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.
I know most of that. The Islamic connection has always been curious to me, though. Only thing I can figure is it is very anti-American.
It is Obama who should be in big trouble. Talk about too big to fail. :-[
That is exactly what it is for.
Just him? Not DHS or the entire administration?
Bfl
IOW, our Terrorist in Chief was angry the passengers delayed his destruction of America.
The Gov. will ride this out even if a story is made about it....they always do....they gage how long the story might run, put what they can in place to appease....and nothing really gets done but stalling at best.
This guy is in big trouble because he is outing the corruptness.
For those that SHOULD be in big trouble, see my tagline.
That’s just the top tier and taglines are limited in # of characters, kind of like a miniature twitter...
When a boss gives you an order, they don't have to give a rational. They just expect you to do the job they assigned. That's why they are the boss.
Not really true when you're a white collar career professional like he claims to be.
Absolutely.
They depend on the the masses having short attention spans.
People have their faces buried in electronic devices and rarely look up
The evil won’t be stopped short of the revolution that those in power are bringing on.
To their detriment.
The stalling comment is interesting and so true.
Look at Hillary and her manipulation STILL of the State Dept with the calculated exact timing of each drop of her emails.
Nothing will be done and this email thingie will drag out until the election.
Her Teflon veneer will probably stay on her until it is burned off by the fires of hell
That’s right...we’ve seen this many times....these things will only stay “alive” until the media drops them....
America is led by traitors. Period. Heads should roll.
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“Why didn’t Philip Haney go directly to the FBI and report this?”
Perhaps he is addicted to breathing?
It has previously been said that “Fish rot from the dead daow”, and the President is in an advanced case of “Muslim-itis.
Given the complicity of the media, why risk being beheaded when the chance of blowing the whistle will only bring jihaddis?
Did not Churchill say Islam was as dangerous as hydrophobia in a dog?
Or to the inspector general. I worked at DOJ and DHS for 25 years and any time I was directed to do something I knew to be shady I would demand it in writing. Often times they never got back to me and I simply ignored the direction.
You don't want to be the one without a chair when the music stops.
Thanks Daniel, great site.
Also there is his letter to congress in 2015 detailing how lives were lost because of not calling terrorists terrorists.
What’s a few lives if an Islamic scum muslim terrorist my get his little feelings hurt.
Fair trial, conviction, gas chamber of all responsible parties to these horrible occurrences.
On twitter within the hour:
“Lying about Benghazi #Benghazi Libya Terrorist Attack Sole Hillary Accomplishment”
The current state is a judgment upon a country which has largely voted God out of office as far as obeying Him is concerned.
Set the trumpet to thy mouth. He shall come as an eagle against the house of the Lord, because they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law. (Hosea 8:1)
Israel hath cast off the thing that is good: the enemy shall pursue him. They have set up kings, but not by me: they have made princes, and I knew it not: of their silver and their gold have they made them idols, that they may be cut off. (Hosea 8:3-4)
I have written to him the great things of my law, but they were counted as a strange thing. (Hosea 8:12)
For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples; and Judah hath multiplied fenced cities: but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the palaces thereof. (Hosea 8:14)
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