Odious ODNI
The slow death of liberty
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” - H. L. Mencken
On Friday, Sept 09, 2025, the France-based global-intel news outlet, Intelligence Online (IO) posted a short piece about US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard and her suspension of the Strategic US Intelligence Report.
The opening salvo… “The latest four-yearly Global Trends report compiled by the National Intelligence Council, highly regarded due to its wide distribution and the interest it generates, has been deemed incompatible with Donald Trump's national security priorities.” You can almost taste the animus.
The IO report included a comment by Larry Pfeiffer, who IO touted as a former top CIA and NSA official, and member of a collective known as The Steady State, a group of former intel figures who purport to support the rule of law. Hang on.
The Steady State counts among its members that bastion of integrity and rule-of-law scion, James Clapper, who lied to Congress more than Frank Costello. Guilt by association? Perhaps. But Mr. Pfeiffer is also linked to Bush-era Black Sites as Chief of Staff to the CIA Director, something the IO report forgot to mention in their bona fides for his quote.
It’s curious that of all the people in the international community of intelligence practitioners and directorates, they chose to quote Larry Pfeiffer, a guy who runs the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, located at George Mason University, a think tank for Gitmo torture enthusiast, then General Hayden, who said in a 2007 meeting with foreign ambassadors, "This is not CIA's program. This is not the President's program. This is America's program."
Nothing unites Americans like the NFL and water boarding.
A senior fellow at the Hayden Center is Mike Morrell, chief organizer of the infamous letter from intelligence officials stating the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” despite having no evidence of collusion.
I’d much rather hear from John Kiriakou on this matter. At least it would be entertaining and honest. Remember, Kiriakou did not go to prison for torturing anyone. He went for telling everyone that we did it. The irony is the French are publicly against torture. In fact, French law rejects the defense of “superior orders,” an artifact of Nurenberg, for manifestly unlawful acts. Simply stated, DGSE officers cannot avoid criminal responsibility for torture by claiming they were following orders.
Hayden may look like the treasurer of your homeowner’s association but this is a man who has given a tiny thumbs up to illegal surveillance and torture for sport. He’s educated, perfectly capable of understanding the studies that show how ineffective torture is. Pfeiffer is a protégé, the Skipper’s Gilligan, still staffing Hayden’s neocon agenda, the perennial number two. The deliberate inclusion of Pfeiffer’s opinion reveals the editorial and political preferences of Intelligence Online.
The Report
The Strategic Intelligence Report has been published by the Strategic Futures Group (SFG) a section of the National Intelligence Council. As part of her 40% fat-reduction goal, Tulsi 86’ed the SFG. She said in a statement, “ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.” Fact check: True
Tulsi felt the latest draft report did not meet analytical professionalism standards and more telling, promoted a political agenda antithetical to President Trump’s “current national security priorities.” That his ‘current priorities’ change with each new reaction-post in his Truth Social feed is immaterial. What’s more important is why an intel report that should be purely analytical and realistic, would have a political perspective at all. Tulsi has made multiple comments over the years decrying the politics of the intelligence community, the same community that put her on the TSA’s Quiet Skies list. They never thought she’d come back as the boss, an “oh shit” moment for the slippery elms in the intel forest.
It’s troublesome that such a sober publication would not be apolitical but in addition, it’s equally concerning that Tulsi’s implication is that Trump would prefer that his own political spin (read, Israel first, quash dissent), should be woven into the narrative. We can glean this from Tulsi’s lack of concern about the report in fact having a political perspective, but rather which vainglorious journal it reflects.
The last report, published in 2021, made a number of references to political, specifically digital, repression of ideas and political dissent. The report framed digital repression as a growing, pervasive challenge that could exacerbate global instability by stifling innovation, eroding privacy, and empowering illiberal governance models. I wasn’t convinced that the vague “stifling innovation” was clearly demonstrated, but the report mainly pointed to China and Russia as the malefactors.
Key drivers of digital repression include hyperconnectivity, AI advancements, and the proliferation of surveillance tech, which make repression cheaper and more effective. The PRC makes use of it at staggering levels. Chongqing, China has roughly 168 cameras per thousand people, but London, Atlanta, the West Bank and DC are closing the gap. The Italian government used spyware to clock journalists in the Paragon scandal. The report contrasted this with democratic vulnerabilities, suggesting authoritarian approaches might gain ground if unchecked. This isn't alarmist speculation any longer. It may even be possible that the only reason the US Treasury sanctioned the Intellexa Consortium and NSO Group was to stifle competition from Ehud Barak-connected enterprises like Black Cube, Carbyne, Paragon Solutions and Toka. Toka focuses on the infiltration of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). There are more than 18 billion devices in the world, according to Statista. The number of IoT devices is expected to explode to 40 billion by 2030, according to IoT Analytics. The next time you’re making breakfast in your underwear on a Saturday morning, imagine Epstein’s pal Ehud Barak watching you through your fridge cam. Here’s your robe, babe.
Trump’s recent comments on AF1 about looking into pulling the licenses of media outlets that “hit Trump” should be cause for alarm. Should he be successful, it’s almost a guarantee that the next Dem president will try to pull Fox’s license. Then we’ll see the Million Walker March on DC as Fox’s target demo gets their meds and protest orders in lock step, or lock shuffle.
We should not miss the opportunity here to mention the billion dollars in 2025 that the administration has given Palantir, a company even Orwell could not have imagined. I recently published an investigation onto the acquisition of Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware firm, by a US defense company. Mass surveillance is here. The question that remains is how comprehensively the federal government will implement it.
The 2021 report, called Global Trends 2040, places significant emphasis on concerns about digital repression of free expression by authoritarian regimes, something many fear the US is becoming. This theme weaves through much of the document as a core risk of a future shaped by technological disruption, geopolitical competition for data, and societal fragmentation. It's not the sole focus of the 156-page missive, but digital tools for surveillance, censorship, and information control are repeatedly highlighted as enablers of authoritarian resilience and threats to global, democratic norms of openness and dissent.
The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in part by Eleanor Roosevelt, states in Article 19, “Everyone has a right to freedom of expression; this right includes the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The First Amendment protects these rights. The asses in our seats of power sometimes think the Constitution gives us these rights. They must be relentlessly reminded that the Constitution protects them; we already have these rights by virtue of our humanity, regardless from where on earth we trace our roots.
The fact that Palantir is paid to collate massive datasets for a creepily comprehensive profile of every American with a face is left out of the report, despite the fact that the US surveillance state was in full-on mission-creep long before the 2021 report was outlined in committee. The other guys do this stuff, not us and hey can you look into this camera please? It’s for your protection from Venezuelan gangs who will steal your corneas.
The prior report was written during the pandemic. It warns, “Illiberal regimes... are using the pandemic as a pretext to more severely crack down on dissent... conditions that may outlive the disease." This last quote brought to you from the Every Accusation is a Confession Department of the NIC.
Despite Tulsi’s posture, the politicalization of a report of this magnitude is as inevitable as it is regrettable. Critics and congressional Democrats have flagged potential political angles. For instance: Senate Intelligence Committee members, including Ranking Member Mark Warner, sent a letter on September 15 expressing alarm that the IC might be scaling back sensitive reporting altogether – not just on Global Trends, but on topics like election interference, under Gabbard's direction. They worry this could stem from a push to align intel with administration priorities. I’m sure their worries are well-grounded. What they do about it is an open question.
Add this to the mix. There's precedent with Gabbard recalling a classified NSA assessment on Venezuela earlier in September, which NSA brass described as fully compliant with protocols but pulled at her order. This has fueled speculation that the Global Trends delay might reflect broader efforts to scrub or Trump-wash analyses that clash with the White House's worldview, aka the Stephen Miller Perspective, better stated as the de-browning of the American electorate.
What are our options? Can we trust Tulsi to save the nation? I’m still hanging on to hope like an aging knight for his queen locked in the tower. It works for me.
The WH has been catching strays from shots fired at Pam Bondi’s comments about hate speech. The political right squealed in unison about the snowflakes on the left protesting conservative speakers on college campuses, mocking cancel culture and calling hate speech a construct of a woke-dominated media landscape. Suddenly, “hitting Trump” is speech worthy of the jackboot. It’s pathetic to the point of being un-American that our Commander in Chief, who is charged with leading the valiant men and women of our military, who have literally given their lives protecting the Constitution, is so fragile that a lame joke by a late-night chat host would bring the wrath of the gold-plated censorate.
The intelligence community is a den of thieves. Anyone involved in that type of work, top to bottom, I believe has to operate in a moral gray zone. Some more than others, of course. Tulsi being the head of our intel community, I have no doubt the skeletons are quickly piling high in her closet.
And as you noted, she believes in principle that the intel community should be apolitical. BUT, now that she’s running it and working for a maniacal, narcissistic president, who demands absolute loyalty and sycophancy, ehhhh… not so much. Now she would prefer the politics of the agency skew towards what benefits her boss. Because at the end of the day, that’s what benefits her. Job security.