Comment #2

MADDOG10 — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 19:44:04 GMT

Comment #1

lejardin — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 16:56:12 GMT

<br />To me it was blantant, Obama again blamed Clapper, he just will not take responsibility. Obama has the ultimate decision. As for Clapper..... This is the second major screwup why is he still holding his inteligence position

Original Blog Entry: More Obama BS...

emilyg — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 16:23:16 GMT

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09.28.14

Why Obama Can't Say His Spies Underestimated ISIS

On 60 Minutes, the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There's one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama's senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria, he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama's interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. Either the president doesn't read the intelligence he's getting or he's bull snip ting, the former official said.

... [ More ]