hen Islamic State (IS) fighters overran a string of Iraqi cities last year, analysts at U.S. Central Command wrote classified assessments for military intelligence officials and policymakers that documented the humiliating retreat of the Iraqi army. But before the assessments were final, former intelligence officials said, the analysts’ superiors made significant changes.
In the revised documents, the Iraqi army had not retreated at all. The soldiers had simply “redeployed.”
Such changes are at the heart of an expanding internal Pentagon investigation of CENTCOM, as Central Command is known, where analysts say that supervisors revised conclusions to mask some of the U.S. military’s failures in training Iraqi troops and beating back the Islamic State. The analysts say supervisors were particularly eager to paint a more optimistic picture of America’s role in the conflict than was warranted.
Documents seizedIn recent weeks, the Pentagon inspector general seized a large trove of emails and documents from military servers as it examines the claims, and has added more investigators to the inquiry.
The attacks in Paris last week were a deadly demonstration that the Islamic State, once a group of militants focused on seizing territory in Iraq and Syria, has broadened its focus to attack the West. The electronic files seized in the Pentagon investigation tell the story of the group’s rise, as seen through the eyes of Central Command, which oversees military operations across the Middle East.
The exact content of those documents is unclear and may not become public because so much of the information is classified. But military officials have told Congress that some of those emails and documents may have been deleted before they had to be turned over to investigators, according to a senior congressional official, who requested anonymity to speak about the ongoing inquiry. Current and former officials have separately made similar claims, on the condition of anonymity, to The New York Times . Although lawmakers are demanding answers about those claims, it is not clear that the inspector general has been able to verify them. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined to comment.
Staff members at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are also poring over years of Central Command intelligence reports and comparing them to assessments from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defence Intelligence Agency and others. The committee is not just examining reports about Iraq, Syria and the Islamic State, but also about Afghanistan and other areas under Central Command’s purview. The insurrection inside Central Command is an important chapter in the story of how the United States responded to the growing threat from the Islamic State.
During the summer, a group of Central Command analysts took concerns about their superiors to the inspector general, saying they had evidence that senior officials had changed intelligence assessments to overstate the progress of U.S. air strikes against the jihadi group. — New York Times News Service
