Cooking The Books: Spies Say Obama's Brass Pressured Them To Downplay ISIS Threat

Shane Harris and Nancy Ybussef at the Daily Beast offer a piece on the intelligence analysts who claim senior officials have pressured them to cook the books on the ISIS threat.

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, (seen in the above photo) the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast when describing what he sees as a concerted push in government over the past several months to find information that tells a preferred story about efforts to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups, including al Qaeda. “That’s here. And it’s dangerous,” Flynn said. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/26/spies-obama-s-brass-pressured-us-to-downplay-isis-threat.html

Journalism Is Dead: As Al Qaeda Magazine Goes Quiet, Intelligence Analysts Also Lose A Valuable Resource

Greg Miller at the Washington Post writes an interesting piece on why U.S. intelligence officials miss the al-Qaeda online magazine Inspire.

Al-Qaeda’s glossy online magazine, Inspire, hasn’t been seen since its creators were killed in a U.S. drone strike last fall, but the terrorist group’s loyalists aren’t the only ones lamenting its demise.

U.S. intelligence analysts miss the publication, too, at least to the extent that it provided a window into the thinking of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen-based group is known.

“It was something that helped us gain insight into the group,” said a U.S. defense official involved in tracking AQAP, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The publication’s apparent demise is “an intelligence loss for us,” the official said.   

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/us-intelligence-analysts-miss-al-qaeda-magazine/2012/02/09/gIQAlwRp1Q_blog.html