Obama on Reports ISIS Intel Was Faked: I Don’t Want Intelligence Shaded by Politics

OBAMA: "Michael Shear."

SHEAR: "Thank you, Mr. President.  On a different topic -- when you go to Paris next week for the climate talks, you do so in the shadow of what happened in that city a week ago.  Could you talk a little bit about how you think those terror attacks might affect the talks?  And substantively, on the talks, can you talk a little bit about concerns that the United States might not have the ability to convince poor countries that nations will help them pay for what they need to do to achieve the climate talks, given especially the Republican opposition back home? And on one separate matter, could you comment on the investigations that we reported about in our paper this morning into whether or not intelligence officials are altering the assessments of the ISIL campaign to make them seem more rosy?"

OBAMA:  "I’ll take the last question first.  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 the desire to tell a feel-good story.  We can’t make good policy unless we’ve got good, accurate, hard-headed, clear-eyed intelligence.  I believe that the Department of Defense and all those who head up our intelligence agencies understand that, and that I have made it repeatedly clear to all my top national security advisors 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.  So that’s a message that we’ve been adamant about from the start. I don’t know what we’ll discover with respect to what was going on at CENTCOM.  I think that’s something that’s best left to the IG and the processes.  I have communicated once again to both the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as well as Secretary Carter that I expect that we get to the bottom of whether or not what you describe has been happening.  There are always going to be some disputes with respect to how to interpret facts on the ground.  I get intelligence briefings every single day, and there are times where they’re making their best judgments -- they’ll say, with moderate confidence, or low confidence, or high confidence, this is what we think is happening.  There may be times where there are disputes internally among various intelligence agencies about that.  But I don’t know the details of this.  What I do know is my expectation, which is the highest fidelity to facts, data -- the truth. And if there are disagreements in terms of how folks are interpreting the facts, then that should be reflected in the reports that we receive -- that some folks think this is going on; other folks thinks that’s going on.  And that’s part of what I weigh in terms of making decisions. One last thing I’ll say, though -- as a consumer of this intelligence, it’s not as if I’ve been receiving wonderfully rosy, glowing portraits of what’s been happening in Iraq and Syria over the last year and a half.  So to the extent that it’s been shaded -- again, I don’t know the details of what the IG may discover -- but it feels to me like, at my level at least, we’ve had a pretty clear-eyed, sober assessment of where we’ve made real progress and where we have not.”