Breitbart News National Security Editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, joined guest host Mike Huckabee on Fox News’ “Hannity” to address President Obama’s mixed messages on the war against the Islamic State.
“The President’s kind of all over the board on this. He tells us that this is an ISIS that’s getting defeated, but we still have a threat. So which is it?” Huckabee asked.
“That is the question, Governor,” Dr. Gorka replied, with a rueful laugh. “You just have to listen to the professionals. Let’s take politics out of the equation. Let’s take spin out of the equation.”
“We have the most senior intelligence officer in federal government – that’s DNI Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence – who, in his last testimony, his last unclassified testimony on the Hill, just a matter of maybe three weeks ago, said the following: he said that the capacity of the Islamic State, of ISIS, to execute global attacks has not been diminished at all by our actions in theater,” Gorka recalled.
“That’s Number One. Their capacity to do terrorism in San Bernardino, in Orlando, in France, has not changed,” he stressed. “And on top of that, the one sentence that the media really missed – it came later on in his testimony – is the following: he said, in my 30+ [year] career as an intelligence professional, I have never seen the world as unstable as it is today. That’s after seven and a half years of Obama and Clinton foreign policy.”
“Let’s leave the answer to the professionals,” Gorka urged. “The most senior intelligence officer said the world is on fire.”
“How does the President, and this Administration, get away with diminishing the description, and the threat that ISIS poses to the world?” Huckabee asked.
“Because it’s not about reality. It’s not about protecting America,” Gorka answered. “It’s about spin. It’s about legacy.”
“Think about the fact that last year, we had 60 CENTCOM analysts, Central Command analysts – the people who are looking at ISIS, at Syria, at Iraq – publicly complain and protest that their analysis reports on ISIS were being either doctored, changed, or thrown away when they didn’t comport with the White House narrative that we’re winning,” he said. “If it didn’t meet the preconceived political message, it was distorted, or it was lost.”
“We didn’t even have that, Governor, during Vietnam,” Gorka reminded Huckabee. “We never had 60 intel analysts say reality doesn’t matter, and the White House simply wants to spin. It’s outrageous.”
Huckabee wondered why there hasn’t been a definitive effort to shut ISIS out of social media platforms, which they have aggressively used for jihad recruiting and strategic communications.
“There’s a couple of reasons for that. The first one is a technical one: the Internet was invented by DARPA, by the defense research hub for the DOD, and it was invented deliberately to have built-in redundancy,” Gorka explained. “So you can shut down one server, shut down one IPA address provider, and it will rejuvenate, and another place will take over. So the technology is really on the side of the terrorists.”
“Secondly, what is Internet provision about? It’s about the bottom line. It’s about making a buck. It’s about the service provider having the shares report positively in the next quarterly stock meeting,” he continued.
“Look what happened after San Bernardino. Apple doesn’t want to allow the FBI to open the county government’s iPhone that was issued to Mr. Farook,” said Gorka, referring to jihadi Syed Farook, a county employee whose encrypted telephone became the focus of a national controversy. “Why is that? Because they’re scared over whether they’re going to make profit on the next iPhone 7.”
“This is the challenge. We really have a lack of cooperation between the national security establishment, the private sector, and the nature of the Internet itself,” Dr. Gorka said.
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