[Badger52]

For some this will fall in the category of "captain of the obvious" or, as one retired professional I'm acquainted with said, "Deja vu all over again."

Spies: Obama’s Brass Pressured Us to Downplay ISIS Threat
U.S. intelligence analysts keep saying that the American-led campaign against ISIS isn’t going so well. Their bosses keep telling them to think again about those conclusions.

A couple snippets:

“The phrase I use is the politicization of the intelligence community,” retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast when describing what he sees as a concerted push in government over the past several months to find information that tells a preferred story about efforts to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups, including al Qaeda. “That’s here. And it’s dangerous,” Flynn said.

At U.S. Central Command, which is in charge of airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, analysts have been frustrated for months that as their reports make their way up the chain, senior officers change them to adhere more closely to the administration’s line. Three U.S. officials and analysts spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

DIA analysis on extremist groups in the Middle East and North Africa has “typically been more hard hitting” and has not tried to paint a preferred picture about how the fight is going against ISIS and al Qaeda, Flynn said.

“It’s not trying to sugar-coat and give you a lot of ‘maybes’ and ‘probably,’” Flynn said. “It’s, ‘Here’s what we believe.’”

Current analysts said that there’s a tendency in some reporting to leave a sort of escape clause, that while the current efforts to defeat ISIS are going well, they could be set back at any moment. [OP note: Sounds just like a Josh Earnest briefing.] That kind of hedging appears designed to protect senior officials from subsequent accusations that they underestimated ISIS’s strength, while at the same time allowing them to say that the group is on the ropes.

Link to full article.