Shocker: Intelligence Analysts Say They Were Pressured to Downplay ISIS' Strength and Overstate Obama's Effectiveness Against Them

Anyone surprised?

They're the JV, you know. Obama said so. Now re-write your report to make them the JV.

Scandal-free administration, You Guys. Scandal-free.

Shane Harris and Nancy A. Yousef:

U.S. intelligence analysts keep saying that the American-led campaign against ISIS isn’t going so well. Their bosses keep telling them to think again about those conclusions.

Senior military and intelligence officials have inappropriately pressured U.S. terrorism analysts to alter their assessments about the strength of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, three sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. Analysts have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is, according to these sources, and to paint an overly rosy picture about how well the U.S.-led effort to defeat the group is going.

Reports that have been deemed too pessimistic about the efficacy of the American-led campaign, or that have questioned whether a U.S.-trained Iraqi military can ultimately defeat ISIS, have been sent back down through the chain of command or haven’t been shared with senior policymakers, several analysts alleged.

In other instances, authors of such reports said they understood that their conclusions should fall within a certain spectrum. As a result, they self-censored their own views, they said, because they felt pressure to not reach conclusions far outside what those above them apparently believed.

"The phrase I use is the politicization of the intelligence community,”"retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast...

It's truly incredible, and of course the major media aren't interested.

A president's minions direct their analysts to lie for political advantage, corrupting some of the most important machinery of United States security, intelligence.

But the media's okay with this -- their preferred story is also "Obama Triumphs." So they work hand in glove with him.

posted by Ace at 12:43 PM

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