http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=5003441F-829D-47DD-9E9A-D2BE5E5EEE5CMcCain disputes ‘underestimated’
By: Kendall Breitman
September 29, 2014 07:44 AM EDT
Sen. John McCain said on Monday he is “puzzled” by President Barack Obama’s comments in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” and that the intelligence community predicted that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant would become a threat to the United States.
“I’m just puzzled by the president, some of his statements, for example, he left behind a stable Iraq, all of that,” the Arizona Republican said on CNN. “We predicted what would happen if we didn’t leave residual force.”
He continued, “His intelligence comments — the intelligence people are pushing back hard. We predicted this and watched it, it was like watching a train wreck, and warning every step of the way that this was happening.”
McCain’s comments came after Obama said on “60 Minutes” on Sunday that the U.S. didn’t see the ISIL threat coming. “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper [the director of national intelligence], has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Obama said.
McCain argued that not only did the intelligence community understand the threat that ISIL posed, but that the current situation the U.S. faces is “a direct result of [Obama’s] failure to leave a residual force behind” in Iraq.
“When they said we couldn’t, they’re not telling the truth,” McCain said. “I was over there with [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] and Joe Lieberman and we know it for a fact. And this idea that we didn’t know what was happening, of course we knew it. We saw it happening.”
