Posted on 02/05/2016 1:41:13 PM PST by Syncro
February 05, 2016, 12:00 pm
By Philip Haney
Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.
Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to "connect the dots." He said, "this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.
After leaving my 15 year career at DHS, I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America’s counter-terror strategy, our leaders’ willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.
Just before that Christmas Day attack, in early November 2009, I was ordered by my superiors at the Department of Homeland Security to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS). These types of records are the basis for any ability to "connect dots." Every day, DHS Customs and Border Protection officers watch entering and exiting many individuals associated with known terrorist affiliations, then look for patterns. Enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected our ability to do that. Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database.
A few weeks later, in my office at the Port of Atlanta, the television hummed with the inevitable Congressional hearings that follow any terrorist attack. While members of Congress grilled Obama administration officials, demanding why their subordinates were still failing to understand the intelligence they had gathered, I was being forced to delete and scrub the records. And I was well aware that, as a result, it was going to be vastly more difficult to "connect the dots" in the future—especially before an attack occurs.
As the number of successful and attempted Islamic terrorist attacks on America increased, the type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit "honor killing" perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).
It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009. It is demoralizing-and infuriating-that today, those elusive dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.
Haney worked at the Department of Homeland Security for 15 years.
#CoverUp
Should be frontpage news!
DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims w/ terror ties https://t.co/NacXZH0MSb pic.twitter.com/U24ZZBblko— Frank Gaffney (@frankgaffney) February 5, 2016
They WANT attack on the USA as it provides the basis for repealing freedoms and militarizing the police, turning us into an occupied country.
They view elections as troublesome, and those with experience living in democracy as People To Be REPLACED.
The allies of our leaders ARE the terrorists.
They are their FOOT SOLDIERS.
The GOP is complicit in the treason which
continues every day, every hour.
Japan does not have draconian laws, nor are their police expenditures sky-rocketing:
They took in THREE Syrian refugees, for the 3rd biggest economy on Earth.
THREE.
Where is Trump and Cruz on this? Should be shouted from the roof tops!
It’s also viewed as an acceptable cost of “diversity.”
The old commie “can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
0 = a traitor.
Rule by laws requires measured DEBATE and free exploration of ideas —this means you constantly have to explain and re-explain yourself.
The Establishment views that as onerous. They’re TIRED of it.
They now give off strong signs of rule by MEN, and their plan is simply to rule in perpetuity, no elections, no convincing people.
They will hand down the rules, and then we Shall Accept Them.
This, they think, is more convenient, more efficient.
They want subordinates with no experience holding their leaders accountable, which is why the borders must remain open.
We are slated TO BE REPLACED.
Why didn’t Philip Haney go directly to the FBI and report this? If Director James B. Comey, the head of the FBI is such a stand up guy he should have been able to do something. Somebody needs to arrest Obama and his administrative staff before he completely scuttles America.
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He seems to be under the mistaken impression that the purpose of DHS is to provide homeland security rather than unionized job security and perks to probable Democrat voters. < / sarcasm >
Diogenesis @4: The GOP is complicit in the treason which continues every day, every hour.
And because of it Traitorcongress will do....................................... nothing.
The job of the DHS is to protect the government from their enemies, not from our enemies.
Let them start with the WH.
Or was it the other way around?
RE: Where is Trump and Cruz on this? Should be shouted from the roof tops!
Do they KNOW about this? If not, someone ought to tell them. PRONTO.
All branches of government are under the same directives. Hands tied. We have fundamentally been taken over by vote.
How? He’s telling the truth
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