The Pentagon’s Inspector General is currently looking into allegations that Central Command (CENTCOM) provided intelligence was spun to make the anti-ISIS campaign appear more successful than it actually was.
The allegations, first revealed by the New York Times on Tuesday, were first brought to light when a civilian analyst from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) told authorities that the higher ups at CENTCOM were putting a positive spin on reports. CENTCOM is currently leading the campaign against ISIS (also known as ISIL or the Islamic State) and the reports it prepares go to many senior figures including President Obama.
The Daily Beast followed up with a report on Wednesday that doubled down on the initial claims. The story said that officials pressure terrorism analysts to give favorable reports or self-censor their views to appease higher ups.
Politicization and falsification of intelligence has long been a problem for the intel community. That’s why in 2011, Congress passed a law that would allow intelligence analysts to approach the Pentagon’s Inspector General should they feel the intelligence is being misrepresented. The law essentially offers a method to check the influence of CENTCOM — an important means of balance according to experts.
“The guys in the field always put the best face on something,” Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress [CAP] and former assistant secretary of defense, told ThinkProgress. “So the IG [Inspector General] will go in and see if the military guys are sugarcoating it because they’re worried about promotions, their job is on the line, and those are the type of things, or whether it’s a legitimate disagreement.”
Korb said the process was a basic democratic function and good for a community that has come under heavy criticism in recent history — specifically for the run up to the invasion of Iraq. “This is a good law and it’s too bad we didn’t have it before,” he said. “We wouldn’t have had the problems we did back in 2002.”
Nonetheless, some have taken this as an opportunity to attack the Obama administration’s fight against ISIS. Former DIA director, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn “noted that senior military and Obama administration officials have been too optimistic in their public assessments about how the war against ISIS is faring,” the Daily Beast reported.
Should the impending investigation yield results showing that the operation to counter-ISIS isn’t going according to plan the administration could be subjected to heavy criticism. President Obama has already come under fire from many of the Republican presidential candidates for what they perceive to be a failed foreign policy — particularly in the fight against ISIS.
A U.S. and Saudi-backed aerial bombing campaign has targeted ISIS strongholds for the last year and while top military leaders back the program, it hasn’t been able to halt the group’s advances. Furthermore, the program to train and equip a group of Syrian rebels to fight ISIS has gone terribly awry. Certain experts believe that aspects of Obama’s ISIS policy should change regardless of the investigation’s outcome.
“I’m already of the mind that key elements of strategy need to be thought about differently,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow also at CAP who focuses on national security and west Asia, told ThinkProgress. Katulis said ultimately that the investigation would elicit a more nuanced version of the fight against ISIS — something that might have been useful in the past.“People like to talk about how great [2007 Iraq surge] was,” he said. “There was clear evidence of manipulation of data to present things in a much more favorable light to the American public than existed. This is what happens when you go to war.”
Update:
The original story quoted Brian Katulis as saying “People like to talk about how great [2003 Iraq invasion] was.” Katulis was referring to the 2007 surge and the story has been corrected.