“Fox News Sunday” was the only major talk show over the weekend to cover CIA Director John Brennan’s chilling update on the strength of the Islamic State terror group.
Mr. Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee last Thursday that ISIS or ISIL, another name for the Islamic State, has not lost its capacity for conducting terrorist attacks despite battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria.
Three of the four prominent Sunday shows failed to cover his testimony despite the June 12 terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida, by ISIS supporter Omar Mateen.
CBS’s “Face the Nation,” ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and NBC’s “Meet the Press” all ignored the CIA director’s testimony, which in many ways contradicted statements by Mr. Obama on efforts to degrade the terror group.
“Despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach,” Mr. Brennan testified on June 16. “The group’s foreign branches and global networks can help preserve its capacity for terrorism regardless of events in Iraq and Syria. In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”
Media Research Center first noted on Monday that only Chris Wallace’s show on Fox broached the subject.
“That was a pretty stunning contradiction on Tuesday,” Mr. Wallace said while speaking with panelist Brit Hume, the website reported. “You had the president talking about making significant progress against ISIS and the very next day you had the CIA director testifying before Congress saying, yeah we are rolling back some of their territory, yeah we are killing some of their people, but, in fact, they are a greater threat than ever to the West.”
“What the CIA director is saying is that this policy in practice that the administration has put into place against ISIS is not working,” Mr. Hume replied. “The threat is growing. The president would never say that, I don’t think. I don’t think Brennan’s going to get fired, but you put that together with all of this argument about the use of the term, you know, radical Islamic terrorism, the refusal to use it by the administration, this is a point of vulnerability for the administration and at a moment when the president’s approval rating had been rising, which is of inestimable help to his party’s candidate, in this case, Hillary Clinton. This attack [in Orlando], I think, is for the time being, anyway, a game changer on that, and has thrown the administration on the defensive and the Brennan testimony hammers that home.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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