Trump to get intel briefings despite opposition

WASHINGTON: The US President's schedule on any given morning includes a confidential Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) at 9 am before he embarks on the day's (mostly) public engagements.

Presented usually by the Director of National Intelligence, the PDB fuses intelligence from various spy agencies (CIA, DIA, NSA etc), much of it obtained through “sigint“ (signal intelligence) and “'technical“ means (euphemism for bugging, electronic surveillance etc), to give the President a head's up on vital national security issues ­ from nuclear advances in countries such as Pakistan, North Korea and Iran to negotiating positions of China, India, and other majors at trade and climate change meets.

The PDB is considered to be sensitive and vital since for along time they were not released for publication, no matter how old or historically significant they may be. Even what began to be declassified in 2015 was sanitised, although it revealed that a month before 9 11, the PDB (on August 6, 2001) told the President “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.“

But on a day-to-day basis, the PDB is marked “For the President's Eyes Only .“ The story goes that when vice-president Harry Truman became President when Roosevelt died in 1945, he did not even know US possessed the atom bomb.Some secrets are for the president's eyes only , which is why there has been kerfuffle over the practice of presidential nominees -presumptively in 2016, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton -receiving intel briefings. How much will they -should they -know?

A few months before a new president takes over, prospective Oval Office successors begin to get intelligence briefings, a practice dating back to the 1940s. The briefings are not as precise or extensive as PDB: they expand as the putative successors get closer to the White House -a one-time briefing for nominees and more frequent ones for the presumptive president after election day in November till the formal oath-taking on January 20. But even those graduated briefings are bothering some intelligence professionals who feel that Trump, in particular, cannot be relied on to keep secrets. “He's never held public office before. He's a business developer and a reality TV star,“ CIA analyst Aki Pe ritz said, calling the presumptive Republican nominee “a man famously with no filter.“ If Trump gets classified briefings with sensitive information it could be a disaster, he added.

Some on the Republican side of the debate have also expressed concern about Hillary Clinton getting similar briefings given the controversy over her use of private servers and alleged carelessness with classified information. But to her credit, she has cosiderable experience in handling highoffice. Already , foreign policy stalwarts are aghast at Trump's peremptory utterances on international issues, from his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US to finger-wagging threats against China and Mexico.

On Sunday, Trump threw another verbal grenade into US foreign relations field, saying he might not have a very good rela tionship with British PM David Cameron if he became president because the latter described his Muslim ban proposal “divisive, stupid, and wrong.“

“I'm not stupid, I can tell you that right now, just the opposite,“ Trump said with his now trademark pique in an interview to Piers Morgan, adding that because of Cameron's remarks, “It looks like we're not going to have a very good relationship.“ Morgan later tweeted that Trump's comments were “incredibly strong“ and were “going to have real ramifications if he wins.“ Notwithstanding such capricious outbursts, some bordering on infantile -including against US allies such as Japan and South Korea -the Obama administration has indicated that Trump will get intelligence briefings -although they may not be as extensive or in-depth of the kind the President gets.