Malaysia —
President Obama
said on Sunday that he had ordered his senior defense officials to find
out whether intelligence reports had been altered to reflect a more
optimistic assessment of the American military campaign against the
Islamic State.
Speaking
at a news conference in Malaysia at the end of a 10-day overseas trip,
Mr. Obama said he expected the Pentagon’s inspector general to
investigate allegations that significant changes were made to reports
from analysts at the United States Central Command, known as Centcom.
“I
don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on in
Centcom,” Mr. Obama said. “What I do know is my expectation — which is
the highest fidelity to facts, data, the truth.”
Mr. Obama was responding to a
report in The New York Times on Sunday
that described the internal Pentagon investigation. Some analysts in
the Defense Department say their supervisors revised their conclusions
about some of the military’s failures before finalizing the reports.
In
recent weeks, the Pentagon has expanded its investigation into the
allegations and has seized a large trove of emails and documents as it
examines the claims. The president said altering reports to make them
more optimistic would be contrary to his wishes.
“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 a desire to tell a feel-good story,” he said.
He
added: “I have made it repeatedly clear to all my top national security
advisers that I never want them to hold back, even if the intelligence,
or their opinions about the intelligence, their analysis or
interpretations of the data, contradict current policy.”
The
investigators, as detailed in The Times report, are examining years of
intelligence reports by Centcom and comparing them with reports about
the same events produced by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense
Intelligence Agency and others.
Some assessments of the administration’s campaign against the Islamic State in
Iraq,
for example, have focused on the deep political and religious divides
in that country that would be difficult to bridge. Meanwhile, the
official picture from Centcom was generally more upbeat, The Times
reported.
Mr.
Obama was careful to say that he did not know “the details about this.”
He said there were many times when legitimate disputes existed among
different agencies about an intelligence conclusion.
He said such disagreements had to be shared with him in a transparent way.
But
he also said he had not felt that the reports he had received about the
campaign to fight the Islamic State had been overly optimistic.
“It’s
not as if I’ve been receiving wonderfully rosy, glowing portraits of
what’s been going on in Iraq and Syria over the last year and a half,”
Mr. Obama said, adding: “At my level, at least, we’ve had a pretty
cleareyed, sober assessment of where we’ve made real progress and where
we have not.
In Washington on Sunday, former Defense Secretary
Chuck Hagel
said he had not seen any evidence of altered intelligence reports
during his tenure at the Pentagon, from early 2013 to February of this
year.
“Now,
that doesn’t mean something couldn’t happen below the secretary of
defense’s office,” Mr. Hagel said in an interview on “State of the
Union,” on CNN. “You can’t monitor everything.”
Mr. Hagel noted that “conflict between our military on the ground versus different intelligence groups” was nothing new.
Mr. Obama said he would not relent in the fight against the Islamic State, also known as
ISIS
or ISIL, and pledged to “take back their land” and “cut off their
financing” and “hunt down their leadership” with what he called an
intensifying strategy on all fronts.
He
repeatedly described the group’s members as little more than thugs with
guns who have little or no ability to “strike a mortal blow” against
the United States or France.
He rejected the use of the term “mastermind” to describe the man believed to have planned and helped execute the
attacks in Paris
on Nov. 13. He said the man “got his hands on some fairly conventional
weapons, and sadly it turns out if you are willing to die, you can kill a
lot of people.”
“The
most powerful tool we have to fight ISIL is to say that we’re not
afraid,” Mr. Obama said, “to not elevate it, to not somehow buy into
their fantasy that they are doing something important.” He called the
group merely “a bunch of killers, with good social media.”
Mr.
Obama said the world leaders scheduled to arrive in Paris next week for
climate talks must demonstrate by their presence that the attacks would
not succeed in blocking progress.
“It
is absolutely vital for every country, every leader, to send a signal
that the viciousness of a handful of killers does not stop the world
from doing important business,” he said, pledging that “we are not going
to be cowed by the violent, demented actions of a few.”
As he had done all week, Mr. Obama said he was seeking more aggressive action from other nations, including France and
Russia, in the military fight against the Islamic State and in the diplomatic effort to end the civil war in Syria.
He
said there was “increasing awareness” on the part of President Vladimir
V. Putin of Russia that the group posed a greater threat to his country
than anything else in the region.
Mr.
Obama expressed confidence about the ultimate outcome of the military
campaign, saying that destroying the Islamic State — with the Russians
or without them — is a realistic goal. “It’s going to get done,” he
said.
But
he returned several times to the idea that Americans must not change
the way they treat other people or demand unreasonable legal changes
because they are fearful of another attack. He noted that Times Square
in New York — not so far from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks — is
filled with people.
“They can’t beat us on the battlefield, so they try to terrorize us into being afraid,” Mr. Obama said. “As president, I will not let that happened"
