NBC only network to report President was warned about ISIS threat

Directions

On Monday, several sources in the intelligence community disputed President Obama’s comments in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired on Sunday night that the intelligence community and Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper are to blame for not recognizing the threat posed by ISIS.

On the Monday evening newscasts of the major broadcast networks, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir chose to ignore the story all together while the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley simply re-aired Obama’s comments from 60 Minutes the night prior without acknowledging the criticisms since the interview aired. [ [MP3 audio here]

NBC Nightly News offered a stark contrast as it aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment that included not only Obama’s comments, but congressional testimony from intelligence officials over the past year warning of ISIS and reports from NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel going back to January that both cited the falling apart of the Iraqi army in being able to hold territory and losses in territory to terrorists that U.S. troops had secured during the Iraq war.

An administration source told the Daily Mail on Monday that the President had “provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012” about the threats and potential of ISIS.

Over in an article posted on The Daily Beast, a source said that the President’s own senior intelligence officials had been telling him “that ISIS was on the move.” The article described how one former Pentagon official who worked closely on matters regarding Iraq and Syria was“flabbergasted” with what the President had said.

On FoxNews.com, an article stated that:

[T]he Obama administration had options on the table to target senior leadership of ISIS — as well as the al Qaeda-aligned Khorasan Group — in the 18 months leading up to the strikes in Syria which began last week.

In the NBC Nightly News report, anchor Brian Williams declared that “a paper trail is emerging of warnings about the growing threat of ISIS as far back as last winter” as Obama’s comments are “now raising questions about how the red flags went unheeded by the intelligence community and the White House for so long.”

NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported that “[t]he ISIS threat is not a secret, say intelligence leaders, to anyone watching or listening” and “[t]here were alarm bells” in the run-up to the current landscape of the Middle East with ISIS controlling large portions of territory in Iraq and Syria.

All together, Mitchell showed five separate clips from January to June that contradicted the President’s claim that intelligence community underestimated ISIS.

In addition to two clips from Engel, there two clips of separate congressional testimonies from a State Department official and intelligence official that warned of the desire of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to gain large swaths of territory across the Middle East and described how Iraq and the region was becoming “increasingly a concern” the U.S. should monitor, respectively.

Also, Mitchell pulled a clip from an episode of PBS’s Frontline in February that mentioned how the group “wants to establish an Islamic State in Syria.” 

(from newsbusters)