National Security: The president, his spokesman and the secretary of state claim we’re safer than ever, while their intelligence chief warns terrorism has reached record levels. Believe the one who’s lied the least.
The man who told us, “If you’ve got health insurance and you like your doctor, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan,” and who denied he drew a red line on Syrian chemical weapons, recently told us we’ve been “overinflating” what the Islamic State does. Like its mass beheadings of Christians and burning alive fellow Muslims in cages.
In the same vein, Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted for the Iraq War before he voted against it, testified to Congress last week that “we are actually living in a period of less daily threat to Americans and to people in the world … than through the last century.”
Someone must have forgotten to tell Kerry the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks occurred in the 21st century.
According to White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who last year contended that Obama wasn’t really talking about IS when he called them “a JV team” of terrorists, Kerry has “the evidence on his side” because the U.S. “has prevented ISIL from being able to operate comfortably in Iraq and in Syria.”
That falls short of great wartime rallying cries. Just imagine FDR or Churchill vowing to “prevent the Nazis from operating comfortably in France and Poland.”
Contrast that with the alarming remarks of Obama’s own director of national intelligence, James Clapper. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that 2014 was “the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled.”
In the first nine months of last year, there were 31,000 terrorist killings in the world vs. 22,000 during all of 2013. As the Washington Free Beacon’s Bill Gertz reports, Clapper also noted that IS “is expanding outside Iraq and Syria into the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and South Asia” and “planning terror attacks on Western interests and against Shiite Muslims.”
According to Clapper, IS also makes effective “appeal to people who then can act on their own at a time and place and circumstance of their choosing . . . a very worrisome challenge, particularly in this country.”
Clapper may not have a perfect record of candor himself. He once admitted giving the “least untruthful” possible answer to a question on government domestic surveillance. But unlike Obama, Kerry and Earnest, he has little, if any, political reason to cover up this administration’s dangerous record on keeping America safe.