Former CIA Director James Woolsey on Wednesday criticized the Obama administration’s reluctance to assess the scope of the threat of radical Islamic terrorism in straightforward terms.
“The administration has a narrative, and they follow the narrative, and if something doesn’t fit with the narrative, they fiddle around with it until it looks like it fits with the narrative,” Mr. Woolsey said on WMAL radio’s “Mornings on the Mall,” while discussing Tuesday’s terrorist attack on an airport in Istanbul.
He headed the spy agency under former President Clinton.
Mr. Woolsey’s remarks came after WMAL co-host Brian Wilson asked him to react to a soundbite from CIA Director John Brennan’s recent congressional testimony, wherein Mr. Brennan warned that “our efforts have not reduced [ISIS’s] terrorism capability and global reach, and the group would have to suffer even heavier losses on territory, manpower and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly.”
“I think he was calling it straight, and the administration is not,” Mr. Woolsey said. “It’s good that he and other leaders, some of our military leaders, have been, I think, even more explicit. And they’re right. We cannot prevail just by doing what the Obama administration has been doing. And the Obama administration is causing a big problem by not talking clearly about what we are doing.”
“Somehow the administration finds it absolutely impossible to say straightforward things” about how the fight against radical Islamic terrorism is in no way an indictment of the majority of peaceful Muslims worldwide, Mr. Woolsey concluded.
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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