This might be another stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day moment. The intelligence failure in underassessing the threat posed by the DAISH (I prefer the Arabic acronym) might well be due to Clapper, who seems to be the champion of the NSA using its resources to make war on the citizenry of the United States, rather than directing its effort overseas as its mission as our foreign signals-intelligence arm would dictate. (Yes, make war — the conduct of signals-intelligence is a war measure, that it why the NSA’s program is so offensive, and would remain offensive even if there were a non-human algorithmic filter constructed by serious civil libertarians built into the system to prevent “abuse”.)
Maybe if the NSA had been attending to what was going on in the Middle East, rather than using it resources to analyse all our cell-phone calls (oh, it’s just “metadata” and “business records”) they might have noticed that the DAISH wasn’t Al Qaeda’s “jayvee” squad.
I hope that you’re not suggesting that NSA was NOT attending to what is going on in the Middle East. I’ve been retired for some time now, but before I hung up my cans, I can tell you that the Agency has NOT turned its attention away from the Middle East.