Partial transcript of todays White House press briefing, discussing the President, the intelligence community and Islamic State. Q Josh, back to this question of ISIS or ISIL. Did the intelligence community underestimate ISIL or did the President underestimate ISIL? MR. EARNEST: I think the way that I would describe it is that everybody did; that everybody was surprised to see the rapid advance that ISIL was able to make from Syria across the Iraqi border and to be able to take over such large swaths of territory in Iraq did come as a surprise. And that’s something that the President has said many times and it’s something that even senior members of the intelligence community have acknowledged as well. A lot of that was predicated on the underestimation of the will of the Iraqi security forces to fight for their country. Q But, Josh, I mean, on that question, just to go back -- I mean, you don’t even have to go back to February, you can go back to November of last year. Brett McGurk, who is Assistant Secretary of State and one of the key point people for the administration on Iraq, he described almost exactly what the threat was, both on the side of the Iraqis not being able to confront it, the fact that they were able to have benefitting from a sanctuary across porous border in Syria. I mean, his description back in November was, “We have seen upwards of 40 suicide bombers per month targeting playgrounds, mosques, markets…in addition to government sites from Basra, to Baghdad, to Erbil.” ISIS “has benefited from a permissive operating environment due to the inherent weakness of the Iraqi security forces.” This is one of your key people on Iraq who was raising this alarm in November of last year. Did this message get to the President? Did he believe it? Did he not hear it? What happened? MR. EARNEST: Jon, this is something that the President has discussed on a number of occasions -- that principally what we’re talking about here is the rapid advance that ISIL was able to make across the Iraqi desert and the success that they have had after that advance to holding large swaths of territory. And that is not to say that there wasn’t an acknowledgement of the risk that this organization posed. Q But if I could just stop you for a second -- because two months after Brett McGurk says this, the President calls ISIL the JV team in an interview with The New Yorker. MR. EARNEST: We’ve been through this and that’s not who the President was referring to. Q He was clearly talking about ISIL because the question was about -- MR. EARNEST: That’s not true. Q The question was specifically about what happened after ISIL took over Fallujah. MR. EARNEST: That’s not what the question was about. Q The question was directly about -- MR. EARNEST: We can look at the transcript after the briefing. That’s not what the -- the President also discussed this on “60 Minutes” yesterday, too. So we’ve sort of -- we’ve been through this argument. Q But what I’m saying is here you have a top person and he’s not alone. I mean, if you go -- you mentioned coming across and taking over vast areas of Iraq. Well, in February of this year, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Michael Flynn, General Flynn, warned of exactly this. He said ISIL “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as it demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah.” And the group’s “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.” He is warning of exactly what happened. This is back in February. How can the President say this was an intelligence failure? MR. EARNEST: Well, Jon, I’ll read you some comments from Director Clapper himself, who said, what we didn’t do -- Q There are 16 intelligence agencies -- this is the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Are you saying that the President didn’t hear this? This was testimony to Congress. MR. EARNEST: What I’m talking about is the person who is responsible for being in charge of the broader intelligence community, and what he said was he said, “What we didn’t do was predict the will to fight. That’s always a problem.” And what that goes to is the challenge of figuring out how exactly willing foreign fighters are to defend their own country -- wow capable are they, how well equipped are they, and how willing are they to put their life on the line to defend their own country. And we did know that there was some weakness among the Iraqi security forces because we had been publicly expressing concern for quite some time that Prime Minister Maliki was governing that country in a sectarian way that was starting to pull that country apart. And that would make it vulnerable to outside forces, and it certainly would reduce the ability of the Iraqi security forces to respond to a specific threat. What was not predicted was how quickly and how successfully ISIL would be able to make this significant advance across Iraq in a way that has allowed them to hold so much territory. What’s important is that the United States, as we always do, has led the international community in responding to this situation. And that response requires the continued skill and professionalism and service of our intelligence community. That’s why -- that’s an important part of why our initial response here has been successful, and they will be critical to our success moving forward. Q Let me just button it up with this. So these warnings that came -- and I’ve mentioned two -- the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, to Iraq, made similar warnings in an interview on ABC News. We had heard similar warnings from Department of Homeland Security officials. Did the President hear this? Did he know what -- he mentioned Clapper. So we know he heard what Clapper said, the head of the DNI. Did he know what these other top officials in his own administration were saying about the threat from ISIL? Did he hear what I just read to you? MR. EARNEST: I assume that what you just read to me is congressional testimony. So there are a lot of public statements about this. I’m not going to get into what sort of private conversations the President had with the intelligence community about -- Q I’m just trying to get at -- these warnings got to the level of the President. Maybe they didn’t; maybe there is a problem at DNI that needs to be looked at. MR. EARNEST: And what I’m saying is that the President has complete confidence in the intelligence community to deal with these very dynamic but significant threats to our broader national interest. And he has complete confidence in their ability to gather the information that will be required to help us meet and mitigate that threat. As it relates to the private conversations that the President has had with his intelligence advisors, I won’t get into that. But both the Director of National Intelligence and the President have been pretty candid about their insight into this specific situation, which is to say everybody knew that there was a threat that was posed by ISIL, but what nobody could predict, as the director said, is the willingness of the Iraqi security forces to stand up and fight for their own country. Q Well, that’s exactly what McGurk said. MR. EARNEST: Okay. Justin.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 23:45:26 +0000
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