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During the Cold War, the Ford administration convened a Team B comprised of conservative foreign-policy thinkers to challenge the intelligence community’s estimates of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Then-CIA director and future President George H.W. Bush later concluded the group’s work lent “itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.”

In the early 1990s, after a rocky confirmation process during which he was accused of politicizing intelligence analysis, Director of the CIA Robert Gates implemented a series of reforms aimed at guarding against political or ideological thinking coloring intelligence analysis. Gates described politicization as “deliberately distorting analysis or judgments to favor a preferred line of thinking irrespective of evidence.”

during my tenure as an analyst with the CIA—President George W. Bush’s administration exerted unusual pressure to have the CIA support its plans to invade Iraq because of that country’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction program. Both assumptions proved flawed.

It is anathema to the training most analysts receive and the values that lie at the heart of the vocation. There is a high cost to putting ideology over informed assessments of political, economic, and military realities.

Intelligence analysis is more an imperfect art than it is a science: Gaps in reporting, bad sources, and circular reporting all complicate the analyst’s quest for knowledge and understanding

Politicization, however, sits on top of all of these complicating factors because it is an act of willful commission: At its most overt, it amounts to using a political position to get people to say that a clear, bright blue sky is cloudy

Speaking “truth to power” requires courage, because political partisans are all too happy to causally decry dissent as disloyalty.

What is the cost of politicization? As of 2013, it was estimated that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 cost an estimated $1.7 trillion, and saw over 4,000 Americans killed in action and over 30,000 wounded in action. Those numbers don’t include the families of the fallen; the innocent Iraqis killed or wounded during the conflict; or the insurgency that evolved into the extremist threat that we now know as ISIS.

The irony is that President Trump is a vocal critic of his predecessors’ decisions to invade, occupy, and ultimately withdraw from Iraq. In the run-up to that war, the Department of Defense formed an Office of Special Plans, conceived by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, which as Seymour Hersh argued in The New Yorker, “was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true” about Iraq the threat it posed to the world

A dark portrait of a vulnerable homeland – impotent against Islamic State militants, susceptible against undocumented refugees and isolated in a world of fraying alliances –

Ted Cru

military strikes against ISIS targets should be less concerned about “civilian casualties.”

the disastrous war McCain celebrated, should be blamed on President Obama’s foreign policy.

The one reaction nearly every Republican candidate agreed on is a refusal to accept Syrian refugees – as if the real lesson of the Paris attacks is feeling less sympathy for ISIS’s victims

the Republican’s rush toward “stop letting in refugees” is reminiscent of “the ‘travel ban now or we all die of Ebola’ fad of last year.”

But there’s also the unnerving track record of many Republican officials – including would-be presidents – who seem to fall to pieces every time there’s a crisis

The GOP’s responses to Friday night’s bloodshed was a discouraging reminder of a party that still doesn’t know what to do or say when mature leadership is required

The House action also served as another blow to Mr. Obama on an area that has repeatedly bedeviled him over the last two years of his presidency — how to articulate and put in place a policy in Syria, where there are no clear paths or partners to end the conflict.The fact that lawmakers in both parties have refused Mr. Obama’s request for an explicit authorization of force against the Islamic State, even as they vote to curb refugees, further highlights the vexing politics in the era of terror.

Momani says that "our borders are open for refugees" and that "we take care of humanitarian cases, particularly children and women."  

Jordan hosts about 630,000 of more than 4 million Syrians who have fled their homeland since 2011.

Jordan has permitted entry to small groups at a time, typically several dozen a day, citing the need for stringent security checks to weed out potential fighters alligned with armed groups.

U.N. refugee agency made a rare public appeal to Jordan to change its policy, while acknowledging the country's "tremendous contribution" to hosting refugees

"Testimony from Syrian refugees and international aid workers in Jordan ... suggests that hundreds of refugees have been arriving on a daily basis in recent weeks but have been denied access to Jordan by the authorities,"

Amman to take "immediate action" to assist them, saying failure to provide refugees with sanctuary could fuel a "humanitarian disaster." 

The group said the images show more than 1,450 tent structures, compared to 175 in April.

Dabiq is a town in northern Syria currently held by ISIS where, according to Islamic prophecy, the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam.

And according to those prophecies, the Islamic armies will ultimately conquer Jerusalem and Rome.

No matter that the majority of Muslims -- even many jihadists - see ISIS' interpretations of the Quran and the hadith as manipulations or distortions.

The revival of the caliphate is the launching pad for a global battlefield. No caliph can govern without pursuing offensive jihad, and that jihad will continue, as Dabiq put it, until "the shade of the blessed flag will expand until it covers all eastern and western extents of the Earth."

"There will come a time when three armies of Islam shall simultaneously rise, one in the Levant, one in Yemen and one in Iraq."

It is powerful motivation to ISIS supporters, and it's also a message to Muslims: The end of times is at hand, and if you want to be a true Muslim, on the right side of history, you had better join us.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said it was an obligation to establish the caliphate and therefore to recognize him as caliph.

A caliphate can only exist if it holds territory: ISIS' raison d'etre is to sustain and expand

ISIS followers -- and Dabiq -- are fond of quoting the words of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the "spiritual" father of the movement and leader of al Qaeda in Iraq until he was killed in 2006.

Libya is the only other country where ISIS holds territory -- the coastal town of Sirte and other patches along the Mediterranean

Libyan territory can also be (and has been) the platform for launching terror attacks in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

But ISIS' ambitions run much further -- it has established a presence in Yemen, Afghanistan and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.

ISIS does not recognize the borders of nation states that make up the modern world nor the idea of a democratic state or citizenship.

"The Islamic State does not recognize synthetic borders, nor any citizenship besides Islam," he declared in 2012.

"We won't enjoy life until we liberate the Muslims everywhere, and until we retrieve Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and regain Al-Andalus (Andalucia in Spain), and conquer Rome," Adnani said in 2013.

ISIS wants to stir religious hatred in Europe and the United States -- so that Muslims no longer feel they belong in the West, and either carry out attacks in their homelands or leave to join the caliphate.

It has already shown extreme cruelty toward Shiites -- most notably slaughtering more than 1,500 Iraqi air force cadets in Tikrit in June 2014.

And it sees the United States as complicit in supporting a Shia government in Iraq.

Embroiling the U.S. and the West in a land war -- ISIS reasons -- would give Muslims no choice but to come to the defense of the caliphate, setting up a global confrontation.

"Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse,"

"We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it."

Making guns personalized so that they only work for approved users is a major theme in gun-safety technology today, but not everyone agrees that fingerprint sensors are the way to go

A review by America’s 1st Freedom, a publication run by the NRA, called Armatix’s smart weapon “sleek” but unreliable and ultimately “disappointing.” The review also raised questions about remote hacking, an aspect of personalized authentication that is likely to continue to come up.

TriggerSmart is developing its own RFID-enabled gun, one that he hopes—like many of the people developing advanced gun-safety technologies—will appeal to law enforcement

If gun enthusiasts see police officers and members of the military using a certain weapon, they’re more likely to buy the same thing.

That’s the idea, anyway. TriggerSmart is still testing its product, a painstaking process, and one that McNamara estimates will take a couple more years. “Because they’re such serious weapons,” he said. “We need to go and test technology rigorously in extreme conditions—in the desert in Africa and in the snow up in Alaska—to make sure that they perform perfectly well.”

“Nobody’s trying to take away guns,” McNamara said. “This is just offering another kind of gun. There’s thousands of types of guns. This is just another one. I don’t think, in any stretch of the imagination, that there’s anything in the president’s announcement that we’re taking away anybody’s guns. But of course there’s the fear-mongering. Paranoid fantasies.”

In the United States alone, there are some 350 million firearms—or, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, more guns than people. “The majority of gun owners are responsible,” Hirsch said. “I don’t know if guns are any more lethal than they used to be. The problem is they’re falling into the wrong hands.”

That’s true. People do kill people, just like guns-rights advocates like to say, but they wouldn’t always be able to without guns.

“Just the simplicity, pulling the trigger. It’s not something like a construction machine, where if you make a mistake you might lose a hand. You’re playing on a much higher level when talking about safety.”

An important detail: The initial draft of the letter Comey sent to Congress to inform them of the new emails was reportedly written by Strzok.

Put another way, there’s been a concerted effort to explain away precisely the contradiction that Strzok notes: If he didn’t want Trump to win, why didn’t he do something to keep Trump from winning? (And by extension, why do something that seemed very likely to hurt Clinton’s chances?)

If you were an FBI agent in possession of information about how an adviser to Trump’s campaign knew about the existence of emails stolen by the Russians that disparaged Clinton, or who knew about the extent of the relationship between Trump’s former campaign chairman and Russian interests, or who knew that there was an active surveillance operation underway targeting another former adviser to the campaign, or who knew God-knows-what-else the FBI knows that hasn’t been made public — why would you not interject that information in the few days before the election as the results were obviously tightening?

But no evidence has emerged to suggest that Strzok leaked anything about what he knew. Even if Strzok and Comey released the information about Weiner’s laptop believing that Clinton was going to win, within a week of that announcement the trend looked far different. Nonetheless, Strzok appears to have done nothing to reveal what he knew

Much of Trump’s dismissal of the Russia investigation hinges on this idea that Strzok was biased against him, tainting the entire probe through to Mueller’s efforts. As new Post-Schar School polling makes clear, this line of argument has helped shift perceptions of the investigation, with about half the country seeing the probe as more of a distraction than as something serious.

The fairest assumption, then, is that the probe’s origins were precisely what Strzok (and others) have suggested: An effort to determine whether Trump’s campaign intentionally aided the Russian effort at interference.

"You know, we tried to get it moved quickly 'cause we'd like to help DACA. I think everybody in this room wants to help with DACA, but the Supreme Court just ruled that it has to go through the normal channels, so it's going back in," Trump told a group of state governors at the White House. "There won't be any surprise. I mean, it's really sad when every single case filed against us -- this is in the 9th Circuit -- we lose, we lose, we lose, and then we do fine in the Supreme Court. But what does that tell you about our court system? It's a very, very sad thing. So DACA's going back, and we'll see what happens from there."<img alt="Sen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim " class="media__image" src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180214095613-dick-durbin-2-13-large-169.jpg">JUST WATCHEDSen. Durbin tells story of Chloe Kim ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCHtheoplayer-texttra

"While we were hopeful for a different outcome, the Supreme Court very rarely grants certiorari before judgment, though in our view, it was warranted for the extraordinary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to maintain DACA," O'Malley said. "We will continue to defend DHS's lawful authority to wind down DACA in an orderly manner."

You might be lucky and be among the very few who are released from immigration jail and allowed to live in our country while your asylum application is pending. This won’t mean that your immigration case will be over though. Your immigration case will not be solved for years, and even though you have a case for staying in this country, the government will make you wait for years before you get a final answer.

Then, something unexpected will happen. You will get sick or you will get very depressed. Maybe you will be sad because you miss your family. Because of how sick or sad you were, you will sleep in one day, miss a shift at work, and you will be fired. You will run out of money and while looking for jobs, one day you will jump the turnstile to get on a train for a job interview. To you, it was worth the risk, but you miscalculated.

You will get arrested and charged with a crime for the first time in your life. You will swear never to make a mistake again but it will be too late.

But let’s say you don’t get deported. If for some reason, and against all the odds, you find an immigration judge that listens to your story and understands your life is at risk if you return to your country, you will be granted permission to stay here. Then, you finally may feel that something good came your way.

I know you have heard so many wonderful things about this place. I am sure that you heard that we were a “nation of immigrants,” correct? Well, that’s a thing of the past. We even changed the mission of the government agency handling asylum applications so it is clear to you. We are now “committed to protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” What values, you ask? Well, whatever we pick to justify that you are not welcome here.

I know. I know you will come because I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. I am so ashamed that we will do this to you and I am angry because my new country has betrayed me and every other person who believed in it. This place is not what it used to be. Just know that.

As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!

The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright

Some have pointed to a controversy earlier this year over former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was ousted amid a scandal involving allegations that he abused two ex-wives, as a turning point in terms of Kelly's influence.

n another example of Kelly being unhappy, one official said Kelly used "salty language" about Trump when Trump wasn't thrilled with picking Kirstjen Nielsen to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Another senior administration official said while Trump and his chief of staff have had disagreements, Kelly has never used that kind of language to criticize Trump.

The U.S. added 164,000 jobs in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent.

As for Americans in potentially affected states, Obama said regardless of whether they have been given an evacuation order they should begin preparations by following guidelines available at Ready.gov.