The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been accused of deleting intelligence records relating to dangerous Islamists linked to terrorists Sayed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, because they wanted to protect the “civil liberties” of members of the caliphate-supporting network.
Phil Haney, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol analyst, says he was ordered to stop investigating Deobandi Islamist groups and his work on them was erased. He even says he was subjected to a disciplinary when he attempted to blow the whistle.
If he’d been allowed to continue his investigation, he claims Malik’s visa application would have been flagged for greater scrutiny.
He explained: “The administration was more concerned about the civil rights and liberties of foreign Islamic groups with terrorist ties than the safety and security of Americans”.
Analyst Phil Haney told Fox News that he once worked as a researcher looking into potential terrorists in the Passenger Analysis Units at the Department of Homeland Security in Atlanta, as well as at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center.
Mr. Haney says that he had been identifying and tracking members of the al-Huda and Tablighi Jamaat groups, offshoots of the radical Deobandi school of Islam, which was founded in British colonial India specifically to oppose western culture.
Tablighi Jamaat is a Deobandi revivalist movement whose mandate is, according to its leading advocate Ebrahim Rangooni, to save the Muslim world “from the culture and civilisation of the Jews and the Christians…” To this end, he has suggested cultivating “such hatred for their ways as human beings have to urine and excrement.”
Tablighi Jamaat have been linked to 80 per cent of all recent terrorist related crimes in France.
Mr. Haney’s work tracking the radical movement was considered so important that he says he was given an agency award for identifying potential terrorists, and he was asked to become part of the National Targeting Center, which works to connect the dots and build a bigger picture of terrorist activity.
However, after more than six months tracking the Deobandis, Homeland Security unexpectedly halted his investigation on the request of the State Department’s Office of Civil Rights, Haney alleges.
According to Mr. Haney, the agencies argued that since the radical Islamist groups are not specially designated as terrorist organizations, tracking individuals related to them was a violation of the their “civil liberties.”
After his work was shut down he says he met with the DHS Inspector General several Members of Congress in 2013. The DHS and the Justice Department subjected him to an investigation, which showed no wrongdoing on his part, Mr. Haney claims.
However, in September 2014 they sequestered him and revoked his access to the database and his security clearance.
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