Opinion

How the Obama team ignored an intelligence ‘cancer’

Just how high did the whistleblowing over doctored intelligence reports on ISIS go? Right to the top, it seems.

The Daily Beast reports that complaints about the intel reports — which exaggerated the success of US anti-ISIS military efforts — were sent last year straight to the office of National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

These complaints are separate from those some 50 intelligence analysts sent to the Pentagon’s inspector general. But both make the same charge: That higher-ups told analysts to “cut it out” and “toe the line” in their reports on the “rapid rise” of ISIS — which President Obama was dismissing as “a JV team.”

That this initial complaint went directly to Clapper’s office shows that the nation’s highest intelligence officials knew of problems in the reliability of the intel they were getting — some of which went to Obama.

One person who had read the complaint, the Beast reports, said it warned that US Central Command was putting “Stalinist” political pressure on the analysts. Another insisted, “The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command.”

Yet Clapper, testifying to Congress last fall, minimized the “media hyperbole” over the 50 analysts’ protest, asking all to wait until the inspector general’s office finishes its (still ongoing) investigation.

A decade ago, Democrats were in a hysterical frenzy over suggestions President Bush deliberately manipulated intelligence in Iraq. Now, with a Democrat in the White House, the silence is deafening.