Intelligence

You have to give Barack Obama credit. When it suits him, he projects omniscience ("99.9 percent of Muslims" are against the terrorists) and complete ignorance when his administration becomes mired in scandal. When he is omniscient, we just have to believe him. Never mind that opposing facts make his pronouncements into lies—in effect, it's 'who do you believe, me, or your lying eyes.' And when he professes ignorance of a scandal or two or three, we shouldn't conclude that his administration is either dishonest or incompetent, but rather a victim of nefarious government agencies that just happen to always do scandalous things that always benefit this president and the narrative he continually espouses.

The latest intelligence scandal was foreshadowed by the administration's effort to spin on-the-ground intelligence that an al Qaeda affiliated group attacked and murdered four Americans in Benghazi. Since Obama was telling the public that al Qaeda was "on the run", the intelligence didn't fit his 2012 campaign narrative, so the attack was spun as a bad movie review. Now we learn that Benghazi was the tip of the iceberg.

Steve Hayes reports (read the whole thing) on still another growing scandal that has enveloped the White House:

On November 21, the New York Times reported allegations that military intelligence officials provided the president with skewed assessments that minimized the threat from ISIS and overstated the success of U.S. efforts against the group. The Times story was an update of reporting from the Daily Beast earlier this fall. “More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials,” the Beast reported in September. These analysts say their superiors regularly massaged pessimistic assessments to make them more upbeat before sending them up the chain of command. The analysts registered their grievances with the inspector general at the Pentagon, who is investigating their claims.

Obama was asked about this investigation at a press conference on November 22. The president said he doesn’t know the details of the allegations. But he added: “What I do know is my expectation, which is the highest fidelity to facts, data​—​the truth.”

It's odd that these intelligence reports were always skewed to bolster Obama's narrative (Islamic terrorism was diminished on his watch) and never the other way around. Now we learn that the reports uniformly underestimated the strength and reach of the Islamists and, very important, that the intelligence analysts preparing the reports claim to have been pressured to spin the reports toward Obama's narrative.

Who pressured these analysis and why? Oddly, it's the very same question that was asked about the bogus anti-Islamic video narrative the was used for Benghazi.

It appears that this scandal is so egregious that very senior ex-administration officials are beginning to speak out. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Obama's former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested this week that the pressure to soften the intelligence reports came from the White House.

Steve Hayes comments on the whistleblowers:

These are not anonymous officials making frivolous claims against the commander in chief. They’re professionals with nearly a century of experience between them who are speaking out because of what they saw and what they’re seeing now. And they’re speaking for many in the ranks. Pregent is an Arabic speaker who has worked for more than 25 years on intelligence matters in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Harvey has worked on Iraq and the global jihadist threat for more than three decades, earning accolades from many who worked closest to him. He spoke out repeatedly against overly optimistic assessments in Iraq from the Bush administration, prompting one retired general to call him the “best strategic intelligence officer in the U.S. military” and another to describe him as “the best intelligence analyst the U.S. government has on Iraq.” Flynn draws from a deep reservoir of experience. He served under Obama at DIA, as the president’s top military intelligence official from 2012-2014. Before that, he was director of intelligence at the Joint Special Operations Command with duty in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom and director of intelligence for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

Democrats will, as they have in the past, spin this as a "partisan witch hunt." After all, they seem more interested in protecting Obama and their presumptive candidate Hillary Clinton (who just happened to be Secretary of State at the time), than they are in rooting out corrupt political wrongdoing that could potentially hurt this country.

And here's a question for the progressives who think that Barack Obama is being persecuted by the meany GOP opposition. Why would intelligence agencies soften the intelligence, rather than report it as-is or even exaggerate the threat? In fact, if the DIA, CIA and NSA wanted to mislead of their own volition, one would think they'd harden the intelligence so that they would receive additional funding to track the threat.

At the end of the day, Obama will likely skate on this scandal as he has on the others. The facts surrounding the intelligence scandal are both arcane and complex. Obama's trained hamsters in the media will not probe as they should and will work hard to keep the story buried.

Whether it's the IRS scandal, the Benghazi scandal, or this Intelligence scandal, it's funny how the end result of unethical or criminal wrongdoing always served to the political benefit one person. You know who that is, and so do I.

And that's why it's a reasonable assumption that White House interference sits at the center of the intelligence scandal as it does at the center of the IRS and Benghazi scandals.