Thursday, September
13, 2012
The little reported story of Obama's troubling absence of daily intel briefings blew up when he missed the critical 912 briefing fresh on the heels of the slaughter of US diplomats in Libya.
Obama skipped the intel
briefing the day after Ambassador Stevens and US aides were killed, continuing
his reckless pattern of missing daily intel briefings. Outrage should be
directed towards the enemedia, which has embargoed this front page story.
Instead, like the intellectual terrorists that they are, they have created a
diversion by attacking Governor Romney for his well-informed criticism of the
adminstration's apology to these jihadists.
Marc Theissen's piece
should not be on the oped page -- this is the September surprise. America, the
enemedia is at war with you. Fight back. Get the news out yourselves.
Obama alone: This president does not need intel briefers By Marc A. Thiessen,
September 13, 9:45 AM
How long had it been
since President Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting in the lead-up to
the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic
facilities in Egypt and Libya? After all, our adversaries are
known to use the anniversary of 9/11 to target the United States.
According to the public schedule of
the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting
was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and
terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to
hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the
attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at
the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the
intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently
chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas
fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.
When I asked National Security Council
spokesman Tommy Vietor if the president had attended any meetings to discuss
the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) since Sept. 5, he repeatedly refused to
answer. He noted that Obama had attended a principals meeting of the National Security Council
on Sept. 10 and reiterated that he reads the PDB. “As I’ve
told you every time you ask, the President gets his PDB every day,” Vietor told
me by e-mail, adding this swipe at Obama’s predecessor, George W.
Bush: “Unlike your former boss, he has it delivered to his residence in the
morning and not briefed to him.” (This new line of defense was echoed this
morning by my Post colleague, Dana Milbank, who writes that Bush was briefed
every day by his intelligence advisers because he “decided
he would prefer to read less.”)
Vietor’s reply is quite
revealing. It is apparently a point of pride in the White House that Obama’s
PDB is “not briefed to him.” In the eyes of this administration, it is a virtue
that the president does not meet every day with senior intelligence
officials. This president, you see, does not need briefers. He
can forgo his daily intelligence meeting because he is, in Vietor’s words,
“among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.”
Truly sophisticated
consumers of intelligence don’t see it as a sign of weakness to “be briefed” by
the experts. Most of us, if we subscribed to a daily report on, say,
astrophysics, would probably need some help interpreting it. But when it comes
to intelligence, Obama is apparently so brilliant he can absorb the most
complicated topics by himself in his study. He does not need to sit down for up
to an hour a day with top intelligence officials, or hold more than 100 “deep
dives” in which he invites CIA analysts into the Oval Office and
gives them direct access to the commander in chief to discuss their areas of
expertise. Such meetings are crutches this president does not need. Written
briefings, questions and comments are enough. Obama has more important things
to do — such as attend Las Vegas fundraisers.
No doubt the
intelligence community has adapted to its diminished access to the commander in
chief and is finding a way to get the president the intelligence he needs.
Members of the community have endured a lot these past 3 1/2 years —
accusations of torture from the Oval Office; more than 100 criminal investigations
from the Obama Justice Department that resulted in zero — zero — criminal
charges being filed; a president who is quick to claim credit for killing
Osama bin Laden while denying credit to the CIA interrogators who made the
mission possible. They’ll survive not being invited more frequently into the
Oval Office.
But the hubris of a
president who believes he does not need to meet regularly with them is
astounding. When President John
F. Kennedy gathered every living American Nobel
laureate for dinner at the White House in 1962, he declared it “the most
extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been
gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when
Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Apparently, in this administration’s view,
Kennedy had it wrong — the most extraordinary collection of talent and
knowledge ever gathered in the White House is when Barack Obama reads his daily
intelligence brief alone.
Marc A. Thiessen, a
fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, writes a weekly online column
for The Post.
Read more from Opinions
Posted by Pamela Geller on
Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 12:35 PM
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/09/obama-skips-intel-briefing-after-91112-attacks-and-murder-of-us-diplomats-goes-to-vegas-fundraising-.html
No comments:
Post a Comment