WASHINGTON - President Obama has acknowledged that the NSA and The CIA had underestimated the rise of the Islamic State militant group, ISIS, which has seized control of a broad swath of territory in the Middle East. He said he "follows their advice."
But why any President would trust the assessments of U.S. "intelligence" agencies calls his own intelligence into question. After all, most recently, they did not predict the Arab Spring and totally missed North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's death.
And, going back into history, intelligence failures allowed the attack on Perl Harbor, which started W.W.II. Too, the CIA talked President Kennedy into its disastrous plan to overthrow Fidel Castro, which failed.
And on an on: The debacle that allowed for the TET offensive during Vietnam, the CIA's failure to see the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rise to power in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, most amazingly not foreseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, and tragically, the supposedly brainy spooks' missing the 9/11 attacks
Most recently, the U.S. has been lured into a trap set by Osama bin Laden and ISIS. Bin Laden said that the U.S. government would strangle the civil liberties of Americans if he could launch as successful attack on some U.S. targets. So, with the creation of NSA data collection, the DOJ attacks the press and the passage of the fascist "patriot act" bin Laden's prediction has come true.
As for ISIS, The Middle East is an impossible cauldron of hatreds, and killing civilians by bombing ISIS will only add to their recruitment of disaffected youth and increase hatred of the U.S. But the "intelligence community" doesn't get that.
"It's easy to say that that the CIA and NSA are bumbling bureaucracies and to talk about 'institutional failure,' but that just passes the buck. It's up to the people in these agencies to fix their institutions. But that won't happen because these imbicles can't solve problems. That Obama doesn't fire these losers just shows that he's clueless and lacks intellectual firepower" said H. Rap Brown of the Heritage Foundation.
