thebigp

THE LONG WAR CONTINUES--WH**EVER PRESIDENT OBAMA MAY SAY--17H.,B37
They were meant to be reassuring, but rang hollow Nobody expected that the United States under Barack Obama would actually "do wh**ever it takes" to win a war the president has long neglected. Even his mouthing of the promise seemed perfunctory—a man saying what the president is supposed to say in such a moment, rather than a leader announcing a new American resolve in the long war against jihadism.
Speaking to reporters at the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey, Obama said that, while the Paris attacks might have been a "setback" for his ISIS strategy, they would not change it. When reporters expressed surprise at his continued embrace of an approach that was failing, he lashed out at them for daring to question him. At a time when an American president might have been expected to show some righteous anger at the attackers and those who enabled them, Obama instead directed his fury towards critics at home who worry about jihadist violence against the homeland. It was a shameful spectacle, and a revealing one.
Barack Obama remains committed to a failed strategy against an enemy he has long underestimated in a war he has no plans to win. Nothing has changed. And this time, what's past truly is prologue. I n an interview with ABC News the day before Islamic state ISIS terrorist k**led 130 people in multiple, coordinated attacks in Paris, Obama told George Stephanopoulos that the terror group had been "contained." Stephanopoulos had asked Obama a straightforward question: "ISIS is gaining strength, aren't they?" "Well, no, I don't think they're gaining strength," Obama responded. "What is true is that from the start our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq. And in Syria they'll come in, they'll leave. But you don't see this systematic march by (ISIS) across the terrain. What we have not yet been able to do is to completely decapitate their command and control structures. We've made some progress in trying to reduce the flow of foreign fighters."
ISIS had suffered some military defeats in Iraq and Syria. But there is no indication that ISIS is immediately at risk of losing most of the territory it claimed in 2014. And ISIS's international network has grown to span multiple continents, with jihadists loyal to the "caliph**e" executing terrorist attacks on a daily basis far outside of the group's strongholds in Iraq and Syria. Just two weeks before Obama sat down with ABC News, an ISIS "province" in the Sinai blew up a Russian airliner, k*****g all 224 people on board. It was one of the most devastating terrorist attacks since 9/11. In no meaningful sense, therefore, is ISIS "contained."
ISIS's expansion around the globe, its deep roster of foreign fighters, and its brutally effective war machine make it a far greater threat today than its precursors were when Obama took office "I read the intelligence faithfully. ISIS is not contained. ISIS is expanding. Obama has been underestimating the threat of the global jihadist movement since before he was sworn in as president. And he's been misleading the country about that threat for nearly as long.
When Petraeus insisted that Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the central front in the war against al Qaeda, Obama challenged him, arguing that Al Qaeda in Iraq—the organization that would grow to become ISIS—had little ambition or reach beyond Iraq. "The al Qaeda leadership is not here in Iraq. They are there," Obama said, pointing to Pakistan on a map.
Analysts probably knew more about the detainees than anyone in the U.S. government. And they concluded that nearly 75 percent of the 240 jihadists held at Guantanamo seven years after it was opened were "high risks" to the United States and its allies. In January 2009, the Defense Department estimated that 61 of the detainees who had been released up to that point either had returned to the jihad or were suspected of having done so. As of September 2015, that figure had more than tripled to 196 ex-detainees. All but 12 of them were t***sferred prior to Obama's inauguration. But rather than learn from his predecessor's mistakes, Obama repeated them.
The final report from Obama's own task force, published in January 2010, made clear that the overwhelming majority of the remaining detainees belonged to the jihadists' paramilitary armies and terror cells. Obama's review body found that 95 percent of the detainees fit into four categories, ranging from low-level foreign fighters to terrorists who were "involved in terrorist plots against U.S. targets." None of the remaining detainees was deemed innocent.
Instead of reevaluating his decision to close Guantanamo in light of the obvious risks, however, Obama continues to press forward. His own task force approved 156 (65 percent) of the detainees it evaluated for t***sfer despite finding that nearly all of them had belonged to al Qaeda or Taliban affiliated terror networks in some capacity. The Obama administration has t***sferred more than 120 detainees and if recent history is any guide, more of them will one day join the U.S. government's list of recidivists. Dozens of the jihadists Obama wants to ship out were once deemed "high risk" to the United States, its interests, and its allies by JTF-GTMO. Like its predecessor, the Obama administration disregarded the task force's recommendations in many cases. and it continues to t***sfer "high-risk" detainees.
Obama instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained. More than 100 of the confirmed or suspected Guantanamo recidivists remain at large today.
Fort Hood. The Christmas Day bomber. The Times Square bomber.
The bin Laden documents. That important moment should have kicked off a comprehensive campaign to make the death of the al Qaeda leader the first step in the death of al Qaeda and the global jihadist movement. That didn't happen. Obama. eager to end what he would call the Bush administration's "boundless war on terror," mistook this victory in an important battle as victory in the broader war.
DIA, officials were given limited access to the documents but told they were not allowed to write official reports based on their contents or circulate them throughout the intelligence community. Even that limited access made clear just how much valuable information had been missed by the Obama administration's initial triage: details of the close relationship details of the relationship between al Qaeda and the afghan Taliban; after-action reports on past operations and indications of future al Qaeda targeting; correspondence between bin Laden and top operatives that revealed the internal dynamics of the al Qaeda network and its relations with al Qaeda branches around the globe; and additional intelligence on al Qaeda's around the globe; and additional intelligence on Al-Qaeda supporters and allies, including in Pakistan and Iran.
Beyond a deeper understanding of al Qaeda, a full exploitation of the documents would give the U.S. intelligence community (a) an accurate baseline from which to judge its past assessments of al Qaeda and its leaders, (b) the ability to compare what we thought we knew with what was actually happening, and (c) an opportunity to evaluate sources and methods to determine who and what means were producing the most accurate information.
But the U.S. intelligence community never made a comprehensive study of the bin Laden documents, says Derek Harvey, a former senior intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and ex-director of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). "A full exploitation? No," he says. "Not even close."
source-weekly standard (11/30/2015), stephen hayes, thomas joscelyn