient for the new era, so in 2003 the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) was created. It became a sometime-ally and sometime rival of the CTC, and overlapping responsibilities created friction between them.
In 2004, the TTIC grew larger and was renamed the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), while the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) was remade into the larger National Clandestine Service (NCS) in 2005.
The growing pains were not yet over.
Creation of the ODNI
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 created yet another IC member called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ODNI). The directorate was a vague and opaque position from the start, and the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI), John Negroponte, often complained that he had status but no power.
On February 17, 2005, President George W. Bush introduced Negroponte as the first DNI, praising him as the kind of leader who could "ensure that our intelligence agencies work as a single unified enterprise." Bush explained that the new office would "establish common standards for the intelligence community's personnel." A grateful Negroponte assured Bush that his priority was, "the reform of the intelligence community in ways designed to best meet the intelligence needs of the 21st century."
In his memoir Playing to the Edge (2016), former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden wrote that Brent Scowcroft, the Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, liked the idea of an ODNI. George Tenet, Director of the CIA, did not. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called it "the dumbest idea ever," and Hayden himself said "it could have been a lot worse."
It has gotten a lot worse as subsequent DNIs have strayed from the priority Negroponte described and introduced different ideas about what the "intelligence needs of the 21st century" really are.
The Obama-Biden IC
In 2009, Barack Obama all but declared war against the Bush IC and remade it in his own image. His first Attorney General, Eric Holder, opened investigations into members of the Bush IC involved in enemy detention and interrogation. As chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Diane Feinstein (D-CA) produced a report accusing the CIA of torturing Al-Qaeda detainees (which it denied). Obama's CIA and FBI purged terms like "jihad" and references to Islam from Bush-era IC training documents, and his DHS adopted new nomenclature, dropping the "Global War on Terror" in favor of "Overseas Contingency Operations" and declaring that terrorism would henceforth be called "Man-caused Disaster."
Many of Biden's IC appointees came from the Obama administration (Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Alejandro Mayorkas, William J. Burns, Avril Haines, Susan Rice, and others), so their policy priorities are naturally similar but supercharged with "progressivism" and wokeness.
Joe Biden's DNI is Avril Haines, who served in the Obama administration as Deputy Director of the CIA from 2013 to 2015 and then Deputy National Security Advisor from 2015 until 2017. Under her leadership, today's ODNI seems more interested in promoting leftist ideology, or what it refers to as the Intelligence Community Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (IC DEIA).
New Priorities of the ODNI
The Daily Wire has led the way in exposing the new priorities at the ODNI, most recently revealing that it was "kicking off pride month" by inviting a "non-binary Filipinx activist" to paint the finger nails of its employees. What this has to do with safeguarding the nation from foreign threats is anyone's guess.
Earlier in the year the Daily Wire published a two-part expose (Part 1, Part 2) of an internal ODNI publication which it had secured through FOIA requests. The Winter 23/24 edition of The Dive, a quarterly IC journal published by "the ODNI's IC Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (IC DEIA) Office," shows us how much the IC has changed since 9/11.
The article that garnered the most attention in the Daily Wire's coverage was titled "My Gender Identity and Expression Make Me a Better Intelligence Officer" by an anonymous cross-dressing analyst, but the theme of the journal is language – "Words Matter."
There's nothing inherently wrong with a 16-page IC document focused on "the importance of words." Naming one's enemies and developing accurate terminology to describe their ideologies and mindsets are important aspects of counterterrorism. But The Dive is a product of an IC more interested in preventing "hurtful speech" and searching for ways not to offend than in understanding and defeating enemies.
The Dive is introduced by an unnamed Editor-in-Chief who announces that, as a new analyst years ago, she (they?) "found it jarring how common it was for people to speak and write about foreign countries in a way that was disparaging." The thin-skinned editor declares that the language she heard at the beginning of her career was often so "hurtful" that it made her "uncomfortable." But she proudly announces, "A lot has improved since then." This preamble explains why the new issue is filled with "articles that speak to inclusivity more broadly, exploring gender identity, advances in accessibility, and diversity in leadership."
What would Negroponte think of today's ODNI?
Separating Terrorism From Islam
The first article in The Dive suggests way that IC officials should change their counterterrorism lexicon with the goal of "disentangling Islam from words and phrases used to discuss terrorism and extremist violence." Fretting that "some trainings and official presentations conflated Islamic beliefs with terrorism," the author urges IC members to avoid "certain phrases to identify international terrorism threats that are hurtful to Muslim-Americans."
Chief among those hurtful words are "Jihadist" and any mention of the word "Islam."
American terrorists should be called "Homegrown Violent Extremists" (HVEs), the author continues, but care must be taken to ensure that "there is no reference to the problematic terms" if suspects happen to be Muslims.
Foreign terrorists may be labeled "international terrorism extremists," but IC members must ensure to "explicitly state that they manipulate and distort Islam to wrongly justify violence."
The article then introduces its preferred substitute for "terrorism" – "a word that many Islamic scholars, public leaders, and academics use to accurately identify extremists: Khawarij."
As Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi points out, the word khawarij "is not immediately understandable to broader audiences or those without knowledge of historical and present-day usage of the term in Arabic-language and Islamic discourse."
The Dive article explains that the word "means 'outsiders' and references a group of individuals in Islamic history who rebelled against Ali ibn Abi Talib."
If the ODNI's goal is to separate terrorism from Islam, choosing the Arabic word khawarij and hearkening back to the origins of Islam is inexplicably obtuse.
Nevertheless, the ODNI claims it did not come to its decisions lightly. Rather, it "took great efforts to engage with the Muslim community, academics and a renowned Islamic scholar, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf of Zaytuna College." On top of all that, the ODNI recently "learned that our French counterparts have been using Khawarij in their nomenclature."
Oh well, if the French are doing it...
Prohibiting counterterrorism analysts from using the words "jihad" or "Islam" will make it very difficult for them to describe or even to identify the most dangerous terrorist organizations, most of which just so happen to have "Islam" and/or "jihad" in their names:
- Gama'a Islamiyya
- Jemaah Islamiya
- Ansar al-Islam
- Army of Islam
- The Islamic State, ISIS, ISIS-K
- Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
- Islamic Jihad Union
- Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami
- Palestinian Islamic Jihad
- Egyptian Islamic Jihad
Doubly problematic is Al-Qaeda's new affiliate, called Jama'at Nusrat Al-Islam Wal-Muslimeen, and widely translated as the Group for Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM).
Presumably, "Allah" is another word that must not be spoken, rendering IC members unable to either mention the name Hezbollah or call the Houthis by the name they call themselves – Ansar Allah.
Inclusivity Over Accuracy
Another article titled "Linguistic Diversity: A Reflection of Who We Are," written by "an organizational ombuds," explains how some "everyday phrases ... commonly used in the workplace can perpetuate bias." It bars some common words and expressions and offers substitutions.
For instance, the term "sanity check" is deemed bad because it "implies that individuals with mental illness are inferior, wrong, or incorrect." It prefers "double check" or "review" instead.
Also banned is the word "blacklisted" because it "implies that black is bad and white is good."
If the ODNI editors were as good as mine, they would recognize a consistency problem with The Dive's four-word motto: "engage | enlighten | empower | evolve." Surely, someone has missed the unconscious bias of the word "enlighten." I humbly offer the word "educate" as a substitute. With none of the newly-verboten "dark/light" etymology, it should be far less offensive to sensitive IC members. Plus, it also begins with the letter "e,"
The goal of "Words Matter," the ODNI editor explains, is "to ensure we are inclusive, accurate, and sensitive" in our terminology. Once upon a time, "accurate" came before "inclusive."
Diversity Over Everything
Since Joe Biden assumed office, the number of diversity officers at the IC has ballooned. We know this from The Divearticle claiming that its proscriptions on language and advice on how to avoid hurt feelings is derived from the best "effort[s] by all nine diversity committees in [redacted]."
No matter what the redacted material might be, the shocking news is that the IC follows the advice of no fewer than nine diversity committees. How is there time left for counterterrorism and assessing foreign threats?
Apparently, there isn't. Or at least not accurately.
Biden's ODNI led the disastrous intelligence assessment predicting that after the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the feeble Ghani government and the Afghan National Army would hold out for "a year or two" before falling to the Taliban. Afterwards, DNI Haines admitted that "[the collapse] unfolded more quickly than [the Intelligence Community] anticipated."
In February 2024, the ODNI Annual Threat Assessment criticized "Netanyahu's viability as a leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties" and obstinately claimed: "We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel" on October 7, 2023.
In April 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that the ODNI, the CIA, and the State Department's intelligence unit had determined that Vladimir Putin "likely didn't order" the killing of Alexei Navalny.
Like much of academia, journalism, wide swathes of the scientific and medical professions, and so many other institutions once widely respected, the Intelligence Community has all the earmarks of a sinking ship, listing precariously (to the port side, naturally).
Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow.