Pajamas Media » Clapper’s Last Strike: Telling the Libyan Rebels They’ll LoseDirector of National Intelligence James Clapper doesn’t seem to understand that when a high-level official speaks in public, he isn’t just talking to the person addressing him or the American public. He’s talking to the world. And the message he just sent to Libya is that the U.S. believes Gaddafi will win and the rebels will lose. Senator Lindsey Graham is right. This should be Clapper’s last strike.
...There were loud calls for Clapper’s resignation after his outrageous description of the Muslim Brotherhood as “largely secular” last month, but a key point was missed. Attention focused on the factual inaccuracies of his description of the Brotherhood as a “very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has described al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”... ...It does not appear that Clapper has learned from his mistakes. He said he was misunderstood and that he meant the Brotherhood works through the secular Egyptian political system... ...We must not also forget Clapper’s embarrassment in December. The Obama administration decided to have Diane Sawyer interview several of its top security officials all at once to prove that it is taking the holiday terrorism threat seriously. The news headlines blared that morning about how a dozen suspected terrorists were arrested in London planning attacks around Christmas. When asked about these arrests, Clapper was clueless. The Obama administration first tried to cover for Clapper, saying Sawyer’s question was “ambiguous.” Shortly after, it was admitted that Clapper did not know about the holiday terror arrests even though he was about to be interviewed about preventing holiday terror plots. It was said that he did not have an immediate need to know because the arrests were not related to the U.S. homeland and no action was necessary on his part.
This was an unacceptable excuse. The director of national intelligence is not the director of the FBI or secretary of homeland security. His job is to oversee the entire intelligence community covering both foreign and domestic, not just the homeland. And if there’s any time to know about the thwarting of major terror plots, it’s before an important interview on the subject.
All of these mistakes have happened since December, a period of less than four months. What will the next four months bring? It’s time for a new director of national intelligence.
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