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.
Yep
I cannot imagine why a devout Christian like Obama would cover for Muslim terrorists. This is a surprise.
If they were smart they would have someone checking threads here 24/7. Even more than drudge which drives me nuts with refreshing. I rarely go there.
There can come a point that those being blackmailed have allowed so much wrong that they are the enemy within the wire ...
But Marco says the NSA still must ignore the 4th amendment and spy on those nasty ol tea partiers.
Bookmarked. BTTT.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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For the purposes of the administration this makes sense. Easier to vet Muslims entering the US if records of those with terror ties are erased. See, no terrorists trying to enter the US.
Related threads
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).
What was the reason given? What kinds of modifications were ordered? How would have helped the administration?
I don't doubt that it happened but this piece tells us nothing useful.
Click on the date right above this sentence to see and retweet the tweet@frankgaffney @realDonaldTrump @tedcruz @KatrinaPierson
We need your take on this https://t.co/OQDepAQSA4— Gary Pon (@GaryZPon) February 5, 2016
>>Where is Trump and Cruz on this? Should be shouted from the roof tops!
Trump is speaking in Florence SC at 7pm. I wonder what he’ll say about Obama throwing open the borders today? I’m sure the word “stupid” will be used. I wonder if he’ll call it treason?
Read the article.
The author is putting his neck on the Gov chopping block for bringing this out to the public.
I had a talk at a dinner party with some guy who spoke of how dangerous the Southern Border is. This was now 5 years ago.
He said he would never go there again, and he’d been on a business trip that was innocuous and should not have been unsafe at all.
I don’t know what happened.
Then again, if you recall, 0bama shook the hand of the Lead Archaeologist in Mexico, and the guy died 3 days later.
0bama has scrubbed records, deleted references, contracts for and of trainers and experts on Islam, wording about Islam and terrorism. Soon, he’ll not only ban children’s books from pre-1984, as he did in 2009; he’ll ban all text and speech antithetical to Islam, and burn what is-or behead people.
Good article in this tweet
Fact Check: Obama's speech at the Islamic Center of Baltimore https://t.co/Gw2KCrWb2X— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) February 5, 2016
I read it. I even went to The Hill hoping that what you posted was an excerpt and there was some meat on his blog piece. No such luck.
Like I said, I don't doubt what he says but he leaves very fundamental questions unaddressed.
Surely there was some rationale offered for scrubbing the records, and some criteria for determining what was scrubbed.
All DHS has to do is announce they will not be enforcing any laws. Just as Obama picks and chooses which laws he enforces. If they would threaten to resign en masse the people might actually start paying attention.
Let’s hope he stays vigilant.
The idiot in the White House is who should be in big trouble, and facing a long time in prison.
Rationale?
Obama’s fingerprints are all over this.
Look up Valerie Jarrett, O’s #1 advisor, muslim brotherhood big wig.
Obama has an Islamic Muslim in a top position at the DHS.
Making sense now?
Obama is building a large Islamic Jihad army right here in the USA.
Do you also not understand why Hillary scrubbed her emails?
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