'Something's wrong': The ISIS intelligence scandal just hit Obama's inner circle

The scandal surrounding US intelligence reports on ISIS just hit President Barack Obama's inner circle. --James Clapper, America's top spy, is reportedly in "frequent and unusual contact" with the military officer who is suspected of allowing US reports on ISIS to be altered to fit the administration's official line, Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian reports. --"In communications, Clapper, who is far more senior than Grove, is said to tell Grove how the war looks from his vantage point, and question Grove about Central Command’s assessments," Ackerman writes.

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Exclusive: 50 Spies Say ISIS Intelligence Was Cooked

It’s being called a ‘revolt’ by intelligence pros who are paid to give their honest assessment of the ISIS war—but are instead seeing their reports turned into happy talk. --More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military's Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

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Hoekstra: Blair Victim of Obama's Politicization

NEWSMAX, 5/20/2010 - U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, after being notified of director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s resignation, called the public servant a victim of President Obama's ongoing politicization of national security. Hoekstra said,

[...] "Congressional Republicans we will be watching closely who the president plans to name as a successor. Right now, the Obama administration’s national security apparatus is broken, dysfunctional and in disarray. Dennis Blair was the one person you could count on for rationality among Holder, Napolitano and Brennan—and he’s the one the president let go." Read more about Dennis Blair at Newsmax...

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Hoekstra: Blair Victim of Obama's Politicization

NEWSMAX, 5/20/2010 - U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, after being notified of director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s resignation, called the public servant a victim of President Obama's ongoing politicization of national security. Hoekstra said,

[...] "Congressional Republicans we will be watching closely who the president plans to name as a successor. Right now, the Obama administration’s national security apparatus is broken, dysfunctional and in disarray. Dennis Blair was the one person you could count on for rationality among Holder, Napolitano and Brennan—and he’s the one the president let go." Read more about Dennis Blair at Newsmax...

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Obama's Undeniable Intelligence Should Be a Dangerous Vulnerability

TOWNHALL.COM, 2/10/2010 by Michael Medved - "In warfare and in political warfare, underestimating your opponent amounts to a terrible, often fatal mistake. That's why conservatives who deny or ignore the president's obvious intelligence imperil their own cause and prevent the emergence of an effective anti-Obama strategy. For Barack Obama, his brain power makes him dangerous but also creates a special vulnerability that his critics should exploit." Read more at Townhall.com...

Interesting, especially the last four paragraphs. --bc Read More......

‘Duh!’ The nation’s top intelligence official speaks

WEEKLY STANDARD, Feb. 1, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 19 by Stephen F. Hayes - In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. Read more at the Weekly Standard... Read More......

The Art of Intelligence

Strategy Page by Austin Bay

[...] Last month, the CIA inspector general’s office released its assessment of the CIA’s pre-9/11 efforts. The report was damning. The CIA had sources, leads and facts, but it lacked imagination — the dynamic imagination to foresee al-Qaida’s planned attack.

The CIA is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are hell on artists, which is OK if you’re pushing pencils but not OK if you are puzzling through an intricate design. The 9/11 plot was an intricate design.

Intelligence is an art — a grand, interpretive collusion of linguistics, geography, mathematics, history, theology, psychology, physics, metaphysics and every other human means of analysis and explanation. Former CIA Director James Schlesinger nailed it in October 2003 when he said: “But major organizational change (of U.S. intelligence agencies) is not the salvation. I would submit the real challenge lies in recruiting, fostering, training and motivating people with insight.”

Insight. If that sounds artsy, well, it is. Continued...

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