Saturday, February 6, 2016

"DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties"

The Hill: 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.”...
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. (read the whole thing)

19 comments:

bagoh20 said...

Why would anyone in the Obama administration want this unless it was to bring Obama down? A successful attack would be extremely bad for him. It would wipe out all his rhetoric criticizing others for hatred and suspicion against Muslims. It would make him and his party wrong. It bring failure on his one remaining claim (that he kept us safe). It would destroy what he has of a legacy, and make it one of pure failure.

I'm skeptical and suspicious. What's the point of this that makes it worth all that, at least for him?

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Sleep well. obama is so blinded by his adoration of all things Muslim, he doesn't care if a few Americans die.

Third Coast said...

Bags, why isn't this in the Washington Post, NYT, CBS, NBC, et al? Because the MSM hides the dirty laundry from this administration. If no one covers it, it didn't happen. Get it?

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

If Another San Bernadino happens - his MSM will simply call it an attack by a "right wing militia" .
There's nothing worse.

bagoh20 said...

Third Coast, You're right about the protection of Obama by the press, but Obama being behind this makes no sense to me. He can't get anybody on his side this way, like he might with his "love Islam stuff". It's suicidal policy for him, and you know it would come out eventually. It's too evil and stupid for me to believe, even for him. He does stupid things out of weakness, hubris, naivete, and narcissism, but this would require the motivation to be pure evil, and at his own expense.

Third Coast said...

Answer me this. Why has Obama implemented what is essentially an open border policy where it's a fact that all sorts of criminals and Middle Easterners (potential terrorists) are crossing while ICE has essentially been ordered to stand down? We know a portion of the illegals are committing horrific crimes all over the country even after multiple deportations, yet it's not an issue, in fact, I'm probably a racist for even pointing it out. Weren't immigration "authorities" ordered not to investigate the social media postings of immigrants like say for example, the San Bernadino terrorists. I don't know Bags, this stuff seems to be happening so fast and so often that it's hard to keep track of it all.
Maybe it's a combination of direction from the top and the fact that the bureaucracies are so infested with leftists that direction is no longer necessary.

ricpic said...

So why didn't anyone in Homeland Security resign in protest that information that would allow him to see patterns of Islamic terrorism was being deliberately deleted from the records? I mean it's no surprise that Obama is America's first jihadi president. But where are the public servants willing to risk their glorious pensions to expose the traitor and his minions? There aren't. There aren't national security personnel, intelligence personnel or generals willing to risk their pensions. Comfort is God in Washington.

Third Coast said...

My favorite example of the media covering a truly horrific abuse of executive authority (sarc.) was the Valerie Plame affair. That one still almost makes me laugh out loud.

Chip Ahoy said...

Bags, they go along because their own lesser jobs are on the line. You don't just quit your job over things you do not completely understand. And we see they do not go along completely. They are complaining as they hang onto their jobs.

Higher up, executively, it is the shiftless character in position of boss. Fixing numbers instead of fixing the situation correctly to the satisfaction of his office.

The numbers do not look good. Useful as metric for how well executive is doing. Now executive rules the whole game, controls the departments. It's his show, the job getting done with available resources, and doing the metrics on itself as measure to how well.

The shiftless executive is not interested in accurate performance feedback. His own feedback about his own performance on his own operation does not make him look good and that is more important than the actual job. So he changes whatever end needs adjusting, brilliant! tweaked to make him look good, brilliant!

*buffs nails* He's so terribly clever.

Visa violators are not showing up to court. They simply ignore the order to appear. There are way too many cases to account for. The situation is completely out of control. The numbers make shiftless executive look very bad. Fix the numbers. Simple as that. The situation is impossible all around in its totality with all things considered not just the citizens vs immigrants; the strong opposition in his own base, his own personal attitude, the area of the country that does not support him, vexes him, and the portion that does support that compounds the whole problem. He orders detainees released. Orders catch and release to shiftlessly fix the numbers to his feckless compounded problems. His unique problem of numbers has a simple fix because the whole show is his and lives incidental.

As for future attacks, that's all on someone else, everyone else, nobody else. All failures are collective, diffused. And never the fault of executive. When executive is D. Conversely, as you know, absolutely everything that occurs even weather even feckless response by state D and city D governments all devolve down to federal executive decision if executive is R, even a shortage of flue vaccine is direct result of executive R, because *eyes bulge* somebody has to be responsible. But not with executive D.

Any future attack will occur under executive R.

All other attacks, all misfortunes under executive D are characterized as some other problem. Certainly not one of executive decision making. There are no warmer words than, "We got your back."

That's one reason Dexter's taken to me.

He was opening a closet that stores packages. He fumbled a large ring of keys but none worked. A black woman passed behind us and ignoring me spoke directly to Dexter, "Better be careful. Does't look good."

It didn't look good. A black guy desperately trying to enter a locked closet.

Standing between the two, I said, "I got him covered." *spread out my arms protectively* "White privilege."

It was her joke. Not mine. She started it. They giggled. Apparently they liked my response because it's been very good between all three of us since. Acknowledging that observation of theirs simply and flatly, as a joke, worked for me. I have no power to stop a policeman being suspicious. But that whole joke of suspicion and protection is shared.

I'm Full of Soup said...

Look Obama and Dems will just blame the new Repub president in 350 days if an attack occurs after he leaves office. It won't matter that the perps crossed our porous border while Obama was president.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

It could Valerie Jarrett, on her own.

bagoh20 said...

Nobody is answering the question: Why would someone in the administration want this? Covering your ass doesn't explain why anyone would order this. Covering your ass doesn't make sense unless someone very powerful wants an attack. If there is an attack, then you risk losing everything, possibly going to jail, or becoming the most hated person in America when it all comes out.

bagoh20 said...

Nobody dislikes Obama anymore than I do, but this sounds like back when the Leftist fever swamp was saying Bush went into Iraq to avenge his dad or for Haliburton. Even those theories at least had some motivation beyond suicidal evil.

Trooper York said...

Obama supports the efforts and desires of radical Muslim extremism. Plain and simple. He has always been a Manchurian candidate. He is only constrained by what he thinks he can get away with. The closer he gets to leaving office the bolder he will be.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Why would someone in the administration want this?

2009–2011: Operation Fast and Furious[edit]
On October 26, 2009, a teleconference was held at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. to discuss U.S. strategy for combating Mexican drug cartels. Participating in the meeting were Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, acting ATF Director Kenneth E. Melson, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Michele Leonhart, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert Mueller and the top federal prosecutors in the Southwestern border states. They decided on a strategy to identify and eliminate entire arms trafficking networks rather than low-level buyers.[3][38][39] Those at the meeting apparently did not suggest using the "gunwalking" tactic, but Phoenix ATF supervisors would soon use it in an attempt to achieve the desired goals.[40] (emphasis added)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal#2009.E2.80.932011:_Operation_Fast_and_Furious

Guildofcannonballs said...

In between Sportscenter and Cowherd Obama saw an ad for a movie where the CIA follows some low level guys suspected of down-low-on-the-scale-activities among swarthy immigrants around so our Top Men can monitor their activities; get to really, really know them inside and out as it were.

But you can't have low-levels know any possible info identifying the red-flaggers as possible red-flaggers so you demand the red flags be erased, for the greater good in service of America and her interests only, thank you very much.

bagoh20 said...

Yea, So why do Americans in positions of responsibility want a terrorist attack on the U.S? This isn't a mistake or misguided policy. This would be outright treasonous sabotage.

chickelit said...

Why would anyone in the Obama administration want this unless it was to bring Obama down?

An attack (or series of attacks) could excuse an imposition of martial law followed by a suspension of elections in the fall.

William said...

America does not discriminate on the basis of religion, and that includes jihadis. That's just not who we are. First they came for the jihadis. Then the momentum of the slippery slope increases, and elderly nuns are sent to concentration camps. Thank God we have a president who sees the need to protect religious liberty. The most beautiful sound in the world, after the call to payer of course, is the boom of the suicide bomber. When you hear that boom, you know that Ametica does not discriminate against Muslims.