If Americans don’t get the truth about ISIS, we’ll never defeat it
By Post Editorial Board
Is America winning
the war against ISIS? It’s hard to know — because intelligence reports
haven’t exactly been honest.
In a troubling new
report this week, House members concluded what many long suspected: Reports at
the US Central Command, which oversees military efforts in the Middle East, were
deliberately doctored to present a false and rosy picture of US efforts against
ISIS.
It’s the first
official confirmation of whistleblower complaints that intelligence analysts’
assessments were routinely manipulated by top brass. Indeed, the report
found 40 percent of the analysts “experienced an attempt to distort or suppress
intelligence analysis” during a one-year period.
All this fits with
President Obama’s attempts to paint ISIS as merely a “JV
team” and claim the group had been “contained.”
The disclosures come
in a damning GOP report from the House Armed Services and Intelligence
committees, which concluded the problems reached the highest levels of
Central Command.
In a separate
statement, Democrats agreed the CentCom reports “insufficiently accommodated
dissenting views” but blamed managerial woes rather than political pressure.
And though the GOP report found evidence of pressure, it couldn’t determine its
source.
Was it from the White
House, perhaps? There was no evidence of that, but one task force member, Rep.
Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), suggests a military culture in which top brass felt
they would be “rewarded” for embracing the official political narrative.
That
narrative “was all in one direction,” he notes — downplaying ISIS as a threat,
when the exact opposite was true.
Americans haven’t
gotten the full truth about ISIS and terrorism for a long time. That’s got
to change, if those threats are ever going to be wiped out.
