Retired Army Col. Derek Harvey told
Newsmax TV on Thursday that reports about senior Obama administration officials falsifying intelligence documents on the battle against Islamic State terrorists were "very unfortunate" and "disturbing."
"We should have learned our lessons over the last decade or more about the problems of politicizing intelligence or trying to sharpen intelligence to fulfill some political goal," Harvey, a former senior intelligence officer and adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, told "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth. "We've had challenges with group think. We've had challenges with things being politicized and being told at different times not to produce on certain subject areas because it was inconvenient.
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"That's happened in the past," Harvey said.
But the biggest challenge facing Pentagon investigators now is whether the falsified information was used to make critical decisions in the field on how to battle the terrorists, he said.
"It's incredibly important for the integrity of the intelligence process" Harvey told Hayworth. "Importantly, the question I have is how did these things impact decisions — if, in fact, they were changed and … what was provided to policy makers?
"What was the impact on specific operations or policies, if what officials weren't getting what was accurate information?"
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