On February 5th, The Hill posted an article by Philip Haney, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security for fifteen years. Mr. Haney begins his article reminding us of the unsuccessful attack on the underwear bomber in December 2009.
The article reports:
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.
The article explains that shortly before the December 2009 attack, Mr. Haney was asked to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database. There was a scrubbing of potential Muslim terrorists from the database in the name of political correctness. (I believe that this was the result of the Muslim Brotherhood‘s infiltration of our government at some of the highest levels. For further information, see Center for Security Policy’s series on the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into the American government.) There was also a ban on entering new data.
The article further reports:
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 beforean 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 unimportant whether the problem is in the White House or the State Department–what is important is that the policy needs to change quickly. I have personally met two former CIA agents who had formerly briefed our military and State Departments who have now been blocked from briefing because they told the truth about Islamic terrorism. If our nation is to survive, we need to be aware and knowledgeable about the threats we face. Sticking our heads in the sand and erasing the evidence will result in American deaths.