I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know. Don't tell me. You're wrong.
I think this guy's creds are in order.
Exclusive — Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn: Obama, Hillary Ignored Intelligence They Did Not Like About Middle East, Only Wanted ‘Happy Talk’
NEW YORK CITY, New York — Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who served for more than two years as the director of President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), leveled explosive charges against the President and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an exclusive hour-long interview with Breitbart News Daily on Friday.
Specifically, during an exclusive interview about his book The Field of Fight,
Flynn said that Obama and Clinton were not interested in hearing
intelligence that did not fit their “happy talk” narrative about the
Middle East. In fact, he alleged the administration actively scrubbed
training manuals and purged from the military ranks any thinking about
the concept of radical Islamism. Flynn argued that this effort by Obama,
Clinton and others to reduce the intelligence community to gathering
only facts that the senior administration officials wanted to
hear—rather than what they needed to hear—helped the enemy fester and
grow, while weakening the United States on the world stage.
“The administration has basically denied
the fact that we have this problem with ‘Radical Islamists,’” Flynn said
during the interview. “And this is a very vicious, barbaric enemy and I
recognize in the book that there is an alliance of countries that are
dedicated basically against our way of life and they support different
groups in the Islamic movement, principally the Islamic State and
formerly Al Qaeda—although Al Qaeda still exists. The administration
denied the fact that this even existed and then told those of us in the
government to basically excise the phrase ‘radical Islamism’ out of our
entire culture, out of our training manuals, everything. That was a big
argument I had internally and I talked a little bit about it in the
Senate testimony that I gave two years back.”
Later in the interview, Flynn was even
more specific, calling out Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for not
wanting to hear all the facts about what was happening in the Middle
East—only some of them.
“There’s a narrative that the President
and his team, including Hillary Clinton, wanted to hear—instead of
having the tough news or the bad news if you will that they needed to
hear,” Flynn said. “Now, there’s a big difference. And the one thing
about intelligence is we should stand for truth to power—meaning we
should always say what we believe, and lay the facts out, lay the tough
right facts out and then you let the policymakers make the decisions
that they have to make. What has happened in the last 10 years, frankly
in the last 8 years, is we have seen a level of dishonesty coming out of
both the policy and the decision making structure with the American
people.”
Because of the President’s and the
Secretary of State’s—among other officials in the Obama
administration—unwillingness to hear all the facts, including ones they
needed to but didn’t want to hear, Flynn says the President has
presented a narrative to the American people about the war on terrorism
and radical Islamism that is simply inaccurate.
“The President has said they’re jayvee,
they’re on the run, they’re not that strong, what difference does it
make what we call—that’s being totally dishonest with the American
public,” Flynn said. “There’s one thing that Americans are, and we’re
tough, resilient people but we have to be told the truth. I think what a
lot of this is, in fact what I know a lot of it is. It’s a lot of happy
talk from a President who did not meet the narrative of his political
ideology or his political decision-making process to take our country in
a completely different direction and frankly that’s why I’m sitting
here talking to you here today, Matt. The intelligence process starts
really at the ground level, but the priorities—the priorities, Matt, for
an intelligence system and the intelligence community in our country
and that’s the President of the United States.”
The Obama administration’s refusal to
take these threats seriously and his, Flynn said, “has allowed an enemy
that is using very smart, savvy means to impact our way of life.”
“That means infiltrating into refugee
populations, that means conducting of smart information operations,”
Flynn said. “Most people don’t know but these guys have very
sophisticated information operations going on, with publications of
magazines and websites. They have leaders in their groups that have
thousands and thousands—I’m talking tens of thousands of followers on
social media and Instagram and Twitter. So we are not even allowed to go
after these kinds of things right now. This is the problem—it’s a big
problem. In fact, if we don’t change this we’re going to see this
strengthening in our homeland.”
Flynn also laid out how to defeat radical Islamism, a plan he has stated repeatedly that the Obama Administration has ignored.
“The very first thing is we have to
clearly define the enemy and we have to get our own house in order,
which this administration has not done,” Flynn said. “We have to figure
out how are we going to organize ourselves. Then I call for in the book a
new 21st century alliance. This is where we really come to how we take
the Arab community to task on how they plan to fix this cancerous
disease inside of their own body that has metastasized and grown
exponentially over the last five or six years and certainly actually
over the last eight to 10 years. So it’s one thing to go after the
ideology, just like we went after Communism for 40 years, but I also say
in the book we have to crush this enemy wherever they exist. We cannot
allow them to have any safe haven. We are dancing around the sort of
head of a pin, when we know these guys are in certain places around the
world and our military is not allowed to go in there and get them. The
‘mother may I’ has to go all the way back up to the White House.”
He said the fight has to be very similar
to how the United States, over decades, thoroughly degraded Communism on
the world stage.
“There’s no enemy that’s unbeatable,”
Flynn said. “We can beat any enemy. We put our minds to it, we decide to
do that, we can beat any enemy. And there’s no ideology in the world
that’s better than the American ideology. We should not allow, because
they mask themselves behind the religion of Islam, we should not allow
our ideology, our way of life, our system of principles, our values that
are based on a Judeo-Christian set that comes right out of our
Constitution—we should not fear that. In fact, we should fight those
that try to impose a different way of life on us. That’s what we did
against the Nazis, that’s what we did against the Communists for the
better part of a half a century—in fact, more than half a century. Now
we are dealing with another Ism, and that’s radical Islamism, and we’re
going to have to fight it—and we’re going to be fighting it for some
time. But tactically we can defeat this enemy quickly. Then what we have
to do is we have to fight the ideology, and we can do that
diplomatically, politically, informationally and we can do that in very,
very smart ways much greater than we’re doing right now.”
Flynn is a lifelong Democrat, and again
served in this senior Obama administration position for more than two
years, but is now publicly supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump
for president. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in support
of Trump, and has been publicly speaking out in favor of the GOP
nominee for some time now.
“My role as Director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency—that’s almost a 20,000 person organization in 140
plus countries around the world,” Flynn said. “I was also the senior
military and intelligence officer not only for the Defense Department
but for the country. So I mean I was basically told ‘hey, you know what,
what you’re saying we don’t like. So you’re out.’ To Donald Trump,
though, and I haven’t known him that long but I met him a year ago—in
fact a year ago this month. The conversation that we had, which was an
amazing conversation, I found a guy that like I to say, ‘he gets it.’ He
gets it. He is a street savvy strategic leader type person who has a
vision for this country, and he’s turned it into this phrase of ‘Make
America Great Again.’”
Flynn said Trump’s campaign theme of
wanting to “Make America Great Again”—along with his detailed policy
speeches on foreign policy, economic policy, immigration policy and
more—means that Trump is a “guy who sees our country like I see it.”
“The elements of that, and the things
that you hear him talking about—particularly recently with his foreign
policy speech and his economic policy speech and his immigration policy
speech,” Flynn said. “Some of the things he is saying, this is a guy who
sees our country like I see it. I will tell you, and I lay this out in
the book—you know, Matt, I can clearly see what it is that we are
facing. It’s not just the rise of radical Islamism, it’s also the
direction that China is going and it’s also the direction that I see
Russia taking. We have an alliance of nations that are opposed to our
way of life and we should not kid ourselves and think that we’re just
going to be around forever because we’re the United States of America.
Countries only last so long, and in order to last, you have to fight for
that belief system that we have, and I like to say it’s American
patriotism—that’s the Ism that I’m for—and that’s where Donald Trump
steps in, because here’s a guy who when you look at what he did over the
past year just slaying the Republican establishment and he’s facing a
current adversary in Hillary Clinton whose criminal behavior and just
dishonesty is just stunning. Yet there’s still people who are trying to,
that are weighing in to bring her back into government? Oh my God, I
mean, to me this is an easy choice. This is a choice about the direction
of the United States of America going forward.”
Flynn noted that the impacts of the
choices voters make in this upcoming presidential election will affect
the United States for generations—perhaps centuries—to come.
“And Donald Trump is not doing this for
Donald Trump,” Flynn said. “Donald Trump is not doing this for the next
four years. Donald Trump is doing this for the next 40, or the next 400,
years. I have children, I have grandchildren, I have a son who has
served overseas in the combat zones three times. I have a couple of
grandchildren. My God, I want those grandchildren to grow up in a
country that is recognizable to those of us that are in this country
today. Right now, it’s starting to become unrecognizable and if we
continue down the path that this administration has set over the past
eight years—and that includes the path that Hillary Clinton was part of
setting—we are going to find ourselves waking up one day in America
saying ‘this is not America anymore. This is not what we were founded
upon.’ Frankly, in order to keep that belief system that we have, we
have to sort of fight for it and we’re going to have to fight for it
overseas, and we’re going to have to fight for it here in the homeland
and the way we do it here in our country is we do it at the voting
booth. People have got to get out and vote.”
Flynn bashed the so-called “Never Trump” Republicans who say they
will never vote for Donald Trump in November as “part of the problem” in
America, too. He said that based on his own conversations with Trump,
he believes he is seriously interested in helping the United States win
again on the world stage.
“All these sort of Republican
establishment types who are having a very difficult time checking their
egos at the door, well, check your egos at the door because you’re part
of the problem,” Flynn said. “The establishment that we’ve had, all they
do is whine, whine, whine. And they have no solutions—what I want to
start seeing is solutions. That’s where Donald Trump comes in because
this is a guy—in my conversations with him, he’s like ‘alright I’m done
talking about the problems, what are we going to do to fix it?’ That’s
what I like about him. He was very serious about those—that’s the
conversations that I’ve had, multiple conversations, now about solutions
and how do we get to those solutions? That to me is the sign of a
leader, back to your use of Churchill and what I talk about in the book,
people don’t recognize people for who they are. Donald Trump is not
kidding—he’s not kidding. He wants to Make America Great Again, like
many of us—and that’s why I’m with him.”
If the United States doesn’t elect Trump,
and seriously start dealing with the enemy, Flynn believes the problem
is only going to get worse—and continue spreading more into the United
States.
“If we don’t deal with it, then we’re
going to be fighting it for a long, long time—and frankly, as a military
guy, I’m sick of just participating in conflict,” Flynn said. “I want
to win.”
Flynn said that the FBI is currently
working on cases in every U.S. state—all 50 of them—regarding people who
are allegedly aiding the Islamic State.
“Our FBI director, our current FBI
director, has stated that the FBI is working a thousand—one
thousand—cases right here in the homeland of the Islamic State,” Flynn
said. “And he’s working those cases in all 50 of our states. So there’s a
problem at home, and we definitely have a problem overseas, and our
current President and frankly this administration to include Hillary
Clinton—they denied the existence of it. And they tried to say ‘this is a
religion of peace.’ Islam is Islam. It is a political ideology.”
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