Military Reviews U.S. Response to ISIS Rise by Matt Apuzzo, Mark Mazzetti, and Michael S. Schmitt, 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…
Comments
Cooking the books at CENTCOM? I'm appalled. Here's the truth about Intelligence today. Raise a problem and you become the problem. The safest analytical tool today is a wet finger in the political winds. Just ask Mike Flynn. A sure route to promotion at command HQ or the Pentagon is to tell the boss what he wants hear. If the CINC says ISIS is "contained," the mission of Intel is to find the evidence to fit the command assertion.