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

FBI Probes 'Hundreds' Of China Spy Cases

Shane Harris at the Daily Beast offers a piece on the FBI investigating Chinese cyber espionage case.

The FBI has seen a surge in cases of economic espionage in the past year, and the bureau says that China is largely to blame.

China’s intelligence services are “as aggressive now as they’ve ever been,” said Assistant Director Randall Coleman, who runs the bureau’s counterintelligence division. He and other senior FBI officials described the threat China poses to U.S. companies during a rare, on-the-record briefing with reporters Thursday. It was an event meant to underscore the pervasive nature of intellectual-property and trade-secrets theft and to alert businesses to protect themselves.

“The predominant threat we face right now is from China,” Coleman said.

The FBI has linked the theft of a broad range of technologies—from seeds to software—to the Chinese government, he said. The number of cases investigated by the division, which is responsible for stopping and catching spies, has shot up 53 percent in the past year, Coleman said. The precise number of total cases is classified, but Coleman said it’s “in the hundreds.” 

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

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/23/fbi-probes-hundreds-of-china-spy-cases.html