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.
Obama said during a press conference in Malaysia on Sunday that he’s been clear since his first day in office that he wants his national security team to never hold back in expressing their honest opinion, even if it differs from current policy.
“One of the things I insisted on the day I walked into the Oval Office was that I don’t want intelligence shaded by politics. I don’t want it shaded by the desire to tell a feel-good story,” Obama said. “We can’t make good policy unless we’ve got good, accurate, hard-headed, clear-eyed intelligence.”
Months ago, the Defense Department Inspector General’s Office began looking into allegations that some intelligence reports had been altered by superiors to make them look rosier.
In one case, military intelligence officials described the “humiliating retreat” of the Iraqi Army in the face of conflict with the Islamic State last year. In documents revised by their superiors, however, there were significant changes, including that the Iraqi soldiers had been “redeployed,” the New York Times reported Saturday.
The New York Times reported that the Pentagon IG has seized a large number of electronic documents from military servers as its investigation into the allegations expands.
The call for an independent investigation is also growing on Capitol Hill. Committee staff are studying intelligence reports from agencies like the CIA over the same time period to find discrepancies from the Pentagon’s reports, the Times article said.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, said the House Armed Services Committee, which he chairs, is looking at whether dissenting voices are regularly being silenced at military commands around the world, but made it clear that any congressional inquiry can’t interfere with the inspector general’s research, the Times reported.
Foreign Policy reported last week that lawmakers are also looking at whether intelligence was skewed in Afghanistan.
