Intel gathering

Politicized Intelligence: Telling the Boss What He Wants to Hear

The August 10 report of a joint task force of the House Armed Services Committee and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence shows that a serious corruption of intelligence by U.S. Central Command (“CENTCOM”) senior officers has been used to feed President Obama’s narrative that the fight against the Islamic State has been going well since 2014.

The report says, in part:

Based on its own investigation, the Joint Task Force has substantiated that structural and management changes made at the CENTCOM Intelligence Directorate starting in mid-2014 resulted in the production and dissemination of intelligence products that were inconsistent with the judgments of many senior, career analysts at CENTCOM. These products were consistently more optimistic regarding the conduct of U.S. military action than that of the senior analysts...