
A CIA intelligence report on LGBTQ+ oppression and another on white supremacy are among nearly twenty that the agency says it has either retracted or substantially revised after MAGA loyalists on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) flagged them for review.
According to the New York Times, 17 reports have been deleted from the CIA’s database, while two have been revised. All were produced over the past decade.
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In a February 20 press release from the CIA’s office of public affairs, the agency claimed that the reports did not meet its “analytic tradecraft standards and failed to be independent of political consideration.”
But a senior CIA official told the Times that most of the 19 reports focused on issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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Included in the CIA’s Friday press release were redacted versions of three of the retracted reports: “Middle East-North Africa: LGBT Activists Under Pressure,” published in 2015; “Worldwide: Pandemic-Related Contraceptive Shortfalls Threaten Economic Development,” published in 2020; and “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment,” published in 2021.
In a statement, CIA director John Ratcliffe claimed the three reports “fall short of the high standards of impartiality that CIA must uphold and do not reflect the expertise for which our analysts are renowned.”
“There is absolutely no room for bias in our work, and when we identify instances where analytic rigor has been compromised, we have a responsibility to correct the record,” Ratcliffe added.
But former CIA officials told the Times that the three reports included neither poor tradecraft nor bias. They merely reflected policy priorities of past administrations.
According to the CIA’s press release notes, the 19 reports were flagged by the PIAB following an “independent review of hundreds of finished CIA analytic reports produced over the past decade.”
As NBC News and the International Business Times note, the president has stocked his PIAB with loyalists, including former Reps. Devin Nunes and Brad Wenstrup, former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, and former DOGE adviser Katie Miller, wife of Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller.
In a Friday statement, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the CIA and PIAB of “politicization” of intelligence work, according to NBC News.
“The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board plays an important advisory role, but it is not a substitute for the independent analytic judgment of the CIA and the broader Intelligence Community,” Warner said.
The move to retract the reports “is part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern in this administration: sidelining career experts, undermining inconvenient intelligence assessments and allowing political considerations to override professional judgment,” Warner said, according to the New York Times. “When political appointees appear to dictate what analysis is valid, it threatens the credibility, reliability, and independence of the intelligence community itself.”
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