The United States spends over $70 billion a year on intelligence. But as the President admitted on “60 Minutes” last night, we were unaware of the existence of ISIS until it started taking over northwest Iraq a few months ago. He explained the militants “had gone underground” when U.S. forces quashed al Qaeda in Iraq with the aid of local tribes during the U.S. war there that ended in 2011, and that “during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swathes of the country that are completely ungoverned, they were able to reconstitute themselves and take advantage of that chaos. I find the Presidents admission frightening. I always thought the purposes of intelligence was to alert us about what’s happening underground. But American intelligence is mostly technological -- satellites, aerial spies, NSA computers -- that cant pick up whats happening underground. Perhaps we need more real spies?
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 14:48:15 +0000