Obama 'confident' in information from Isis briefings despite Pentagon inquiry

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/23/obama-confident-isis-briefings-pentagon

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Barack Obama has confidence in the staff who brief him on the war against Islamic State, his spokesman said on Monday, despite an official investigation into claims of an intelligence whitewash.

The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations by the US military’s central command (Centcom) intelligence analysts that supervisors revised conclusions of their reports to exaggerate progress and play down failures in Iraq and Syria.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said Obama has made clear to his advisers he wants a warts-and-all account of the fight against Isis. “The president does have a lot of confidence in the individuals who are responsible for presenting intelligence information to him, primarily because he has given them very specific instruction about his desire to get the possible sense of what’s actually happening on the ground, even if it means coming to the president with some bad news,” he said.

There is room for dissent among analysts over the merits of American strategy, Earnest added. “The president also acknowledged that there is this area where people might have, based on the facts that are on the ground, reached differing conclusions based on their own analysis of the situation.

“That’s entirely appropriate. We want people with different points of view to be considering the facts and presenting their analysis to the president. There is a mechanism for ensuring that differing views are incorporated into the intelligence material that’s presented to the president.”

The New York Times reported on Sunday that investigators recently seized a big cache of emails and documents from military servers and are now comparing Centom’s reports with those about the same events from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others. Centcom’s assessments are alleged to be overly optimistic.

Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, expressed similar concerns in a TV interview. He said members of his committee had long observed discrepancies between what they saw during visits to the region and the intelligence reports.

“We travel to many of these countries and we meet with the people on the ground and it’s almost all the time, what we hear and see on the ground when we talk to the folks that are actually doing the work” is grimmer than the intelligence reports, Nunes told CNN’s State of the Union.

“More alarming, what we hear the president and his senior officials saying to the public – it just doesn’t jive with, what they’re saying in public and what we see on the ground.”

Nunes and his committee is working with other congressional panels to study the Centcom intelligence reports, he added. “We’re trying to gather all the facts. We’ve heard from a lot of whistleblowers and other informers.” Obama, speaking in Malaysia on Sunday at the end of a week-long overseas trip, said he would await results of the inspector general’s report but described the intelligence he has been getting as not “wonderfully rosy” but a “clear-eyed, sober assessment”.

“I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in Centcom,” he said. “What I do know is my expectation – which is the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”