Intelligence needs to be free of censorship in order to be, well, intelligent. In order to be distinguishable from propaganda, it has to report results impartially. Bad news cannot be tossed in the garbage. It doesn’t necessarily have to be broadcast to the general public through a bullhorn, but it can’t be deliberately hidden from governmental decision makers. Even more tellingly, it can’t be kept from domestic political opponents within the government. If you want your military to win, you have to tell unpleasant truths. If you don’t want your military to really win, you certainly have no right to engage in Operation Failure Theater with the lives of people on a battlefield. This is what the United States Military has so endeavored to do under its Commander-In-Chief Barack Obama. This is a major aspect of his legacy as POTUS.

The lump that the US Military has designated to get thumped as it gets rolled over by the bus is General Lloyd Austin. It turns out that he was making it very easy to report favorable results in the fight against ISIS. It was made procedurally difficult and uncomfortable to report anything that was negative. Over time, this made the intelligence received by leadership in Washington DC no more accurate than what you would read on a typical blog. Intelligence had become propaganda.

“The bad news didn’t just need to be footnoted,” one military source, who did not want to be further identified because he is involved with the inquiry, told NPR. “The intelligence data itself had to be attached to the report. It became pretty clear if they wrote something bad, it was likely to be changed. Knowing that bad news on ISIS wasn’t welcome meant that, over time, the picture of the fight began being rosier.”

General Austin decided Capitol Hill was not the hill upon which he intended to die. When addressing the Senate Armed Services Committee, he offered the following preemptive statement on the IG investigation that has resulted from the obviously disingenuous intelligence that is coming from Iraq.

“There is an ongoing DOD IG investigation looking into allegations concerning the processing of intelligence information by CENTCOM’s intelligence directorate,” Austin said in his opening remarks. “Because the allegations are currently under investigation … it would be premature and inappropriate for me to discuss this matter.”

Meanwhile, Centcom General Steven Grove is also a figure attracting significant suspicion. He is said to be supervised very closely by James Clapper who is the director of national intelligence. Mr. Clapper is more than one level senior to General Grove which suggests manipulation is occurring. This is further indicated by the fact that over 50 different intelligence analysts have complained they are being ordered to shade their results. The Guardian UK is apparently more adept at collecting foreign intel data than Centcom. They tell us the following regarding US intelligence collection.

Grove and his civilian deputy, Greg Ryckman, are said to be the sources of dissatisfaction among analysts within Central Command, where an internal controversy about integrity in intelligence has now sparked an official inquiry by the Pentagon inspector general. More than 50 intelligence analysts, both those within Central Command and their seconded Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) colleagues, have registered complaints about manipulated or skewed data, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday. Analysts object to internal portrayals, said to come ultimately from Grove and Ryckman, of a war proceeding better than Isis’s persistent hold over large swaths of Iraq and Syria suggests. The existence of the Pentagon inquiry was first reported last month by the New York Times.

This IG inquiry will get stonewalled and blue-balled like the investigations into President Clinton’s Whitewater issues. It will reveal nothing we don’t already know and will be thoroughly sabotaged before it gets anywhere close to Pennsylvania Avenue. A few bureaucratic generals will get retired with full pay and benefits. This is all that will happen. The price of Failure Theatre is too shallow to prevent it from happening. Therefore, we get the following analysis.

“ISIS is losing,” John Allen, the retired Marine general charged with coordinating the ISIS campaign, said in July. “I am confident that over time, we will beat, we will, indeed, degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in March, using the government’s preferred acronym for the group. “No, I don’t think we’re losing,” President Obama said in May.

This story reminds me of the entire edifice of disingenuous “settled science” presented by Al Gore. Is there really Global Warming? There may well be some. A portion thereof could even be manmade. But you couldn’t legitimately know that from the model that generates The Hockey Stick Curve. This is because the model will take randomly generated data and turn it into a Hockey Stick.

This is analogous to an intelligence process where analysts can submit desired results with just a footnote, but must submit entire annexes to publish a non-desired result. You will always get a Hockey Stick. It will always produce a result that is #winning. You know, like Charlie Sheen. That isn’t how you go about running a war. But then again, the entire Obama Presidency is the wrong darn way to run a country. We know that whether our official information sources are allowed to so report.