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In a televised news interview on CBS news program “60 Minutes” on Sunday, President Obama acknowledged that the U.S. underestimated the rise of the ISIS Islamic militant group and overestimated the capabilities of the Iraqi Army.

The New York Times reported reflecting on how a president who wanted to disentangle the United States from wars in the Middle East ended up redeploying to Iraq and last week expanding air operations into Syria, Mr. Obama pointed to assessments by the intelligence agencies that said they were surprised by the rapid advances made in both countries by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Mr. Obama said on “60 Minutes,” the CBS News program, referring to James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. Mr. Obama added that the agencies had overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi Army to fight such Sunni extremists. “That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” he said.

In the interview the president made no mention to any missteps he had made considering in January he referenced ISIS as a JV team, and repeatedly has stated that al-Qaeda was on the run.

This omission by the president has raised eye brows among many in the national security and intelligence community who as the Daily Beast reported nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

In prepared testimony before the annual House and Senate intelligence committees’ threat hearings in January and February of this year, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, stated the group would likely make a grab for land before the end of the year. ISIS “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.” Flynn continued to comment that ISIS had taken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and the demonstrated an “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”

The Daily Beast reported in that same hearing Clapper himself warned that the three most effective jihadist groups in Syria—one of which he said was ISIS—presented a threat as a magnet for attracting foreign fighters. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, said he thought both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s formal franchise in Syria, presented a threat to launch external operations against the West.

The Daily Beast continued as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said February 4 that because of areas of Syria that are “beyond the regime’s control or that of the moderate opposition,” a “major concern” was “the establishment of a safe haven, and the real prospect that Syria could become a launching point or way station for terrorists seeking to attack the United States or other nations.”

The president’s approach since 2009 in Iraq was to extricate the U.S. from the country and move on to other areas, all against the advice of his national security and military commanders.

This was a startling omission by the president on “60 Minutes” and one that needs to be investigated as why we were so unprepared to deal with the threat from ISIS when we had ample warning from many sources.