Obama Admin Excluded Iran from Threat Assessment

Leading U.S. officials are expressing concern about newly disclosed efforts by the Obama administration to play down the terrorism threat posed by Iran in an official report issued this year.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted in a recent letter to top senators that the administration wrongly excluded references to the global terrorism threat posed by Iran and its terror affiliate Hezbollah in the 2015 World Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

“A specific reference to the terrorist threat from Iran and Hizballah—which was not included in any of the drafts of the testimony [offered before lawmakers]—would have been appropriate for the 2015 Assessment, but the lack of its inclusion is in no way a change in the [intelligence community’s] assessment,” Clapper wrote in a June 3 letter to top senators.

Clapper’s letter came in response to an earlier letter from a delegation of senators who were seeking to discover why the Obama administration excluded references to Iran’s global terrorist operations.

“Despite ongoing nuclear negotiations and the administration’s evolving policy towards the Iranian regime, we are perplexed that your annual assessment contains no meaningful reference to the chaos that Iran manufactures through its support for terrorist groups and proxy organizations, which raises serious questions about the credibility of this annual exercise,” Sens. Dan Coats (Ind.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Susan Collins (Maine), James Risch (Idaho), and James Lankford (Okla.) wrote in an April 28 letter to Clapper.

Some critics accuse the Obama administration of downplaying the terrorist threat posed by Iran and its proxies in order to appease the Islamic Republic and preserve the ongoing talks aimed at inking a wide-ranging nuclear deal.

Coats said that the Obama administration cannot overlook Iran’s longstanding financial support for terrorist groups across the region.

Via: WFB

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Susan Rice: NSA Officials Didn’t Lie, They ‘Inadvertently Made False Representations’

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????

National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on Sunday night’s 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, and one of the issues she addressed was the continued fallout from the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Rice argued that NSA officials didn’t lie about intel dragnets, they just “inadvertently made false representations.” This statement comes as House Republicans are demanding a criminal probe for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for his flat-out denial in March, three months before the Snowden leaks began, that the NSA collects data on hundreds of millions of Americans (a denial that Clapper later categorized as the “least untruthful”answer he could have provided).

RELATED: Reliable Sources Panel Knocks 60 Minutes: ‘Who Deputized CBS’ to Tell NSA’s Side of the Story?

After expressing the opinion that Snowden should “be sent back” to the U.S. and “face justice,” Rice faced Stahl’s questioning about whether NSA officials have lied to Congress or not. Here’s the exchange:

STAHL: “Officials in the intelligence community have actually been untruthful both to the American public in hearings, in Congress, and to the FISA court.”

RICE: “There have been cases where they have inadvertently made false representations, and they themselves have discovered it and corrected it.”

Rice also asserted that NSA surveillance has been worth is and “the fact that we have not had a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11 should not be diminished.”

The segment elicited some criticism (though not as much as last week’s NSA puff piece) on Twitter, including from Glenn Greenwald and actor John Cusack.

Watch the video below, via CBS:

VIA: MEDIAITE.COM

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