obama skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings

8/11/2019 Obama skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings

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Obama skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings

Published time: September 30, 2014 17:20

Edited time: October 01, 2014 08:12

U.S. President Barack Obama (Reuters /

Kevin Lamarque)

US President Barack Obama has attended

only 42 percent of his day-to-day

intelligence briefings considering the fact

that assuming workplace more than five and a half years ago, according to a new study.

The Government Accountability Institute, a watchdog non-profit organization, calculated the

quantity of occasions Obama has received everyday oral intelligence briefings, or the Presidential

Day-to-day Short (PDB). The group found that as of Sept. 29, the President had attended 42.4 % of

PDBs for the duration of his first term and 41.three % for the duration of his second term.

The report came days soon after Obama told 60 Minutes that Director of National Intelligence James

Clapper has "underestimated" the strength of Islamic State, the militant group at the moment the

target of US-led airstrikes on its holdings in Syria and Iraq.

"I feel our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think theyunderestimated what had been taking spot in Syria," Obama stated.


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The statement infuriated some in the intelligence and defense communities. 1 anonymous former

senior Pentagon official told the Daily Beast that Obama is certainly acquiring useful informationabout Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from intelligence reports.

"Either the president doesn't study the intelligence he's obtaining or he's bullshitting," stated the

former official who is familiar with jihadist actions in Syria and Iraq.

Immediately after a earlier tally of PDB attendance in 2012, the White Property stated that Obama

constantly receives a copy of such intelligence reports on his secure iPad, and that the White

Residence public schedule is, at times, inconsistent with how and when the President's each day

meetings and events are announced or termed.

"It really is pretty nicely-recognized that the president hasn't taken in-particular person intelligence

briefings with any regularity given that the early days of 2009," an Obama national security staffer

told the Daily Mail on Monday. "He gets them in writing."

The staffer added that Obama has been warned of Islamic State for years.

"Unless a person incredibly senior has been shredding the president's everyday briefings and telling

him that the dog ate them, hugely precise predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval

Office given that prior to the 2012 election," the security staffer mentioned.


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The Washington Post analyzed how past presidents had handled the PDB when the preceding Obama

attendance record was reported in 2012. Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National SecurityArchive at George Washington University, mentioned there has been "lots of variation in the briefing

patterns" among presidents, with varying degrees of engagement no matter if the president received

oral briefings or preferred written reports.

For instance, George W. Bush "wanted private and oral, and that matched CIA's institutional interest

in face to face with the president, significantly better for their bureaucratic politics, but unclear how

good it was for presidential decision creating," Blanton mentioned. "On Iraq WMD [weapons of mass

destruction], the direct brief was clearly pernicious reading may well have pointed to the dissents,

but the briefers did not."


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Meanwhile, according to an account of CIA history written by John L. Helgerson, Ronald Reagan

seldom received the PDB from an intelligence official.

"Considering back over the eight years of the two Reagan administrations, the Agency's briefingofficer remembered only one particular or two occasions when the National Safety Adviser took him

into the Oval Office to brief the President directly."

In contrast, former CIA director George H.W. Bush, Reagan's vice president and eventual successor

in the Oval Workplace, pored over intelligence reports and received the oral briefing. Overall,

Helgerson wrote that he had a remarkable partnership celeb newswith the intelligence

neighborhood.

The prior attendance report came just one day before US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens,

amongst other folks, was killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi by Islamic militants,

igniting further criticism of how Obama processes national intelligence reports.

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obama skipped most of his daily intelligence briefings

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