Where Was the Media Outrage When Obama Ignored Intelligence Briefings on ISIS?

In an interview with Chris Wallace and “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump indicated that he does not like to receive intelligence briefings every day, because the information can become repetitive.

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years. Could be eight years — but eight years. I don’t need that,” Trump said. “But I do say, ‘If something should change, let us know.’”

Naturally, the media and liberal opponents are apoplectic. Outgoing Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. (F, 2%) told CNN Monday that Trump’s stance on briefings was “very concerning.” And Wired.com’s Andy Greenberg stated it is “the most troubling recent revelation of all.” Wrote Greenberg:

That dismissal and disregard of the intelligence agencies’ fact-finding represents a disturbing potential preview of the next four years, say former members of the US intelligence community who spoke with WIRED. They worry that it threatens to politicize the intelligence community’s work, pushing it toward conclusions that will please the president rather than inform him. They say the growing rift demoralizes staffers, leading to a loss of valuable talent, and that it could leave the commander-in-chief himself dangerously ignorant of crucial world events.

Now, the president-elect of the United States disregarding the value of intelligence briefings is absolutely a cause for concern. But where were the media and Harry Reid when it comes to President Obama and the briefings?

Back in 2014, the Government Accountability Institute released a report indicating that Obama only attended a little over just 40 percent of his daily intelligence briefings up to that point in his presidency:

In September 2014, the Government Accountability Institute updated an analysis of how much time President Barack Obama has spent attending his Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs), as recorded on the White House official calendar and Politico’s comprehensive calendar. The updated study covered the president’s first 2,079 days in office, running from January 20, 2009 through September 29, 2014. Of those, President Obama attended a total of 875 Presidential Daily Briefs for an overall 42.09% attendance rate.

An unidentified senior Pentagon aide also confirmed to the Daily Mail that the president skipped his intel briefings.

“It’s pretty well-known that the president hasn’t taken in-person intelligence briefings with any regularity since the early days of 2009,” an unidentified senior Pentagon aide also stated to the Daily Mail in 2014. “He gets them in writing.”

Worse, still, is those sources in the Daily Mail report confirmed that the president knew about ISIS since before the 2012 election and ignored his intelligence reports to fulfill his campaign promise to remove American boots on the ground in Iraq. The withdrawal of American troops was accomplished in December 2011, and ISIS subsequently grew in strength to become a major threat throughout the Mideast.

The president, he said, was hearing information about ISIS ‘long before that. It goes back to the autumn of 2012.’

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, he said, had already begun to metamorphose into ISIS before Obama ran for president the first time. In 2006 the group’s Mujahideen Shura Council declared an Islamic ‘state’ in western and central Iraq, a development U.S. military intelligence was aware of since they were stationed ‘in country.’

By the late autumn of that year the nascent self-proclaimed Sunni country was organized and holding open-air military parades.

President Obama ordered America’s military to pack up and return home at the end of 2011. By that time, the would-be nation ISIS’s goals had exploded to encompass controlling land in Syria. And its tactical toolbox had grown to include the kind of genocidal preferences that ISIS has showed in 2013 and 2014.

In 2014, President Obama claimed that that U.S. intelligence had been caught off guard by the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said during a “60 Minutes” interview.

Another former Pentagon official with experience combatting the Islamic militants told The Daily Beast, “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullsh—ing.”

So, while the media would like to excoriate Trump for his seemingly hands-off approach to national security thus far during the transition, their words hold little credibility in light of Pres. Obama’s similar intelligence-briefings stance in the past.

Trump has yet to take office, but President Obama’s disregard for intelligence reports and his commitment to ending the war in Iraq solely out of rigid ideological reasons may well have permitted ISIS to become the global threat it quickly became.

Donald Trump would do well to learn from Obama’s mistakes. (For more from the author of “Where Was the Media Outrage When Obama Ignored Intelligence Briefings on ISIS?” please click HERE)

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