A whistleblower from the Department of Homeland Security has come forward to reveal that an investigation he was conducting on a fundamentalist Islamic group could have “put the red light” on the San Bernardino terrorists, potentially preventing their deadly attack, but it was abruptly shut down. The reason: fears that it involved “profiling” of Muslims.
Former DHS employee Philip Haney told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly Thursday that intelligence work he was a part of in 2012 would have “put the red light” on radicalized Muslim extremists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Working as an agent with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center, Haney was investigating a Sunni Islamic group, Tablighi Jamaat, which has been linked to attempted terror attacks and was part of a larger umbrella fundamentalist movement called the Deobandi movement.
Both the al-Huda school in Pakistan which Malik attended and Farook’s mosque have ties to the fundamentalist Deobandi movement, said Haney.
“…we were not allowed to develop a case, based on…any Islamic group.”
Philip Haney, Former DHS Employee
A year into collecting information that Haney said could have been used specifically to flag Farook and Malik, the investigation was shut down by the State Department and the Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The reason it was quashed, said Haney, was that “we were not allowed to develop a case, based on…any Islamic group.”
When his superiors shut down the investigation, Haney said they destroyed all the intelligence he had accumulated, which included information on the Dar-al-Uloom al-Islamia organization, part of the Deobandi movement, that had ties to Farook’s mosque.
“[T]wo things very plausibly would have happened,” said Haney. “Either Syed would have been put on the No-Fly List, because of association with that mosque, and/or the K-1 visa that his wife was given may have been denied because of his affiliation with a known organization.”
Guest Marc Thiessen said in response to Haney’s testimony that this is “political correctness run amok” and defended many of the Republicans’ calls for heightening measures to clamp down on Islamic extremism as based not in bigotry but in a desire to protect the citizens of the United States.
When the dust began to settle after the horrific attack by two radicalized Muslim extremists in San Bernardino last week, witnesses told reporters that though they had noticed suspicious activity around Farook’s home, they chose not to report it out of fear of appearing to be “racially profiling.”
The increasing evidence of the obstructive role that political correctness played in preventing the attack has added a sobering weight to conservatives like Ted Cruz’s warnings that political correctness is killing in America.
The Daily Caller provides some background on terror history of Tablighi Jamaat:
Members of the sect were tied to the Oct. 2002 Portland Seven case and the Sept. 2002 Lackawanna Six case. Members were also involved in an Aug. 2006 plot to bomb airliners en route from London to the U.S. and attempted bombings in London and Glasgow, Scotland in July 2007. Stratfor also reported that Talighi Jamaat affiliates were involved in the the July 7, 2005 bombings. That attack left 52 dead and more than 700 injured.