His name is Philip Haney, and he worked at the Department of Homeland Security for 15 years. He has a first-person account at The Hill chronicling his time in the agency under the Obama administration. It begins:
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.”
The wholesale condemnation, Haney goes on to write, adversely affected morale at DHS, especially in light of administration efforts to “erase” those very “dots” the president complained were not being connected:
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).
Taken by itself, Haney’s account will be dismissed by Obama supporters as the one-off ravings of a malcontent, even though there are stories like this coming out each day. On Wednesday, Kenric Ward wrote of administration plans to halve the budget of Operation Phalanx, an aerial surveillance program that employs military units to aid in keeping the southern border secure. Arguments that the move is a necessary budget cut are belied by the fact the program has already been fully funded.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Yesterday, LU carried an excerpt from an article by The Daily Caller’s Alex Pfeiffer noting that a top Border Patrol agent revealed on Thursday that he and his border agents can expect to be terminated if they do their job and ask illegal aliens why they are coming to the U.S.
When is the president going to be called on to explain his actions?
