Did U.S. military brass edit intelligence reports that warned of the Islamic State’s success in Iraq to paint a more rosy picture? Did these new reports wrongly color President Obama’s assessment of the threat the Islamic State posed to the peace of nations? And did the supervisors then try to cover the edits up by deleting emails?
These are questions raised by reports that the Defense Department’s inspector general has demanded all manner of documents from Central Command, or Centcom, which is charged with overseeing military intelligence and operations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.
Centcom intelligence analysts have alleged to Inspector General Jon Rymer that their supervisors edited documents to paint a far-too-optimistic picture of the Iraqi Army’s skirmishes with Islamic State forces. Since Iraqi forces had been trained by U.S. troops, their early losses were seen as embarrassing and thus were fudged a bit.
When Islamic State fighters initially forced the Iraqi Army to retreat from several cities, for instance, the New York Times reports that supervisors edited intelligence reports to say “the Iraqi Army had not retreated at all. The soldiers had simply ‘redeployed'” away from battle.
Charges of intelligence tampering are being taking seriously, and not just by the inspector general. “Any time there is an allegation that intelligence is being shaved in a certain way, or distorted in a certain way, that’s a cause for serious concern,” said Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Thornberry said that he would try not to step on the inspector general’s toes in a too-crushing way but insisted that legislators “also have a job to do” in keeping military intelligence honest.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, seems, if anything, even more determined to get to the bottom of intelligence failures, in Iraq and even in Afghanistan. Nunes is readying a letter to the inspector general asking if any documents related to the investigation have been deleted.
If so, Nunes will be requesting that techs try to recover those deleted documents from Centcom servers, so that Congress can make its own intelligence assessment.
