We are on our own
DHS ordered me to scrub
records of Muslims with terror ties, By Philip
Haney, 2/5/16
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.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/268282-dhs-ordered-me-to-scrub-records-of-muslims-with-terror
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