Ted Cruz Misquotes CIA Official, Makes False Claim On Bombing ISIS Oil And Climate Change

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz tore into President Barack Obama’s strategy against ISIS in an NPR interview.

Cruz, who vowed to “utterly destroy ISIS” and “carpet bomb them into oblivion,” said Obama is not serious about defeating the jihadists. The Texas senator brought up Obama’s former CIA deputy director, Mike Morell, to show how Obama has prioritized a green agenda instead.

“Mike Morell testified and told Congress that the reason Obama has not bombed ISIS' oil fields is they're concerned about global warming,” Cruz said on Dec. 8’s Morning Edition. “This is nonsense.”

Is it true that Morell said the Obama administration refused to strike ISIS’ oil assets because of fears that emissions from oil fires will contribute to global warming, the term for increased temperatures believed to be linked to human activity?

Experts told us this policy is humanitarian and tactical. Injuring or killing civilians or crippling the economy would be counterproductive to the goal of isolating the enemy from the local population, said Ben Bahney, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a global policy think tank.

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That’s precisely why bombing the physical oil fields themselves would be a “terrible idea,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The ecological fallout, health hazards and permanently weakened economy would impact local people.

“If it were just global warming, we would obviously bomb them,” he said.

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