Obama: I've told advisers not to hold back bad intelligence
President Obama said Sunday that he has always insisted upon accurate intelligence from his advisers, even if it does not paint a good picture of facts on the ground.
Mr. Obama's remarks came during a press conference in Kuala Lumpur before he wrapped up a nine-day trip to Turkey and Asia. He was responding to a New York Times report that the Pentagon has expanded an investigation into whether supervisors at Central Command (Centcom) edited intelligence reports to hide military challenges in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
"One of the things I insisted on the day I walked into the Oval Office was that I don't want intelligence shaded by politics. I don't want it shaded by the desire to tell a feel-good story," the president said. "I believe that the Department of Defense and all those who head up our intelligence agencies understand that, and that I have made it repeatedly clear to all my top national security advisors that I never want them to hold back."
The president said he did not know what the investigation would uncover, but, "I expect that we get to the bottom" of whether the Times report was true.
The investigation began earlier this year after more than 50 intelligence analysts at CENTCOM told the Pentagon inspector general that they believed their work was being altered to portray the war on ISIS as more successful than it actually is. They argued that a military campaign would not necessarily fix the sectarian divides that plagued Iraq.
Overall, Mr. Obama also seemed dubious that much had been hidden from him in the military assessments.
"As a consumer of this intelligence, it's not as if I've been receiving wonderfully rosy, glowing portraits of what's been happening in Iraq and Syria over the last year and a half," he said. "It feels to me like, at my level at least, we've had a pretty clear-eyed, sober assessment of where we've made real progress and where we have not."