Top analysts question accuracy of Iraq reports

They contend that commanders paint too rosy a picture.

WASHINGTON— As the war in Iraq deteriorated, a senior U.S. intelligence analyst went public in 2005 and criticized President George W. Bush’s administration for pushing “amateurish and unrealistic” plans for the invasion two years before.

Now that same man, Gregory Hooker, is at the center of an insurrection of U.S. Central Command intelligence analysts over America’s latest war in Iraq, and whether Congress, policymakers and the public are being given too rosy a picture.

As the senior Iraq analyst at Central Command, the military headquarters in Tampa, Fla., that oversees U.S. military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, Hooker is the leader of a group of analysts who are accusing senior commanders of changing intelligence reports to paint an overly optimistic portrait of the U.S. bombing campaign against the Islamic State.

The Pentagon’s inspec- tor general is investigating.

Although the investigation became public weeks ago, the source of the allegations and Hooker’s role have not been previously known.

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former intelligence officials place the dispute directly at the heart of Central Command, with Hooker and his team in a fight over what Americans should believe about the war.

Hooker, who declined to comment, has been an Iraq analyst for more than two decades. Some on his team were at Central Command, or CENTCOM, when tens of thousands of U.S. troops poured into Iraq in 2003. The analysts remained focused on the country long after President Barack Obama officially ended the war in 2009.

“This core group of Iraq analysts have been doing this for a long time,” said Stephen Robb, a retired Marine colonel and a former head of the CENTCOM Joint Intelligence Center.

“If they say there’s smoke, start looking for a firehouse.”

The investigation has repercussions beyond the question of whether the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria is succeeding. The allegations call into question how much the president — this one or the next — can rely on CENTCOM for honest assessments of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and other crisis spots.

In some ways, the Iraq team’s criticism mirrors the disputes of a decade ago, when Hooker wrote a research paper saying the Bush administration, over many analysts’ objections, advocated a small force in Iraq and spent little time thinking about what would follow the invasion.

That dispute was separate from the battle over flawed intelligence assessments by the CIA and other spy agencies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Central Command did not contribute significantly to those assessments.

Several current and former officials said that it was the two most senior intelligence officers at CENTCOM — Maj. Gen. Steven Grove and his civilian deputy, Gregory Ryckman —who drew analysts’ ire with changes in draft intelligence assessments. But why the assessments were changed remains an open question.