Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The Seven Biggest Intelligence Failures Under Team Obama

In several crises around the world in recent years, the Obama administration has been one step behind.
In some cases, U.S. officials failed to act on intelligence that warned of dire threats to U.S. security and interests. Other times that intelligence was simply wrong.
Critics say the multiple intelligence failures have caught the administration flat-footed and forced it to react to crises rather than proactively working to prevent them.
Here are the seven biggest intelligence failures during the Obama administration:
Rise of Islamic militants in Iraq
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that U.S. spy agencies “often have underestimated” the operational abilities of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS).
U.S. officials were reportedly caught off guard last week when ISIL defeated Kurdish Peshmerga forces and began to threaten minority Yazidis, prompting President Barack Obama to order airstrikes and airdrops of food and water.
The Journal noted that “a decline in U.S. spy resources after the U.S. military pulled out of Iraq in 2011 has limited American intelligence capability in the region.”
“There is no doubt that [ISIL’s] advance, their movement over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates, and I think the expectations of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq,” Obama said on Saturday.
Russian invasion of Crimea
On Feb. 27, the U.S. intelligence community determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin would likely not send his forces into Ukraine. The Russian military invaded the Crimean peninsula the very next day, the Daily Beast reported at the time, seizing two airports and flying multiple planes and helicopters into Ukraine.
“He’s like a kid with a can of gasoline and a book of matches, and he laughs as Obama tries to deliver lectures on how fire is dangerous,” a former U.S. intelligence officer said of Putin. “Indeed, Putin throws banana peels on the ground, and Obama manages to slip on every one of them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Find out the other 5 Blunders and Read the rest of the story HERE.

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