DHS: ISIS Data Deleted By Obama Administration Over Muslim Political Correctness May Have Prevented U.S. Terrorist Attacks


Philip Haney, a former Department of Homeland Security employee, is making startling claims about the Obama administration. Haney says the DHS was ordered to delete portions of the intelligence community’s database, including Hamas and ISIS data, in order to scrub any Muslim connections to Islamic terrorist groups. The former DHS employee believes the only reason for taking this action was political correctness, yet he believes it’s possible deleting these records allowed U.S. terrorist attacks like the Boston Marathon bombing to happen.

These accusations were recently published by the Hill within an editorial written directly by Haney, who explained his motivation for coming forward.

“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,” he wrote.

Haney says the DHS data scrubbing began shortly after the failed terrorist attack by the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253. After the explosives failed to detonate, other passengers subdued the Nigerian Muslim until he could be arrested.

Following the failed terrorist attack, President Obama blamed the intelligence community for its alleged failure to “connect the dots” and prevent the terrorist attack in the first place.

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had,” Obama claimed.

(Photo by Evan Vucci - Pool/Getty Images)
[Photo by Evan Vucci – Pool/Getty Images]
The former DHS employee wrote that Obama’s 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.” In November of 2009, Haney says he was ordered 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),” before the underwear bomber ever attempted his attack.

While Congress was grilling the Obama administration on why the intelligence data was not being used properly, Haney says he was “being forced to delete and scrub the records” which provided this very intelligence. The deleted DHS Customs and Border Protection officers was used to monitor individuals within the United States known to have terrorist ties. Haney says that “enforcing a political scrubbing of records of Muslims greatly affected” their ability to look for patterns used to prevent U.S. terrorist attacks.

“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,” Haney wrote. “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.”

Cellphones Bought In Missouri, ISIS' Syrian Passports Has Some Fearing A 2016 New Year's Terrorist Attack In America
[Image via Flickr by 3aref 6ari2o/CC BY-SA 2.0]
As examples of U.S. terrorist attacks which may have been prevented, Haney cites the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. According to NewsMax, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, mosque attended by the two Boston bombers was linked to the terror group Islamic State (ISIS) and several other radical Islamist groups. The 2014 Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen was known to have “idolized” ISIS.

Other examples provided by Haney include “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);… or Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez, who opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee (2015).”

In the end, Philip Haney states that it is “demoralizing” and “infuriating” how those intelligence “dots are even harder to find, and harder to connect, than they were during the winter of 2009.”

[Image by Win McNamee/Getty Images]

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