Important Or Not?

President Obama has recently cited intelligence failures as the reason America was taken by surprise by the rise of ISIS. The intelligence community has not been happy with this statement.

The U.K. Daily Mail reported yesterday that President Obama has had accurate information about the rise of ISIS since before the 2012 election. The problem is that since ISIS is nothing more than a reconstitution of Al Qaeda, an organization which the Obama Presidential campaign claimed had been destroyed during the first presidential term of President Obama. Therefore the threat was ignored publicly. It was evidently also ignored privately.

Breitbart.com reported yesterday that according to the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), President Obama has attended only 42.1 % of his daily intelligence briefings (through September 29, 2014). This information came out after President Obama blamed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for intelligence failures related to ISIS.

The article at Breitbart reports:

“I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” said Obama.

According to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake, members of the Defense establishment were “flabbergasted” by Obama’s attempt to shift blame.

“Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” a former senior Pentagon official “who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq” told the Daily Beast.

On Monday, others in the intelligence community similarly blasted Obama and said he’s shown longstanding disinterest in receiving live, in-person PDBs that allow the Commander-in-Chief the chance for critical followup, feedback, questions, and the challenging of flawed intelligence assumptions.

…Ultimately, as ABC News reported, the White House did not directly dispute the GAI’s numbers but instead said Obama prefers to read his PDB on his iPad instead of receiving the all-important live, in-person briefings.

As Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” I think we need a commitment from our President to attend intelligence briefings. Reading something on your iPad is no substitute for hearing an intelligent discussion of a subject.