Barack Obama Blames Intel Officials for ISIS … “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Barack Obama … The Buck always Stop with somebody else other than me …

It did not take long in last nights CBS ’60 Minutes’ interview for President Barack Obama to blame some one else for his not having a strategy or a clue in how to deal with ISIS. Barack Obama threw Intel officials and James Clapper under the bus and stated they underestimated ISIS. Who underestimated ISIS, or did you just not want to see what they were doing?  I could not have said it any better than Instapundit, When things go well, it’s always “I, me, mine” with this guy. When things go badly, it’s always “they” who screwed up.

But wait a minute, didn’t FOX News report Obama given detailed intelligence for a year about rise of ISIS?

President Obama was given detailed and specific intelligence about the rise of the Islamic State as part of his daily briefing for at least a year before the group seized large swaths of territory over the summer, a former Pentagon official told Fox News.

The official — who asked not to be identified because the President’s Daily Brief is considered the most authoritative, classified intelligence community product analyzing sensitive international events for the president — said the data was strong and “granular” in detail.

60 Minutes – Barack Obama interview

The Hill: Obama – Intel officials underestimated ISIS.

President Obama largely blamed the United States’ intelligence community in an interview broadcast Sunday for giving an incorrect assessment of the capabilities of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said on CBS’s “”60 Minutes.”

Obama said ISIS, also known as ISIL, went “underground” when United States forces fought al Qaeda in Iraq in the last decade.

That, along with Syria’s civil war, allowed ISIS to regroup and recruit fighters from all over the world, including Europe, the United States, Australia and the Muslim world, Obama said in an excerpt from the interview. The full interview with Steve Kroft will air Sunday night.

“And so this became ground zero for jihadists around the world,” Obama said of Syria.

Jim Geraghty at NRO says, oh contaire … “How Many Times Was Obama Warned About an Islamist Takeover of Iraq?”

Isn’t this what all of those allegedly horrific warmongering Bush administration officials warned about? Didn’t we have an entire 2008 presidential campaign debating the consequences of a “precipitous withdrawal”? Didn’t Obama and his team assure us, over and over again, that they would manage the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq responsibly?

Vice President Cheney, November 21, 2005:

Would the United States and other free nations be better or worse off with terrorists like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi running Iraq? And would the United States be more or less safe with Iraq ruled by extremists intent on its destruction?

A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further the violence against free nations and a terrible blow to the future security of the United States of America.

President Bush, July 12, 2007:

I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region, and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.

Even The Daily Beast is calling Obama on his comments … Why Obama Can’t Say His Spies Underestimated ISIS.

Still, other senior intelligence officials have been warning about ISIS for months. In prepared testimony before the annual House and Senate intelligence committees’ threat hearings in January and February, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the recently departed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the group would likely make a grab for land before the end of the year. ISIS “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.” Of course, the prediction wasn’t exactly hard to make. By then, Flynn noted, ISIS had taken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and the demonstrated an “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”

Flynn was not alone. Clapper himself in that hearing warned that the three most effective jihadist groups in Syria—one of which he said was ISIS—presented a threat as a magnet for attracting foreign fighters. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, said he thought both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s formal franchise in Syria, presented a threat to launch external operations against the West.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said February 4 that because of areas of Syria that are “beyond the regime’s control or that of the moderate opposition,” a “major concern” was “the establishment of a safe haven, and the real prospect that Syria could become a launching point or way station for terrorists seeking to attack the United States or other nations.”