Obama's Former Top Defense Official: Obama Ignored Warnings About Rise of ISIS Because They Didn't Fit His Re-Election "Narrative"

He lied us into war.

"I think that they [the intel reports Obama ignored] did not meet a narrative the White House needed. And I'll be very candid with you, they just didn't," retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead."

Flynn, who has been critical of both Obama and former President George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq War and involvement in the Middle East, said that Obama was served poorly by a small circle of advisers who were worried about his re-election prospects at the time.

The story they needed to tell, he said, was that pulling troops from Iraq would not leave the region vulnerable to rise of a radical Islamic group like ISIS.

"I think the narrative was that al Qaeda was on the run, and (Osama) bin Laden was dead ... they're dead and these guys are, we've beaten them," Flynn said, but the problem was that despite how many terrorist leaders they killed they "continue to just multiply."

Steven Hayes wrote about the buried intelligence on Al Qaeda yesterday.

Yes, Al Qaeda too. Obama was covering up the rise of ISIS and the growth of Al Qaeda at the same time.

Readers of this magazine are familiar with the story of the documents obtained in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The Sensitive Site Exploitation team on the raid collected more than a million documents--​papers, computer hard drives, audio and video recordings.

Top Obama administration officials at first touted the cache as the greatest collection of terrorist materials ever captured in a single raid and boasted that the contents would fill a "small college library." An interagency intelligence team, led by the CIA, conducted the initial triage​--​including keyword searches of the collection for actionable intelligence. And then, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials with firsthand knowledge of the controversy, the documents sat largely untouched for as long as a year.

The CIA retained "executive authority" over the documents, and when analysts from other agencies requested access to them, the CIA denied it​--​repeatedly.

After a dispute, some analysts were allowed to see this treasure trove of intelligence that Obama was, for some reason, hiding from the intelligence community.

Much of what these analysts were seeing--directly from Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders--contradicted what the president and top administration officials were saying publicly. While drone strikes had killed some senior al Qaeda leaders, the organization had anticipated the U.S. decapitation strategy and was flourishing in spite of it; bin Laden remained intimately involved in al Qaeda decision-making and operational planning; the relationship between al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban remained strong despite the Obama administration's attempts to weaken it by negotiating with Taliban leaders; al Qaeda's relationship with Iran, while uneven and fraught with mutual distrust, was far deeper and more significant than U.S. intelligence assessments had suggested.

Ah yes -- that. Of course.

The analysts were forbidden from including any of this information in their finished intelligence reports.

In addition, four sources tell the Weekly Standard that a team hand-picked by Obama released some cherry-picked documents just before the 2012 election -- documents which suggested Al Qaeda was weaker, when the bulk of the documents suggested otherwise.

But Ben Carson said he thought he remembered seeing Muslims cheering, and then said he didn't, so let's talk more about that.

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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