CENTCOM Cooked ISIS Intelligence Reports but Nobody Seems to Know -- or Wants to Say -- Why

The CENTCOM manipulation of intelligence reports has certainly had serious repercussions, most undoubetedly not yet fully understood. Last Friday, Newsmax published a report of a Fox News interview with Representative Pete King, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and also chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism. King told Fox there is no doubt that "somewhere the books were cooked" when it came to the US military Central Command's reports detailing ISIS's rise in Iraq and Syria in 2014 and 2015." At the "very least," he added, it will eventually be determined that President Barack Obama created an atmosphere that made that happen : "Somewhere the books were cooked, and the analysts would submit their reports, their analysis of the final product....[but] the statements were always on the side of being better than it was. Every instance, analysis changes, made it out to be a rosier picture." The Defense Department has been reluctant to turn over documents to the task force investigating the reports, King said, but "there is no doubt it happened, it happened, and it put lives at risk. The question now is how high does it go?" Even if Obama did not issue the order to make the reports look better, King said he is sure it will be determined that he "created the atmosphere, the mood that ISIS was defeated, ISIS was a 'JV' team, and his policies were working." The positive reports had negative consequences, King said : "General Jack Keane explained it best, this is life and death. Now you're having tactical and strategic decisions based on analysis that was faulty. Phony intelligence is saying the enemy is weak, the enemy is retreating, the enemy is on defense. The fact is, ISIS was very well armed, very well trained, and ready to attack." King told Fox that the faulty reports put troops at risk, as well as strategic forces, and he said the information led to the loss of the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Mosul to ISIS, noting that troops are still struggling to regain Mosul. King complained that the reports are a part of a pattern with Obama, including "saying it was workplace violence when Major [Nidal] Hasan was killing people at Fort Hood....Obama has also complained that his intelligences sources failed, leading him to make the infamous "JV team" comment about ISIS." However, King said there have been warnings for some time about the danger of ISIS : "General Mike Flynn, in 2013, early 2014 told us how dangers ISIS was....The President chooses to ignore that. Here's what he wants to hear. His vision is that the war was caused by George Bush, and by extending the hand of friendship, he was going to bring peace to the region. His taking troops from Iraq was the worst decision a President has made in recent memory." ~~~~~~ Long before the CENTCOM scandal broke, President Obama was being heavily criticized for his refusal to call islamic terrorism by its name and to appear not to take it seriously enough -- he often explained that doing so would simply be "playing into the 'terrorists' hands." In June, Fred Fleitz -- former CIA analyst, and Iranian nuclear program analyst for the CIA, State Department, and House Intelligence Committee -- wrote an article about Obama's reaction to the Orlando gay nightclub massacre by 29-year old Omar Mateen, a US citizen born of Afghan parents. Mateen committed the worst mass shooting in US history and Fleitz said : "There’s no question this deadly shooting was motivated, if not directed by ISIS. Mateen swore legiance to ISIS during a 911 call during the massacre. He also had been investigated twice by the FBI for possible terrorist links." But, Fleitz said President Obama simply called the Orlando shooting “an act of terror and an act of hate,” saying “we must spare no effort to determine what -- if any -- inspiration or association this killer may have had with terrorist groups.” Obama's typical reference to similar attacks has been to call them “radical extremism” or “work place violence,” refusing to say that the Orlando massacre or any prior islamic terrorist attack in the US was motivated by radical Islam, while using each attack to press for his gun control agenda. Hillary Clinton called the Orlando shooting an act of terror and said it showed the importance of "defeating international terror groups,” but she failed to mention radical Islam and also used the shooting as opportunity to press for stricter gun control. Fleitz called the Orlando attack a wake-up call for America : "We desperately need a comprehensive strategy to defeat the global jihad movement (which many refer to as radical Islam) and its global ideology of sharia to promote islamist supremacism." ~~~~~~ Also last week, American Thinker wrote that Congress still doesn't know why CENTCOM "cooked the books" on ISIS intelligence. Rick Moran wrote that two congressional reports on CENTCOM's handling of ISIS-related intel have concluded that superior officers intervened with analysts to get them to report on progress against the terrorists more positively. Fifty of those analysts complained to the Pentagon inspector general that their analyses were being altered. The motivation for cooking the books is still unknown. There has been no link discovered leading directly back to the White House, although Republicans speculate that officers at CENTCOM tailored their reports to the White House narrative on the war against ISIS, which claimed we were making good progress. Why they would do this may be as simple as trying to curry favor. Moran says that whoever ordered the altering of intelligence reports, the scandal has set us back in the war against ISIS. The Daily Beast quoted Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and member of the congressional task force, as saying that despite nine months of review, "we still do not fully understand the reasons and motivations behind this practice and how often the excluded analyses were proven ultimately to be correct.” But, Wenstrup noted the effects have been damaging nevertheless : “We cannot win a war against ISIS with incomplete intelligence,” he wrote. ~~~~~~ The congressional Republican CENTCOM report released last week -- the report was not joined in by any Democrats -- attributed the problems at CENTCOM in part to a change in leadership and in the process by which intelligence reports are created. In the weeks after ISIS took control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June 2014, intelligence leaders were given a more direct say in how lower-level analysts’ reports were produced and then sent along to the military brass. That angered some analysts who, while outranked by the CENTCOM leaders, had been studying ISIS and other terrorist groups for years and thought their expert views were not being given full weight. The report says that in May 2015, CENTCOM analysts formally complained to the inspectors general for the Defense Intelligence Agency and for the intelligence community, which passed the complaints on to the congressional committees. In late 2015, an internal survey of intelligence analysts found that 40% of them “had experienced an attempt to distort or suppress intelligence in the past year." The report says the survey results alone should have prompted CENTCOM and [intelligence community] leaders to take corrective action without other inducements. During interviews, however, multiple Intelligence Directorate senior leaders challenged the legitimacy of the survey results rather than taking responsibility for them.” The amount of damage such misleading reports had on the Obama administration’s and the military’s overall understanding of the war on ISIS remains unclear. But the report noted that there were several secure conference calls by CENTCOM staff with top civilian intelligence officials, including the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and that such access gave CENTCOM’s reports “outsized influence on the material presented to the President outside of formal coordination channels. The impact was that you have a false signal being sent to officials,” committee member Representative Pompeo told The Daily Beast : “They had information what wasn’t true. It is difficult to wind back and say what would have happened had they had different information.” ~~~~~~ The media is, so far, generally ignoring these reports. Apparently, it is news only when Republican administrations are accused of cooking war intelligence, as George W. Bush was accused about WMD before the Iraq invasion. However, it defies credibility to think that nobody in the Obama administration noticed or cared about the discrepancy in reports between CENTCOM and US intelligence agencies. Why didn't someone see it and ask which analysis was correct. It cannot all be attributed to Ben Rhodes, the inexperienced writer Obama apointed to an important seat on the National Security Council. ~~~~~~ Fred Fleitz and many other analysts attribute the Obama and Clinton refusal to call massacres like the Orlando shooting what they are -- not just a war against terrorism or terrorists and not even just a war with ISIS -- as misquided analysis and political correctness toward Islam. In reality, says Fleitz, we are at war with a movement that wants to destroy modern society and impose its radical ideology of sharia on the world. Until Obama, Clinton and other Western leaders acknowledge this basic fact openly and agree on a comprehensive strategy to defeat the threat, it is certain to grow worse. Fleitz believes it is unlikely that President Obama or Clinton will abandon political correctness and admit that the Orlando shooting was caused by radical Islam or the global jihad movement. Instead, Fleitz expects more lectures from them on Islamophobia, tolerance, and the need for gun control. ~~~~~~ Dear readers, tomorrow we will look at the Obama/Clinton approach to the Middle East, Iran, Israel, and islamic terrorism, because there seems to be much more than PC at work in the Obama/Hillary 'strategy.' Meanwhile, the official ambiguity about the enemy the US and the West are facing is, as Fleitz says, the reason why the threat from radical Islam is such a powerful issue for Donald Trump, who consistently calls it a global ideology at war with modern society. It is why polls show most Americans view Trump as the better candidate to protect our nation from terrorism. It also is the reason why the threat from the global jihad movement is likely to win Trump the White House. At a Florida rally last week, Trump slammed both Hillary Clinton and President Obama for creating the Islamic State : "ISIS is honoring President Obama. He’s the founder of ISIS. He founded ISIS. I would say the co-founder would be 'Crooked' Hillary Clinton. The President created a void for ISIS to fill when he withdrew US troops from the Mideast. We should never have gotten out the way we got out. We unleashed terrible fury all over the Middle East. Instead of allowing some small forces to stay behind to maybe, just maybe, keep it under control, we pulled it out....normally you want to clean up, and he [Obama] made a bigger mess. We’re not respected. We’re laughed at all over the world." Although Barack, Hillary and their Progressives also like to laugh at Donald Trump, it's hard to argue with Trump's Middle East analysis -- nobody should be laughing at his incisive evaluation of the Obama/Clinton Iraq folly.