Obama orders inquiry on ISIS intel
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — President Barack Obama said on Sunday that he had ordered his senior defense officials to find out whether intelligence reports have been altered to reflect a more optimistic assessment of the U.S. military campaign against Islamic State.
Speaking at a news conference before leaving Malaysia to return home at the end of a 10-day overseas trip, Obama said he expected the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate allegations that significant changes were made to reports from analysts at the U.S. Central Command, known as CENTCOM.
“I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in CENTCOM,” Obama said. “What I do know is my expectation — which is the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”
Obama was responding to a report in The New York Times on Sunday that described the internal Pentagon investigation. Some analysts in the Defense Department say their supervisors revised their conclusions about some of the military’s failures before making the reports final.
In recent weeks, the Pentagon has expanded its investigation into the allegations and has seized a large trove of emails and documents as it examines the claims. The president said altering reports to make them more optimistic would be contrary to his wishes.
“One of the things I insisted on the day I walked into the Oval Office was that I don’t want intelligence shaded by politics. I don’t want it shaded by a desire to tell a feel-good story,” he said.
The investigators are examining years of intelligence reports by CENTCOM and comparing them with reports about the same events produced by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others.
“It’s not as if I’ve been receiving wonderfully rosy, glowing portraits of what’s been going on in Iraq and Syria over the last year and a half,” he said. “At my level, at least, we’ve had a pretty clear-eyed, sober assessment of where we’ve made real progress and where we have not.”
In Washington on Sunday, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he had not seen any evidence of altered intelligence reports during his tenure at the Pentagon, from early 2013 to February of this year.
“Now, that doesn’t mean something couldn’t happen below the secretary of defense’s office,” Hagel said on State of the Union, on CNN. “You can’t monitor everything.”
Obama said he would not relent in the fight against Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and pledged to “take back their land” and “cut off their financing” and “hunt down their leadership” with what he called an intensifying strategy on all fronts.
He repeatedly described the group’s members as little more than thugs with guns who have little or no ability to “strike a mortal blow” against the United States or France.
He rejected the use of the term mastermind to describe the man believed to have planned and helped execute the attack in Paris on Nov. 13. He said the man “got his hands on some fairly conventional weapons, and, sadly, it turns out if you are willing to die, you can kill a lot of people.”
“The most powerful tool we have to fight ISIL is to say that we’re not afraid,” he said, “to not elevate it, to not somehow buy into their fantasy that they are doing something important.”
He called the group merely “a bunch of killers with good social media.”