This is from The Hill.
Full text:
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 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 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.
Has the Obama administration done a good job of preventing terrorist attacks? Does his attitude of blaming America deter terrorist attacks, or does it embolden radical Islamists to perform more attacks?
The Daily Caller lists 7 terrorist attacks that occurred during the 7 years of the Obama presidency, as of July 2015.
Here is one:
In November 2009, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire in an attack at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Hassan killed 13 people and wounded over 30 more.
In a document dated Oct. 18, 2012 obtained by Fox News, Hasan wrote: “I, Nidal Malik Hasan, am compelled to renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend man made constitution (like the constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam.”
The U.S. government has steadfastly refused to call Hasan’s militant slaughter a terrorist attack. Instead, federal officials have repeatedly characterized Hasan’s actions as “workplace violence.”
A U.S. military court sentenced Hasan, a military psychiatrist, to death in 2013.
And another:
In April 2013, Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev exploded two pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
The bombings killed three people including an eight-year-old boy. Hundreds of runners and spectators were seriously injured. Seventeen people saw their limbs blown off.
Three days later, the brothers ambushed and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died when his brother ran over him with a stolen Mercedes SUV in the midst of a shootout with police. In April, a jury found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of 30 criminal counts. He later received the death penalty.
There is a plan to protect us from these sorts of activities, and it was recently announced by Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch.
The Daily Wire reports:
Speaking to the audience at the Muslim Advocates’ 10th anniversary dinner Thursday, Lynch said her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America and vowed to prosecute any guilty of what she deemed violence-inspiring speech.
“The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence,” she said.
[…]After touting the numbers of “investigations into acts of anti-Muslim hatred” and “bigoted actions” against Muslims launched by her DOJ, Lynch suggested the Constitution does not protect “actions predicated on violent talk” and pledged to prosecute those responsible for such actions.
This is the same woman who declined to charge Lois Lerner for using the IRS as a weapon to persecute conservative groups in an election year.
Do you feel safe now? Do you think that the Democrats are serious about the threat of Islamic terrorism? Do you think that you should elect the Democrats again in November 2016?
WINTERY KNIGHT 