Obama skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings

Published time: September 30, 2014 17:20

Edited time: October 01, 2014 08:12
U.S. President Barack Obama (Reuters /
Kevin Lamarque)
US President Barack Obama has attended
only 42 percent of his day-to-day
intelligence briefings considering the fact
that assuming workplace more than five and a half years ago, according to a new study.
The Government Accountability Institute, a watchdog non-profit organization, calculated the
quantity of occasions Obama has received everyday oral intelligence briefings, or the Presidential
Day-to-day Short (PDB). The group found that as of Sept. 29, the President had attended 42.4 % of
PDBs for the duration of his first term and 41.three % for the duration of his second term.
The report came days soon after Obama told 60 Minutes that Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper has "underestimated" the strength of Islamic State, the militant group at the moment the
target of US-led airstrikes on its holdings in Syria and Iraq.
"I feel our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they
underestimated what had been taking spot in Syria," Obama stated.
The statement infuriated some in the intelligence and defense communities. 1 anonymous former
senior Pentagon official told the Daily Beast that Obama is certainly acquiring useful information
about Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from intelligence reports.
"Either the president doesn't study the intelligence he's obtaining or he's bullshitting," stated the
former official who is familiar with jihadist actions in Syria and Iraq.
Immediately after a earlier tally of PDB attendance in 2012, the White Property stated that Obama
constantly receives a copy of such intelligence reports on his secure iPad, and that the White
Residence public schedule is, at times, inconsistent with how and when the President's each day
meetings and events are announced or termed.
"It really is pretty nicely-recognized that the president hasn't taken in-particular person intelligence
briefings with any regularity given that the early days of 2009," an Obama national security staffer
told the Daily Mail on Monday. "He gets them in writing."
The staffer added that Obama has been warned of Islamic State for years.
"Unless a person incredibly senior has been shredding the president's everyday briefings and telling
him that the dog ate them, hugely precise predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval
Office given that prior to the 2012 election," the security staffer mentioned.
The Washington Post analyzed how past presidents had handled the PDB when the preceding Obama
attendance record was reported in 2012. Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security
Archive at George Washington University, mentioned there has been "lots of variation in the briefing
patterns" among presidents, with varying degrees of engagement no matter if the president received
oral briefings or preferred written reports.
For instance, George W. Bush "wanted private and oral, and that matched CIA's institutional interest
in face to face with the president, significantly better for their bureaucratic politics, but unclear how
good it was for presidential decision creating," Blanton mentioned. "On Iraq WMD [weapons of mass
destruction], the direct brief was clearly pernicious reading may well have pointed to the dissents,
but the briefers did not."
Meanwhile, according to an account of CIA history written by John L. Helgerson, Ronald Reagan
seldom received the PDB from an intelligence official.
"Considering back over the eight years of the two Reagan administrations, the Agency's briefing
officer remembered only one particular or two occasions when the National Safety Adviser took him
into the Oval Office to brief the President directly."
In contrast, former CIA director George H.W. Bush, Reagan's vice president and eventual successor
in the Oval Workplace, pored over intelligence reports and received the oral briefing. Overall,
Helgerson wrote that he had a remarkable partnership celeb news with the intelligence
neighborhood.
The prior attendance report came just one day before US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens,
amongst other folks, was killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi by Islamic militants,
igniting further criticism of how Obama processes national intelligence reports.
http://rt.com/usa/191944-obama-absent-intelligence-briefings/
http://www.fashionindustrynetwork.com/
http://www.eonline.com/news/fashion