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FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR
President Obama Skipped His Intel Brief the Day After the U.S. Ambassador to Libya was Murdered by Terrorists
Marc Thiessen provides a shocker in his Washington Post column: the day after America’s embassy in Cairo was assaulted and the consulate in Benghazi, Libya fell victim to an armed attack that killed four, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, the president once again skipped his intelligence briefing, choosing instead to fly off to Las Vegas to fundraise while the world continued to burn.
This after being inexcusably unprepared for, and unaware of the threat of, violent protests and, in the case of Libya, a terrorist attack against the official representatives of the United States of America in two North African nations. Since those attacks, protests have taken place in Yemen, Tunisia, and Kuwait, with State Department warnings having been issued for several more countries.
Also since those attacks, President Obama has criticized Mitt Romney for “shooting first and aiming later” by speaking about international situation – a statement that is doubly galling considering the fact that Obama himself, rather than learn about facts and threats, blew off his own intel briefing to go fundraise in Las Vegas.
Thiessen writes:
According to the public schedule of the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.
Emphasis added.
Thiessen’s take on this is excellent, and it is worth quoting more here (and even more worthwhile reading the whole column yourself). He continues:
When I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if the president had attended any meetings to discuss the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) since Sept. 5, he repeatedly refused to answer. He noted that Obama had attended a principals meeting of the National Security Council on Sept. 10 and reiterated that he reads the PDB. “As I’ve told you every time you ask, the President gets his PDB every day,” Vietor told me by e-mail, adding this swipe at Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush: “Unlike your former boss, he has it delivered to his residence in the morning and not briefed to him.” (This new line of defense was echoed this morning by my Post colleague, Dana Milbank, who writes that Bush was briefed every day by his intelligence advisers because he “decided he would prefer to read less.”)
Vietor’s reply is quite revealing. It is apparently a point of pride in the White House that Obama’s PDB is “not briefed to him.” In the eyes of this administration, it is a virtue that the president does not meet every day with senior intelligence officials. This president, you see, does not need briefers. He can forgo his daily intelligence meeting because he is, in Vietor’s words, “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.”
Truly sophisticated consumers of intelligence don’t see it as a sign of weakness to “be briefed” by the experts. Most of us, if we subscribed to a daily report on, say, astrophysics, would probably need some help interpreting it. But when it comes to intelligence, Obama is apparently so brilliant he can absorb the most complicated topics by himself in his study. He does not need to sit down for up to an hour a day with top intelligence officials, or hold more than 100 “deep dives” in which he invites CIA analysts into the Oval Office and gives them direct access to the commander in chief to discuss their areas of expertise. Such meetings are crutches this president does not need. Written briefings, questions and comments are enough. Obama has more important things to do — such as attend Las Vegas fundraisers.
He concludes with an apt jab at the president’s absurdly high opinion of his own intelligence and knowledgeability:
When President John F. Kennedy gathered every living American Nobel laureate for dinner at the White House in 1962, he declared it “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Apparently, in this administration’s view, Kennedy had it wrong — the most extraordinary collection of talent and knowledge ever gathered in the White House is when Barack Obama reads his daily intelligence brief alone.
The current president’s actions and failure to plan in any way at all resulted in a Libya and an Egypt in which radical elements are far more free to act, and in which foreign diplomats and property lack even a modicum of reasonably expected security.
The world is burning – and while it does, the President of the United States can’t even be bothered to Fiddle. Instead, he’s too busy fundraising.
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