Conservative
Type 40
A bogus defense of Obama’s intelligence briefing record - The Washington Post
With the facts above, any sane person would conclude that Bush was more up to date and better informed than Obama on security matters.
After hearing from sources in the intelligence community that President Obama was not attending his daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis, I asked researchers at the Government Accountability Institute, a nonpartisan research group headed by Peter Schweizer (who is also my business partner in a speechwriting firm, Oval Office Writers) to examine at Obamas official schedule. We found during his first 1,225 days in office, Obama had attended his daily meeting to discuss the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) just 536 times or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obamas predecessor, George W. Bush, almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.
These facts are not in dispute. Indeed, before publishing both of my columns, I specifically asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if there were instances where the president had, in fact, held his daily meeting on the PDB that did not appear on the official public calendar. He offered no examples, and not once did he challenge the numbers I presented. Neither has any White House official challenged them in the weeks since this controversy erupted.
What Kessler and the Obama White House do argue is a matter not of fact but of opinion that it does not matter if Obama attends a daily intelligence meeting because he reads his PDB every day.
Without criticizing Obama, former CIA director Mike Hayden recently explained the value of the in-person meeting: With President Bush, I really saw the value of the personal interaction that we had on an almost daily basis. There was rich give-and-take, so that not only did the president get the advantage of knowing the analysts innermost thoughts, but they also were able to leave the room understanding what the president believed he needed in order to make the kind of decisions he had to make.
In addition to the PDB, Hayden said, Bush also received two longer, magazine-length pieces each week, and additional in-person briefings were held on each of these. On Thursdays, Hayden also briefed Bush for a half-hour on sensitive collection programs and covert action.
It is a fact that for eight years before Obama took office, there was a daily meeting to discuss the PDB. And it is a fact that, on taking office, Obama stopped holding the daily intelligence meeting on a daily basis.
With the facts above, any sane person would conclude that Bush was more up to date and better informed than Obama on security matters.