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Of course, this isn’t really news until it’s reported in The New York Times

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From the wiser Dana, on Patterico’s Pontifications:

50 Spies Spill The Beans

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:24 am

Well, well, well… According to the Daily Beast, 50 intelligence analysts working out of Central Command claimed that senior management altered reports to more readily fit the administration’s narrative on ISIS:

It’s being called a ‘revolt’ by intelligence pros who are paid to give their honest assessment of the ISIS war—but are instead seeing their reports turned into happy talk.

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

One person who knows the contents of the complaint said it used the word “Stalinist” to describe the tone set by officials overseeing the military’s analysis.

This is interesting in light of President Obama’s claims last September that the U.S. would “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS, as well as subsequently claiming that we had the upper hand in the situation. This in spite of it never quite appearing to be true.

Is this as damning to the administration as it appears, or is it possible that the administration was just handed the very excuse needed to explain its overall lack of success in the Middle East and policy failure? It will be very interesting to find out who at the top gave the order to doctor the reports.

Assuming that the story is accurate, it’s quite possible that no one gave the order. The military officers already know what the civilian leadership want, and many act accordingly. Of course, even if such an order was given, no one will ever admit to it, and the facts will never be known until after someone who wants to tell retires and writes a book. And the Army is getting rid of a bunch of captains and majors; if you are a captain or major, in intelligence, and you’d rather not leave the service, about the last thing you’d want to do is tell the truth about intelligence assessments.

We understand: politically, the President, any President, is going to want to put as rosy a face forward as he can on any policy. Heck, according to the Johnson and Nixon administrations, we were winning the war in Vietnam, right up until the moment we lost it. But if the story is accurate, intelligence reports are being prettied up by senior military officers, not only before things get to the public, but before they even get to the President. I may not trust President Obama’s judgement on much, but if the military is presenting the civilian leadership with deliberately falsified intelligence, there’s no way he can take informed and reasonable decisions.


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