Obama misled when he said failure to act on ISIL was an intelligence failure

Washington Times:

U.S. policy leaders, including President Obama, were repeatedly warned by the U.S. intelligence community over the last year that the Islamic State movement was gaining significant strength and would pose a major threat to regional stability if left unchecked by Iraq’s struggling military.

The warnings, some in private and others in public testimony, conflict with Mr. Obama’s nationally televised proclamation Sunday night that US intelligence had underestimated both the Islamic State’s strength and the ability and will of Iraqis to combat it, according to US intelligence officials familiar with the briefings.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers specifically challenged Mr. Obama on Monday, telling The Washington Times that the failure to combat the Islamic State was a policy failure and not an intelligence failure as the president claimed.

“For over a year, U.S. intelligence agencies specifically warned that ISIL was taking advantage of the situation in Syria to recruit members and provoke violence that could spill into Iraq and the rest of the region,” Mr. Rogers said. “In fact, in 2013, the House Intelligence Committee formally pressed the administration for action to address the terrorist threat present in Syria. Additionally, national security experts – both inside and outside the government – repeatedly warned, a year before ISIL’s drive into Mosul, that the Iraq Security Forces faced severe pressure; the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing on that very issue in early 2014.

“And we all knew that former Iraqi Prime Minster Maliki had mismanaged his military and gutted the ISF of its top commanders. Indeed, over a year ago, our Arab League partners sought U.S. support and leadership for a coordinated effort to address the extremist threat in eastern Syria. This was not an Intelligence Community failure, but a failure by policy makers to confront the threat.”
...

There is much more.  Fox New's Katherine Herridge just reported on Greta's show that intelligence briefs for over 18 months warned of the ISIL threat as well as the al Nusra threat in Syria.   At best the President appears to be a man who only hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.  What he was hearing was inconsistent with his world view so he ignored it.