"Arrow? What arrow? Bus? What bus?"
White House Intelligence chief James Clapper has been pilloried on this page for a long time (James Clapper's Lock of the Week). He is a bumbler who always seems to be the last to know when something happens, such as the roundup of terror suspects in the UK a couple of years back and his absurd denial of NSA spying on Americans.
So he is a convenient scapegoat given the rise of ISIS, which the US was clearly unprepared for. Now comes President Obama telling 60 minutes that it was Clapper's fault that we were unprepared.
Not so fast. It appears the intelligence folks were briefing Obama on ISIS for well over a year.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/29/obama-faces-backlash-after-blaming-intel-community-for-missing-isis/
"Our head of the intelligence community Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria," the president said.
This appears to be another sterling example of a president who refuses to take personal responsibility for anything. He always looks for someone else to blame. Even if Clapper and his underlings had not warned Obama about ISIS (and Khorasan), he was Obama's choice to be intelligence chief.
If Obama is telling the truth, he should fire Clapper for incompetence. On the other hand, if Fox's sources are telling the truth, Clapper should resign in protest and go public to save his own reputation. If it is true that Obama had been warned and briefed on these two organizations for over a year but repeatedly refused options to counter them (until now), it is a failure of major magnitude. Somebody was negligent here.
Once again.
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