OBAMA WON’T READ INTELLIGENCE ON GROUPS HE DOESN’T CONSIDER TERRORISTS:

SHARYL ATTKISSON: OBAMA WON’T READ INTELLIGENCE ON GROUPS HE DOESN’T CONSIDER TERRORISTS:

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” veteran journalist Sharyl Attkisson said her sources have told her that President Barack Obama does not want and will not read intelligence reports on groups “he does not consider terrorists,” despite being on a U.S. list of designated terrorists.
Attkisson said, “I have talked to people who have worked in the Obama administration who firmly believe he has made up his mind. I would say closed his mind, they say, to their intelligence that they’ve tried to bring him about various groups that he does not consider terrorists, even if they are on the U.S. list of designated terrorists. He has his own ideas, and there are those who’ve known him a long time who say this dates back to law school. He does not necessarily—you may think it’s a good trait you may think it’s a bad trait—he does not necessarily listen to the people with whom he disagrees. He seems to dig in. I would suppose because he thinks he’s right. He is facing formidable opposition on this particular point.”

The New York Times sounds like it grudgingly concurs with Attkisson’s assessment of our epistemically closed president, though you have to scroll down eight paragraphs deep past their deliberately underplayed headline, “In Rise of ISIS, No Single Missed Key but Many Strands of Blame,” to find the story’s real lede:

A 2012 report by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was direct: The growing chaos in Syria’s civil war was giving Islamic militants there and in Iraq the space to spread and flourish. The group, it said, could “declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria.”
“This particular report, this was one of those nobody wanted to see,” said Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who ran the defense agency at the time.
“It was disregarded by the White House,” he said. “It was disregarded by other elements in the intelligence community as a one-off report. Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative.”

As John Fund wrote last year, the eye of the narrative draws ever-tighter in the cloistered Obama White House:

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

To borrow from Gen. Flynn’s language, I wonder what else Obama and Jarrett “disregard” because “it doesn’t meet the narrative?”

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