If the inestimable Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney were still with us, he would have a lot to say about Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s new report finding the FBI let at least six homegrown terrorists fall off its radar before carrying out attacks that killed a total of 70 Americans.
Haney, whose death Feb. 21 is still under investigation, had first-hand knowledge of the FBI’s mishandling of evidence tied to figures cited in Horowitz’s report, including the perpetrators of the San Bernardino, Orlando and Boston Marathon attacks.
The retired Islam subject matter analyst, a founding member of DHS, would have noticed a fundamental flaw in Horowitz’s conclusions. A flaw similar, in fact, to the one pointed out by many regarding the IG’s January report on the FISA warrants the Obama administration obtained to surveil the Trump campaign in 2016.
In his FISA report, Horowitz found “significant errors and omissions,” refusing to conclude what his own carefully laid out evidence clearly showed: that the “failures” were intentional, driven by ideology and politics.
In his latest report, released Wednesday, there’s also an ideological elephant in the room, shielded by a focus on failures of “oversight,” “procedures,” “strategies” and “techniques.”
With the exception of a reference to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, better known as ISIS, there is no mention of Islam in the report, titled “Audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Efforts to Identify Homegrown Violent Extremists through Counterterrorism Assessments.”
What was the standard he didn’t meet?
Haney, who was punished and exonerated nine times during his career for taking into account the religious dimension to terrorism, often asked a simple question after yet another person previously known to authorities carried out an attack.
“What is the law-enforcement standard he didn’t meet that caused his case to go dark?”
“Our criteria are off,” he told WND in an interview in 2017. “We can’t keep saying he didn’t meet the criteria. It’s obvious that what we’re doing now isn’t working effectively.”
The West, he said, has “a blind spot” when it comes to the threat of Islamic jihad.
Robert Spencer, the prolific author of books on that threat and the director of Jihad Watch, saw the Horowitz report’s glaring blind spot.
He told WND the report “makes no attempt whatsoever either to identify or explain the importance of the motivating ideology behind jihad terror attacks.”
“The failure of the intelligence community to study and understand that ideology is what led to a great many of the procedural errors upon which the report does focus: Agents in all too many cases simply didn’t know what to look for, or how to understand the significance of the information they did have,” Spencer said.
“Unless and until this is corrected, these failures of oversight and procedure will continue, no matter what safeguards are put into place.”
Haney saw that firsthand when he was a member of the advanced unit at the National Targeting Center, which provides information in real time to officers at ports of entry. He helped develop a case in 2011 on a worldwide Islamic movement known as Tablighi Jamaat. Within a few months, the case drew the “concern” of the State Department and the DHS’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office because the Obama administration believed it unfairly singled out Muslims. The case effectively was shut down, even though the intelligence had been used to connect members of the movement to several terrorist organizations and financing at the highest levels, including for Hamas and al-Qaida.
Only a few years later, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were found to have been tied to Tablighi Jamaat, meaning if the case had been allowed to continue, the attack might have been prevented. Later, Haney also found the Orlando killer Mateen had a link to the case.
Haney said that if he had been given the opportunity to question San Bernardino killer Farook upon his return to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia in 2014, he would have asked him about the fact that he had grown a Shariah-compliant beard and was wearing an Islamic headdress while his passport photo showed him bareheaded and clean-shaven.
He explained that while a person’s appearance certainly isn’t itself an indicator of a threat, when combined with other information, a profile could emerge of a conversion to belief in the authority of Shariah, or Islamic law, over “man-made” laws and the obligation to spread it.
Haney emphasized that the problem the West ultimately faces is not terrorism, which is a tactic; but the spread of Shariah, an all-encompassing system of life and governance that clashes with the U.S. Constitution.
“We need to adjust and improve our ability to observe and address this tactical blind spot,” Haney said in the 2017 interview.
“You can still do it without violating our civil rights and civil liberties.”
When he worked for DHS, he and his colleagues collected information on visitors to the U.S. that included their travel patterns.
“Through law enforcement tools, we got to a place where had a functional database with derogatory information on 1,600 individuals that enabled us to take law enforcement actions based on observable trends,” he explained.
It didn’t mean, he pointed out, that all of those people were immediately barred from entry or arrested if they were in the country.
“We didn’t just go in there wholesale and shut them down, but in the process of monitoring them we would have noticed if all of sudden there was an outbreak of x, y and z events happening near, let’s say, LaGuardia Airport, that would indicate possible terrorist or criminal activity,” said Haney.
“You have to be able to establish criteria and have the legal authority to continue gathering information,” he said.
“That’s what’s called connecting the dots. It’s basic,” Haney emphasized.
“But if your government tells you you can’t use your authority to connect the dots, you find yourself where we are.”
Haney testified to a Senate committee in June 2016 of the “purging” of his intelligence on terrorist networks in the U.S. It included the Obama administration’s “modification” or elimination more than 800 of his records related to the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S. because they were deemed to be an offense to Muslims.
See Rep. Louie Gohmert’s tribute to Philip Haney on the House floor:
‘Inappropriate and intrusive questions’
WND reported in January 2017 the pressure put on the federal government by Islamic groups funded from abroad to remove religious indicators from law enforcement practices and policies.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations – a U.S. front for the Muslim Brotherhood, according to FBI evidence – filed complaints in January with Customs and Border Protection, DHS and the Justice Department “reporting the systematic targeting of American-Muslim citizens for enhanced screening by CBP.”
CAIR’s Florida branch further complained that CBP had asked American Muslims “inappropriate and intrusive questions” at secondary inspection and has “passed that information on to the FBI to maintain a registry of information on American Muslims.”
Among the questions the group found objectionable were:
- Are you a devout Muslim?
- How many times a day do you pray?
- What school of thought do you follow?
- What Muslim scholars do you listen to?
- What do they preach in your mosque?”
Included in CAIR-Florida’s complaints to the CBP were questions asked of a Canadian Muslim citizen who was denied entry to the U.S.
Among them was, “Why did you shave your beard?”
‘No nexus to terrorism’
The new Horowitz report found FBI agents closed down the cases of six terrorists who later carried out attacks killing a total of 70 people.
Along with the San Bernardino killers, they included Mateen, who killed 49 people in Orlando in 2016, Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, and Esteban Santiago-Ruiz, who killed five in 2017 at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
Agents also failed to investigate Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who conducted the 2013 Boston Marathon terror attack with his brother, even after he was flagged by an internal bureau database.
Tsarnaev was determined to “have no nexus to terrorism.”
Haney had compiled a database of information about the radical mosque attended by the Tsarnaev brothers that was ignored by investigators.
Another missed terrorist, Horowitz said, was Elton Simpson, who attacked a Garland, Texas, art exhibit featuring cartoon images of Muhammad after agents received threat information.
Horowitz faulted the FBI’s counterterrorism program division managers for failing to conduct oversight of its homegrown violent extremist assessments.
Even after identifying lapses, about 40% of the FBI’s counterterrorism assessments went unaddressed for 18 months, Horowitz found.
“The FBI has acknowledged that various weaknesses related to its assessment process may have impacted its ability to fully investigate certain counterterrorism assessment subjects, who later committed terrorist acts in the United States,” he wrote.
Horowitz offered seven recommendations for the FBI to develop a “comprehensive strategy” for investigating terror suspects, including providing clear guidance to field offices on investigative steps.
Suzanne Turner, an FBI section chief in the inspection division, said in a written response to the report that the bureau is complying with the recommendations.
“We agree it is important to continue to improve the assessment process, provide adequate guidance, training and program management for all Guardians and those specifically addressing homegrown violent extremists,” she wrote. “In that regard we concur with the seven recommendations for the FBI.”
