The U.S. military's Central Command "skewed" its reports tracking Islamic State's rise in Iraq and Syria during 2014 and 2015 to make the situation appear better than it was, according to a House Republican task force analysis released Thursday.

Following allegations from a Department of Defense whistleblower that analysts’ findings were manipulated to present the campaign against ISIS in a more positive light, the task force concluded that Central Command’s intelligence reports were "inconsistent with the judgments of many senior, career analysts."

"These products also consistently described U.S. actions in a more positive light than other assessments from the [intelligence community] and were typically more optimistic than actual events warranted.”

According to the report, "structural and management changes" in the Central Command Intelligence Directorate in 2014 were the cause. From surveys given to the task force, they discovered that 40 percent of analysts said they "had experienced an attempt to distort or suppress intelligence."

The task force report goes on to say that senior officials favored reports from coalition forces over "more objective and documented intelligence reporting," and would alter reports 'in a more optimistic direction" because of this.

"The facts on the ground didn't match what the intelligence was saying out of the United States Central Command," said Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., who was connected with the report. "The United States Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.

"The result: consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently ‘rosy’ view of U.S. operational success against ISIS," Pompeo continued. "That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight. I urge the Department of Defense Inspector General to hold accountable the intelligence leaders that failed our service members fighting our wars on the ground."

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In an appearance later Thursday on Fox News' "America's Newsroom," Pompeo said Centcom was "manipulating intelligence in a way that puts our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines at risk."

The rosy picture was being painted, he told Fox News, because "the culture inside this administration is bad news doesn't sell well, and they wanted to tell the story that ISIS was the JV, that we had Al-Qaeda on the run."

"They would talk about ISIS being on the defensive, just before they took Mosul," he continued.

"These are the kind of things that get people killed ...We haven't seen this kind of manipulation of intelligence, tactical and military intelligence in an awfully long time. It's a direct result of the culture from the White House and an administration that didn't want to confront this, didn't want to tell the American people, did not want to tell Congress about what was really going on and the resources that were going to be required to fight this fight."

Sandy Fitzgerald contributed to this report.

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