"The latest revelations confirm how badly Obama first misjudged and then deliberately misrepresented to the American people the continuing strength of the jihadist terrorist threat on his watch."Doug Ross Journal "The CIA released on Wednesday approximately 470,000 files of materials from the trove recovered during the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The materials include internal documents, practice reels for public speeches, audio correspondence, and imagery gathered or generated by al Qaeda for a variety of purposes.
"Today’s release of recovered al-Qaeda letters, videos, audio files and other materials provides the opportunity for the American people to gain further insights into the plans and workings of this terrorist organization," said CIA Director Mike Pompeo. "CIA will continue to seek opportunities to share information with the American people consistent with our obligation to protect national security."
"The newly released materials provide some additional insights into al Qaeda’s operations. They also expose the Obama administration’s misrepresentations regarding al Qaeda’s strength, which may be one reason Obama administration officials resisted a public release of this magnitude.
"Obama boasted regularly that al Qaeda was “decimated” and “on the run” during his 2012 presidential campaign. He made these claims despite having been informed privately by his intelligence team that al Qaeda was spreading into other regions, including in Africa, while still operating under a central leadership.
"In August 2013, Obama said that al Qaeda’s “tightly organized and relatively centralized al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11 has been broken apart and is very weak and does not have a lot of operational capacity.” He went on to characterize al Qaeda as made up of “regionalized organizations.”
"When Obama made his claims, he had available to him contradictory information gleaned from a handwritten, 228-page journal kept by Osama bin Laden himself, which was part of the trove secured in the raid. That document has now just been publicly released." . . .Obama hid al-Qaida threat, Iran link . . . “ 'Second, the documents proved beyond any reasonable doubt that al-Qaida had an uneasy but mutually beneficial relationship with Iran, and Obama spent much of his second term laboring to convince Americans that the Iranian regime could be trusted.”
"President Trump and CIA director Mike Pompeo should get credit for “making good on their predecessors’ pledges – and prevailing over the bureaucratic inertia that would have kept the vast majority of these documents secret forever,” the editors said." . . .
