President Barack Obama has
attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings
(Breitbart) – 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.
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 follow-up,
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.
Source: http://www.teaparty.org/report-obama-missed-half-second-term-daily-intel-briefings-58203/
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/09/29/Report-Obama-Has-Missed-Over-Half-His-Second-Term-Daily-Intel-Briefings
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