Ginni Thomas

Obama’s Former Intelligence Director: President’s Strategy Not Working

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Ginni Thomas Contributor
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President Barack Obama’s highest-ranking military intelligence official — forced out for excessive candor in 2014 — continued his no-holds-barred critiques in this 20-minute video interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Retired in 2014, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, President Obama’s former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, served in the U.S. Army for 30 years but believes the nation is being lead by an ideological allegiance that crowds out strategies and decisions based on facts on the ground.

According to the candid Flynn, President Obama — who called ISIS a “JV team” — is downplaying the Islamic threat and overstating our readiness because of an allegiance to his ideology. The energetic general dismisses the tone-deaf Democrat or media elite’s focus on gun control or Islamaphobia after the Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks. Flynn says, “It is about religion, and not about gun control.”

“It’s a cancerous form of radical Islamism and we cannot allow it to exist on this planet anymore,” he continues.

While Obama has claimed “we’re on track” with fighting ISIS, Flynn says here, “we’re not on track.”

“His strategy is not working,” as he decries senior government officials who out of fear or self-interest, refuse to tell the president the facts.

Asked to connect the dots on releasing GITMO prisoners, Bowe Bergdahl and others, Flynn says, “Obama has made incredibly poor decisions that have made us less safe.”

As for the continuation of announced releases by the Obama administration of GITMO prisoners, which is under attack from Republicans like this, Flynn says in this video “we should be capturing, not releasing, more GITMO prisoners.” After release, Flynn says, these detainees are returning to the battlefield, picking up networks and providing a command and control capacity that works against the United States’ interests.

Flynn, having served in Afghanistan when Bowe Bergdahl left camp and in a position to know about the reassignments needed to find Bergdahl, says we “certainly shouldn’t be trading them [GITMO prisoners] for those like Bowe Bergdahl.”

Other topics discussed in the video are the mistake of invading Iraq, the disaster of toppling Libya’s leader, the error of allowing Pakistan and Syria to be safe-havens and using America’s military as a social experiment while allowing our readiness to decline.

Flynn says, “We are allowing the threads of this nicely woven fabric to be pulled apart.” He believes it will take more than one president after Obama’s term to right the ship of state for America to lead the world again.

Flynn is working on a new book, “Field of Fight” to continue voicing his strategic ideas to keep America safe now that he is retired from the Army. The book has a slated July 2016 release. More on Flynn can be found here and here.

“The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies” — $17.67 Hardcover/$12.22 Paperback/$12.99 Kindle

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