President Barack Obama´s assertion that U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict the rapid rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq drew a sharp riposte from several top congressmen and intelligence community members in Washington on Monday.
“This was not an Intelligence Community failure, but a failure by policy makers to confront the threat,” Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representative Intelligence Committee said.
Several current officials from the CIA and other agencies declined to publicly comment on the president´s statement.
But privately, officials cited many warnings, some made public in Congressional testimony, which had spelled out the growing threat over the last year.
Former intelligence officials objected to Obama´s statement. They suggested he was holding the spy agencies up as a scapegoat to mask what the president´s critics say was his own slowness to react to the danger.
