Thread: Report: Obama Has Missed over Half His Second-Term Daily Intel Briefings

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.

Breitbart News Sept. 30, 2014

The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.


The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.


“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.


“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 Obama national security staffer told the Daily Mail on Monday. “He gets them in writing.”


The Obama security staffer said the president’s PDBs have contained detailed threat warnings about the Islamic State dating back to before the 2012 presidential election.


“Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president's daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election,” the Obama security staffer told the Daily Mail.


This is not the first time questions have been raised about Obama’s lack of engagement and interest in receiving in-person daily intelligence briefings. On September 10, 2012, the GAI released a similar report showing that Obama had attended less than half (43.8%) of his daily intelligence briefings up to that point. When Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen mentioned the GAI’s findings in his column, then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney dubbed the findings “hilarious.” The very next day, U.S. Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American staff members were murdered in Benghazi. As Breitbart News reported at the time, the White House’s very own presidential calendar revealed Obama had not received his daily intel briefing in the five consecutive days leading up to the Benghazi attacks.


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.


Now, with ISIS controlling over 35,000 square miles of territory in its widening caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and with Obama pointing fingers at his own Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for the rise of ISIS, the question remains whether a 42% attendance record on daily intelligence briefings is good enough for most Americans.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2...ntel-Briefings

This is a national outrage! Obama must go!

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Obama has absolutely no sense of the responsibility he took on as president. He just continues to disgrace the office of POTUS!!

What Was Just Disclosed About This Apalling Obama Habit Proves He’s A Danger To America

"Obama...has failed in his duty to protect America..."

Norvell Rose — September 30, 2014



The tire tracks from the bus Barack Obama drove over the U.S. intelligence community continue leading to trouble for a president seen as trying to save his own political skin.
When Obama told “60 Minutes” on Sunday that the rapid rise and spread of ISIS could be blamed on intelligence failure, that set off a firestorm of angry reaction. Intelligence officials adamantly defend their expertise and actions, arguing that the blame is not theirs, but the president’s for failure to act on their repeated warnings.
The Washington Times reports that the White House has been given detailed briefings on the activities of the Islamic State and their relentless spread of terror for well over a year.

U.S. policy leaders, including President Obama, were repeatedly warned for more than a year by the U.S. intelligence community that the Islamic State terror group was gaining significant strength in Syria and was on the verge of seizing territory deep inside Iraq, where the military was struggling to respond.
The private assessments, which were confirmed to The Washington Times on Monday, conflict with Mr. Obama’s claim on national television over the weekend that America’s spies had underestimated the rise and capabilities of the Islamic State and had overestimated the Iraqi military’s ability and will to fight the group.

And a new study offers a reason for Obama’s lack of awareness about the emergence of ISIS — he wasn’t paying attention…he was disinterested and detached. President Obama, says this damning report, has skipped over half his daily intelligence briefings.
Via breitbart.com:

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.
The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.

In a revealing analysis on americanthinker.com, Thomas Lifson argues that Obama’s apparent attempt to shift blame from his own inaction to the inadequacies of his intelligence experts will backfire and be a “disaster” for his presidency.

Obama has now handed his political opponents a big issue. He has failed in his duty to protect America.
Once the impression is created that Obama is irresponsible in his duty to protect us, it will be very hard indeed for him to escape a degree of scorn, particularly if the threat from ISIS and domestic terrorists (including lone wolves who may not be done with beheadings) continues to produce dramatic images.

http://www.westernjournalism.com/jus...anger-america/

Watch: Obama Just Blamed Others For One Of The Biggest Disasters Of His Presidency
Even interviewer Steve Kroft, perceived by many viewers to be sympathetic to Obama, bristled...
westernjournalism.com

Video at the page link:


http://www.westernjournalism.com/oba...-intelligence/

10:28 PM 09/30/2014
Joseph Miller
The Daily Caller

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning.



President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flack since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh Earnest doubled down with a whole new lie — both of which are easily, publicly proven false.

On Sunday, Obama said the intelligence community had underestimated the rise of ISIS, saying in an interview with CBS, “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

But we know that isn’t true, as nearly a dozen administration officials have testified to the threat posed by ISIS publicly over the last year.

The fact that the president chose to use the word “they” instead of “we” immediately drew condemnation from friend and foe alike, who saw it as the president’s attempt to pass the buck.

To mitigate the fallout, Earnest’s office issued a statement stating that, “…A lot of that [decision-making] was predicated on the will of the Iraqi security forces to fight for their country.”

But this was also not true.

In 2010, General Lloyd Austin, then-commander of United State Forces in Iraq, directly informed the president that over 20,000 U.S. troops would be required to maintain the gains made by U.S. forces against al-Qaida and its affiliates, and to mentor the fledgling Iraqi security forces– because he knew they were not ready to go out on their own.

But in order for Austin’s plan to work, the United States would have to negotiate and sign a security agreement with the government of Iraq to give the U.S. legal authority to keep U.S. military forces in that country beyond December 2010. The White House claims they were forced to withdraw because then-Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to grant U.S. force serving in Iraq post 2010 immunity from Iraqi prosecution– a prerequisite for the presence of U.S. forces anywhere else in the world. But the administration made no attempt to seriously negotiate an agreement with the Iraqis, and cited our withdrawal from Iraq as a major achievement during the 2012 elections, giving the American intelligence community the distinct feeling that the move was politically motivated.

Instead of investing any time in negotiating the agreement, the Obama administration used the Maliki regimes refusal to grant immunity as a political out for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by the end of 2010. That saw the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and the end of Operation New Dawn, the successor to Operation Iraqi Freedom. It also saw the rise of ISIS, and brings us to where we are today.

Today, Gen. Lloyd Austin is in command of U.S. Central Command– the U.S. combatant command in charge of fighting all wars in the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of North and East Africa. From that post, he once again recommended to the president that ground forces would be required in order to achieve the White House’s goals, this time against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Once again, the president overruled his commanding general and has chosen to use air strikes alone to “destroy” a terrorist army of 30,000.

The president clearly does not think the mission is worth the cost necessary to complete it; but by pursuing his ends without authorizing the necessary means, he is dooming that mission to failure.

The United States military and intelligence community have learned a lot over the past decade of conflict. Our commander in chief, unfortunately, has not. Since the start of his administration, President Barack Obama has ignored his generals and the intelligence community. Over the past few weeks, he has half-heartedly pursued a strategy the destines us to fail in our mission, and over the past three days, he and his White house have lied to prove otherwise. To those who wear our nation’s uniform, or serve in her intelligence community, that’s insult — and injury.

http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/30/pe...nd-about-isis/

Mark Levin

What did Obama know and when did he know it?

Mark Levin Calls For ISIS Investigation: "What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?"
MARK LEVIN: People in the know are sick and tired of this. So before the election, he knew, but he...
realclearpolitics.com

Mark Levin Calls For ISIS Investigation: "What Did Obama Know And When Did He Know It?"

Video at the page link:

MARK LEVIN: People in the know are sick and tired of this. So before the election, he knew, but he wouldn't say, because he wanted you to believe, and he wanted his drones to believe, that everything was under control, that al-Qaeda was dead, GM was alive, we're not going to worry you with facts. Quote: "Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president's daily briefings, and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval office since before the 2012 election," said a national security staffer in the Obama administration who is familiar with the content of the intelligence briefings.

We now need, in my humble opinion, we had a 9/11 commission, we need now an ISIS commission. Call it whatever you want, a caliphate commission, that can look at what was in Obama's briefing books, because now World War Three has begun, like it or not, it has begun, because this man wouldn't read his briefings books, and he wouldn't act, early on.

It is outrageous that this man hasn't gone to Congress for a declaration of war, and it is outrageous that John Boehner all weekend long on television saying somebody may have to send troops. That the United States Speaker of the House of Representatives, a Republican doesn't demand that the president ask Congress for a declaration of war. It is absolute abomination. It is not just Obama who's shredding the Constitution let us be clear here, it is also John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, who refuse to insist on a declaration of war when a declaration of war is absolutely compelled.

Related Videos:

Obama: "Absolutely True" We Underestimated ISIS
Brit Hume on Obama Misjudging ISIS Threat: Our "Chickens Coming Home To Roost"
Karl vs. Earnest: How Can Obama Say Underestimating ISIS Was An Intelligence Failure When He Was Warned?


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/vid...e_know_it.html

Was he at the golf course, the basketball court, on vacation or at Democratic fundraiser?

http://www.alipac.us/f19/rush-limbau...itself-311807/