Toeing the Line on ISIS

Maybe this is one scandal that won’t get swept under the rug. Then again, we’re talking about the Obama administration. The president claims he wants to “get to the bottom” of growing stories that military analysts doctored reports to paint a rosy picture of US efforts against ISIS.

Indeed, the Pentagon is expanding its investigation of Centcom — the US Central Command, which oversees military activity in the Middle East.

A number of Centcom analysts say their superiors falsified intelligence assessments, overstating the success of US airstrikes and downplaying ISIS’s growth. Fox News reports the analysts got at least two emails ordering them to “cut it out” and “toe the line” after they filed reports on the “rapid rise” of ISIS.

Now the Pentagon’s inspector general has seized emails and documents from military servers and is adding investigators to the team poring over the evidence. But both Fox and The New York Times report that some of those documents and messages may already have been deleted.

Obama said Sunday that from the moment he took office, he demanded intelligence not be “shaded by politics” or “the desire to tell a feelgood story.”

Hmm. If he’s been getting good intel, he’s ignored it. How else to explain his calling ISIS the “JV team,” or saying it’s been “contained” just hours before the Paris attacks?

Meanwhile, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has joined the ranks of Democrats questioning Obama’s failed antiISIS effort. And fully 66 percent of Americans in a new CBS poll say the president lacks a coherent strategy to battle ISIS.

Obama has denied that charge, time and again, saying his generals tell him it’s not true.

Huh. Where could anyone at Central Command have gotten the idea that the higherups don’t want to hear bad news?