It’s Because Obama Didn’t Attend Intel Briefings, Right?

The U.S. was taken by surprise when al Qaeda in Iraq, breaking from the founding group based in the tribal areas of Pakistan, metamorphosed into ISIS, which adopted the entirely different strategy of reforming itself into an army bent on taking and holding territory. Terrorist attacks — from suicide bombers in city markets to the suicide attacks of 9/11 — had always been Al Qaeda's modus operandi.

The surprise should have ended in January when ISIS gained control of Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq, towns that had been cleared of insurgents by U.S. troops in assaults in 2004 and 2006 at great cost of lives. But as had often been the case, President Obama and his administration were sleepwalking. As with the Veterans Administration scandal, the flood of Central American youths at the border mounting year-to-year, his total unawareness of how unprepared for launch was his healthcare exchange — all were apparent, but the President's attentions seemed elsewhere.

That is the needed prologue before bringing up our second media distortion story.

Casting about for ways to blame the President, the media has resurrected an attack theme devised by Republicans led by Dick Cheney and others and deployed in the 2012 election campaign. They and Karl Rove's American Crossroads group used an analysis by a conservative watchdog, Government Accountability Institute, that said Obama had "skipped" all but 42% of the in-person intelligence briefings in his first term days in office.

In the wake of the ISIS advances, the institute updated its analysis and when the two years of Obama's second term were added they, interestingly, came up with the same percentage, now refined to 41.26%. No wonder Obama was caught napping. So that's why ISIS has made such extravagant gains.

Only problem is that, according to the White House, there are no briefings to skip. Then and now, the 42% is a bogus number that leaves out inconvenient facts to support today's corrupt "journalism". The "PDB" — Presidential Daily Brief — the term that the media is tossing about — is a document, not a meeting, the most famous of them delivered to George W Bush at his ranch on August 6, 2001.

Obama, and presidents before him, gets that brief daily, originally on paper and now electronically for reading on a laptop or tablet. The White House has said that the process is then to send questions or requests for additional material to the intelligence units. If any in-person report follows, that doesn't count as a scheduled meeting that is, on other days, "skipped".

That's the same process that President Clinton followed. That's how President Reagan did it. (A CIA history says he almost never received oral briefings from CIA personnel.) That's the way President Nixon did it. An oral briefing every day when not much may have changed would be an inefficient ritual. And a briefing from whom? There are sixteen intelligence units across the government. The written PDB is a mechanism for pooling their data.

George W Bush was the exception; he preferred not to have to read.

It is regrettable that today's media has become all too eager to feed the public's craving for the sensational and is so willing to distort and propagate lies to gain an audience. Once an honorable calling that prided itself on objectivity, the media has slid first into bias and now to peddling outright propaganda.