Obama stated [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report] that he anticipates a thorough investigation and “he does not want intelligence shaded by politics”.
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President Obama has asked his top military advisers to get to the bottom of reports that intelligence officers have been skewing their reports on the fight against the Islamic State to make it appear more successful.
A Centcom spokesperson, Col. Patrick Ryder, told the NY Times that the agency would cooperate with the Pentagon inspector general and Congress throughout the investigation, and that Centcom’s commander, General Lloyd J. Austin, would “take appropriate action once the investigation results have been received and reviewed”. “I don’t want it shaded by the desire to tell a feel-good story”, Obama said.
President Barack Obama pushed back on claims that officials are altering USA intelligence reports to fit the White House’s narrative on ISIS and al Qeada, insisting he’s been clear with officials that he does not want intelligence “shaded”. “We can’t make good policy unless we’ve got good, accurate, hard-headed, clear-eyed intelligence”. Final assessments presented by CENTCOM were also reportedly significantly changed to create a more positive accounting of events related to the Iraqi Army’s retreat as ISIS overran a number of cities in that country past year, the NY Times reported.
Mr. Obama said, though, that the news he has gotten about Islamic State from intelligence agencies hasn’t been a “wonderfully rosy, glowing” portrait.
The Pentagon inspector general in recent weeks has seized a large stash of emails and documents from military servers and has added more investigators to the inquiry, the NY Times reported Sunday.
Eleven individuals with knowledge of the details of the complaint told The Daily Beast that it says crucial parts of intelligence reports were taken out.
“If there are disagreements in terms of how folks are interpreting the facts, then that should be reflected in the reports that we receive – that a few folks think this is going on; other folks thinks that’s going on”. Also, it is alleged that senior military officials revised intelligence reports that analyzed training of Iraqi military forces by the United States military to combat the IS.
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“That doesn’t mean something couldn’t happen below the secretary of defense’s office”, Mr. Hagel said on CNN.
