Report: Obama ignored 2012 CIA plan for Assad ouster before ISIS rise

Former CIA office, Doug Laux revealed in an NBC interview that in 2012, senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer Bashar Assad’s’s ouster.  As the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says he spent a year in the Middle East interviewing Syrian rebels and intelligence officers and then wrote an “ops plan.” He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he said that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. “We had come up with 50 good options to facilitate that. But political leadership…hadn’t given us the go-ahead to implement a single one,” said the former CIA officer.