Pentagon Investigates Doctored "Intelligence" on ISIS

Living in an area with a heavy military population, I and others are supportive of our nation's military and not just in terms of the lip service so prevalent among Republicans who talk about supporting the military even as they cut veterans benefits and send our troops to war without property equipment.  All of this said, I remain highly suspicious of senior commanding military personnel who whether it be in the Vietnam era or now in the Middle East fiasco ALWAYS claim to be making better progress than is the reality and who ALWAYS claim that with more time, men and money they can do the impossible regardless of objective reality and/or that local military personnel in countries such as Iraq are capable of defending themselves.  The result is that bad decisions are made and American lives and treasure are wasted.  Now, the Pentagon is investigating doctored intelligence reports that sought to hide the military's failed "success" with fighting ISIS.  Here are highlights from the New York Times:

When Islamic State fighters overran a string of Iraqi cities last year, analysts at United States Central Command wrote classified assessments for military intelligence officials and policy makers that documented the humiliating retreat of the Iraqi Army. But before the assessments were final, former intelligence officials said, the analysts’ superiors made significant changes.

In the revised documents, the Iraqi Army had not retreated at all. The soldiers had simply “redeployed.”

Such changes are at the heart of an expanding internal Pentagon investigation of Centcom, as Central Command is known, where analysts say that supervisors revised conclusions to mask some of the American military’s failures in training Iraqi troops and beating back the Islamic State. The analysts say supervisors were particularly eager to paint a more optimistic picture of America’s role in the conflict than was warranted.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon inspector general seized a large trove of emails and documents from military servers as it examines the claims, and has added more investigators to the inquiry.

The electronic files seized in the Pentagon investigation tell the story of the group’s [ISIS] rise, as seen through the eyes of Centcom, which oversees military operations across the Middle East.

The exact content of those documents is unclear and may not become public because so much of the information is classified. But military officials have told Congress that some of those emails and documents may have been deleted before they had to be turned over to investigators, according to a senior congressional official, who requested anonymity to speak about the ongoing inquiry. Current and former officials have separately made similar claims, on condition of anonymity, to The New York Times.

The committee is not just examining reports about Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State, but also about Afghanistan and other areas under Centcom’s purview. The insurrection inside Centcom is an important chapter in the story of how the United States responded to the growing threat from the Islamic State. This past summer, a group of Centcom analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of American airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

The analysts said problems in Iraq were rooted in deep political and religious divides that could not easily be solved with a military campaign, current and former officials have said. Yet Centcom’s official posture remained generally upbeat. 

It is not clear whether the Centcom assessments significantly changed the Obama administration’s views about ISIS. While Centcom was largely positive about American gains, other agencies have been more pessimistic. The White House has generally been measured in its assessments.

[T]he prospect that senior officials intentionally skewed intelligence conclusions has raised questions about how much Mr. Obama, Congress and the public can believe the military’s assessments.

On Thursday, Foreign Policy reported that a group of Republican lawmakers will be focusing on whether Centcom also skewed intelligence assessments about Afghanistan. 

In addition to determining whether changes were made to intelligence reports — and if so, who ordered them — the investigators, like the staff members of the House intelligence committee, are studying reports from other intelligence agencies produced at the time to determine what was actually occurring in Iraq and Syria when the reports were written.

Sadly, senior military commanders never seem to be held to a level of accountability that is warranted given their ability to throw away the lives of our troops.    If reports were falsified, people need to lose their jobs - and their retirement packages.