title:  Former CIA Covert Agent DETAILS Why Trump’s Dismissal Of Facts Is A Threat To Our Country
text: Donald Trump has seriously insulted our intelligence community and his continuing refusal to listen to them is putting America at risk.Just ask J.C. Carleson, a former covert CIA officer who has been on the ground in hot spots around the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and understands that facts are the difference between life and death.In an article for Fortune, Carleson warned that Trump s obsession with Twitter while ignoring his intelligence briefings are more serious than many Americans believe. In a world where Breitbart headlines can create lurid stories out of thin air, the daily brief s stubborn reliance on facts and expert analysis might seem positively archaic,  Carleson began.So far, Trump has ignored most of his daily briefings, a trait that proved disastrous in 2001 when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center with airplanes on September 11th. Months prior to the attack, Bush ignored a memo that al-Qaeda was determined to strike the United States using airplanes.The bottom line is that if Trump does not take intelligence briefings seriously and refuses to listen to them because he thinks he is smarter than the people who have been doing this work for decades, we re going to see real consequences and it will start with the people on the ground like Carleson, who risk their lives to gain intelligence to pass on to policymakers in order to prevent terrorist attacks and wars. To a person, every asset I ever recruited or worked with genuinely believed that, in providing information to the United States government, he or she was doing something that in the long run would help right wrongs, improve circumstances both locally and globally, and possibly avert large-scale tragedies,  Carleson wrote.  I fear that Trump s rejection of both the content and the conclusions offered to him by the intelligence community will have a profound chilling effect on the recruitment of new assets, and the willingness of existing assets to continue to provide information. This disregard has consequences beyond Trump s own dearth of information, because once again, it serves to erode the motivation of those who might provide us with information we desperately need information that may include details of threats to American lives and infrastructure, for example small and, yes, sometimes repetitive details that cumulatively inform us of impending terrorist attacks, progress on covert weapons programs, cyberthreats, and countless other plots and dangers faced by our nation every day. But why should either potential assets or foreign intelligence services trust the CIA if our own president does not?And Carleson is absolutely right. Why should foreign assets trust the CIA with information that Trump is going to ignore?Because if the United States is not going to act because Trump writes off everything the CIA says as lies, assets would probably rather take the information elsewhere or simply let the United States be attacked and become the victim of our own refusal to accept facts. And that will only help nations like Russia and China and other nations that would love to watch our country burn.The world knows that, in the incoming administration, facts will be ignored, and reasoned analysis will be rejected. If Trump continues to publicly scorn the CIA s briefings and conclusions, assets and cooperative foreign intelligence services will become increasingly disinclined to provide sensitive information. Without confidence that their cooperation will have any kind of positive effect, the risks quickly outweigh the results. On an individual level, the why determines the what, and without the motivation of knowing that their sacrifices will ultimately make a difference, CIA sources may choose, in Trump s parlance, to walk away from the deal.This is exactly why Trump should never have been allowed to become president. And it s why conservatives are unfit to have any power within our government. Facts do not matter to them, and we live in a time when facts matter most. If America is attacked or our enemies walk all over us, it will be Trump s fault. He will be to blame along with all the Republicans who kissed his ass. And then the American people will have a choice to make. Do we allow Trump to continue putting our nation and our lives at risk, or do we do something about it?Featured Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images