Why We Can’t Connect the Dots to Prevent Jihad Attacks

by Jerry Gordon (July 2016)

Orlando jihad massacre perpetrator Omar Mateen and Palestinian émigré wife Noor Salman

In the wake of the Orlando Pulse gay nightclub massacre that took 49 lives, injuring 53 others, a number of questions have arisen about why the FBI investigations of the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, didn’t prevent him from carrying out his homicidal jihad. Moreover, after 9/11, Fort Hood, Chattanooga, Garland, San Bernardino and now Orlando, questions have arisen about conduct of counterterrorism programs of the DHS and especially the FBI, that abets willful blindness to the threat posed by radicalized domestic Muslims. This is especially disturbing in the wake of the largest mass shooting in American history and the largest domestic death toll in an Islamic terror attack since 9/11. After the attack, FBI Director James Comey said that in 2014 it had run operatives against him, conducted surveillance, including electronic, yet it didn’t provide enough evidentiary material to bring charges. Perhaps they may have even spoken with fellow co-workers who now allege to the media that Mateen expressed violent views. 

Dr. Sebastian Gorka
Source: FoxNews Insider News

Dr. Sebastian Gorka, counterterrorism expert and author of the best-selling, ISIS Defeated; the winnable War, said on Hannity’s America:

I work with FBI agents. They are loyal patriotic Americans. But the problem is the politically correct matrix imposed by the Department of Justice on top of the FBI.

Watch the Fox News Hannity interview with Dr. Gorka.

Following the breaking news about Mateen’s jihad, the FBI disclosed it had conducted two investigations in 2013 and 2014 on Mateen’s alleged connections to al Qaeda. They also investigated his relations with Moner Abu-Salha, the first American suicide bomber in Syria who attended the same Fort Pierce, Florida Mosque. Abu-Salha fled Florida for Syria to join al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusrah. Mateen had allegedly listened to tapes by the American-born leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki, and watched on-line videos of ISIS beheading or burning victims.

We now know that Mateen and his second wife, Noor Salman, had traveled to Orlando ostensibly on a trip to Disney World. That may have allowed him to case the premises of the Pulse nightclub as well as Disney properties in Orlando. His wife knew of his purchases of the SigSauerMCX semi-automatic carbine and Glock pistol with large capacity magazines and was with him when he went to another gun shop dealer to purchase military grade body armor and bulk ammunition. The alert gun shop owner contacted the FBI. They did not follow up to investigate Mateen a third time. Mateen’s wife didn’t notify the police about her husband homicidal jihad intentions. Now she is the subject of a grand jury investigation that might bring possible multiple charges of being an accomplice in her husband’s atrocities.

There are suggestions by his former wife that Mateen may have exhibited conflicted perceptions of his sexual identity that might have been a factor in his violence towards her that ended the four month marriage seven years earlier. So far, no evidence has been found supporting this claim, however.

Dr. Michael Welner, forensic psychiatrist
Screen grab: ABC Good Morning America

Dr. Michael Welner, noted forensic psychiatrist, chairman of the Forensic Panel and an expert witness for the prosecution in numerous high profile mass-killing and terrorist cases was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America, June 15, 2016 about his views on the Orlando jihad by Mateen. Welner differentiated mass killings between “vanity” spectacles done by an individuals versus “ideological” ones that involved co-conspirators. Orlando fit the latter category, as Mateen’s wife Noor Salman was a co-conspirator who assisted her husband in casing locations. He notes that she easily could have stopped it by going to police, but didn’t. This mass killing, he suggested, was an ideologically driven spectacle mass killing “targeting Americans, targeting America and was allied with Islamic supremacists supporting destruction of America.” Mateen knew that there were many defenseless people packed in the Pulse nightclub that he could kill efficiently. As to his sexual orientation conflicts, Welner noted that jihad committed during Ramadan begets forgiveness under Islamic law. As to Mateen’s own sexual conflicts, Welner noted homosexuality is prevalent in the male culture of Afghanistan.

Listen to the Lisa Benson Show interview with Drs. Sebastian Gorka and Michael Welner, June 19, 2016.

In the wake of the Orlando Massacre by Omar Mateen, the country is desperately seeking answers on what policies and strategies that might be adopted to prevent another ideologically driven mass killing in an enclosed space using military grade weapons against soft targets and having accomplices. A mass killing by self-motivated members of a virtual Islamic supremacist global network. San Bernardino and Orlando attacks demonstrate these were both ideologically driven.

Both Gorka and Welner reject the deranged “lone wolf” assessments of the Administration and self-styled counterterrorism experts. They also blame the Administration for rejecting the Islamic supremacist doctrine behind this homicidal jihad committed during the month-long Muslim observances of Ramadan. Effectively, Gorka and Welner are like the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen fable who points out the obvious.

President Obama and the mainstream media deny the homicidal jihad doctrine of Salafist Islam espoused by the Islamic State to whom these attackers pledged fealty for fear of offending domestic and international Muslim communities. Communities, whose leaders are complicit in supporting Islamic supremacism, whether Sunni or Shia. Instead the Administration and the media blame such terrorist attacks on alleged deranged individuals using guns, expressing hate of minority groups without naming what the doctrinal motivation is behind them.

For answers as to why our federal law enforcement and immigration agencies cannot connect the dots to prevent network jihadi homicidal attacks, we recently had the opportunity to interview Philip Haney, co-author of best-selling expose, See Something; Say Nothing:  A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad,.

Listen to the June 26, 2016 Lisa Benson Show interview with Dr. Haney.

Philip B. Haney

Haney is a classic whistleblower with a difference. He morphed from a PhD USDA entomologist to become one of the first members of the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Custom and Border Protection (CBP) service. He half jokingly said that his training with insects enabled him to follow the ants and other insects back to their nests, identifying their networks. Besides his professional education, he was also linguistically and culturally equipped by dint of episodes in the Middle East and Africa to become conversant in Arabic and Qur’anic Islamic doctrine and Sharia law. That enabled Haney as a new DHS officer to ultimate interview and spot jihadist Visa waiver violators at the Port of Atlanta. His natural intellectual curiosity enabled him to spot and intercept more than 300 potential terrorist threats.

His self education also led to writing monographs on the network of jihadist threats in a 2006 Front Page Magazine (FPM) article, Green Tide Rising. It was about globally designated terrorist group Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the US. He has noted in both his book and interviews that his information was two years before the federal Dallas Holy Land Foundation trial. That trial resulted in multiple convictions for funneling more than $35 million via this Muslim charity to Hamas. It also identified co-conspirators, Muslim Brotherhood front groups, Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Saudi-financed North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) that funds the creation of 80 percent of Mosques in the US. Other identified by federal prosecutors included the Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Muslim Students Association (MSA).

That FPM article caused his first brush with the politically correct, civil rights and civil liberties views of the DHS hierarchy that subsequently falsely accused Haney of violating security laws regarding alleged confidential information. Upon investigation, it was discovered that all of the information in Haney article was drawn from open sources.

Ultimately, he was exonerated, as he was in more than 8 other instances over his 13 years of service at DHS before his retirement in 2015. His expertise was recognized in several assignments. Most notably were assignments at the National Targeting Center of DHS and requests for his assistance by counterterrorism echelons of the FBI. In 2012, five members of the House Homeland Security and Intelligence committees wrote a letter to the Inspector Generals of several defense and national security agencies. They were seeking information on infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood front group members. Haney on his own recognizance briefed these and dozens of other Members and Congress and Senators who found his analysis both compelling and incisive about the threat the nation faced. Ultimately he would be invited to more than 45 such private Congressional briefings.

The worst episode of the nine investigations brought against him was the convening of a Grand Jury investigation into allegations stemming from an FBI investigation into a Saudi national student who was injured at the Boston Marathon bombing perpetrated by the Tsarneav brothers. Haney was in possession of the FBI reports on that Saudi person of interest who was subsequently deported. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano went on television to indicate that there were no identified perpetrators or suspects before the identities of the Tsarneav brothers were revealed. Because Haney had briefed members of the House and Senate Homeland Security and Intelligence Committees at the behest of chairmen, he was falsely accused of leaking the information. Napolitano had misinformed Homeland Security Committee members about the existence of the Saudi national who had violated his student Visa. Ultimately, as in the previous eight other episodes, Haney was exonerated just prior to his retirement from DHS.

We queried him about why the FBI and DHS have failed in too many instances to identify jihadist networks. He attributed it to the lack of intelligence sharing and the limitations placed on law enforcement by civil rights and civil liberties priorities of the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. That was evident in guidelines that indicated that just because a person belonged to a terrorist backing organization, he or she should not necessarily be considered a terrorist. 

Haney uncovered a network of members of the Tablighi Jamaat, (TJ) meaning “party of the promoters” in Arabic, infiltrating the US. They sent several domestic madrassa boys abroad from the port of Atlanta to an English speaking madrassa in the Republic of South Africa. The TJ movement sprang from the Deobandi influenced clerics from India and Pakistan. Haney indicated that TJ Islamic doctrine is the equivalent of ISIS Salafism or Saudi Wahhabism. The TJ movement aimed at proselytizing other Sunni Muslims and gaining converts from other religions. It is estimated to have between 70 to over 120 million adherents globally. Their influence spawned the Taliban and radical terrorist groups like Lakshmi al Taiba whose adherents perpetrated the Mumbai jihad massacre of 2008. In the US, the TJ has a beehive madrassa, the International Islamic Education (IIE) school based in Chicago, which is affiliated with the Bridgewater Islamic Center. Haney suggested that the designation of mosques as “centers” usually was a tip off that it was a TJ doctrine group.

When news broke of the Orlando massacre, Haney went through an intelligence exercise. He demonstrated that the TJ network that encompassed the Fort Pierce Florida “center” was attended by perpetrator Omar Mateen and revealed his father’s membership on the board. The Fort Pierce masjid or mosque had connections to the IIE in Chicago, which in turn, had connections to the San Bernardino Dar-al-Uloom al-Islamiya of America mosque where terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook worshipped. The Pakistani imam, Roshan Zamir Abbassi, told FBI investigators that he barely knew Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. Malik had been a convert to TJ Deobandism while attending the al Hulda women’s seminary in Pakistan. The founder of the al Hulda seminary had migrated to Canada and founded an affiliate in a suburb of Toronto where three women were recruited to join ISIS in Syria. The National Security Task Force of America of the Lisa Benson Show uncovered a TJ affiliated network of Shifa health clinics in the Bible belt that spread across the US. It was directed at providing health care to low income minorities along with da’wa, the call to Islam. Haney further noted that Farook’s choice to return to the US with his Pakistani bride via Chicago and their appearance in Sharia compliant attire was purposeful. It was deemed a safer port of entry than Atlanta.

The FBI, according to Haney, is not trained in profile considerations because of the over-arching civil rights and civil liberties concerns of the Bush and the Obama Administrations. That led to the creation of the countering violent extremism program at DHS which includes Muslim Brotherhood front group advisors. FBI training lacks the necessary nuances to detect adherents of potentially seditious Islamic doctrine under Sharia. That was compounded by the lack of domestic intelligence and communications with the DHS Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that has vastly more enforcement authority on immigration issues. Thus, the FBI had investigated Orlando jihadist Mateen three times without alerting the CBP which could have provided information on Mateen’s prior trips to Saudi Arabia.

Haney was part of a panel that included four prominent counter-jihadists at a hearing of the US Senate Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee on “Radical Islam” and terrorism. The hearing was chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on June 28, 2016. Others of note included Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, Chris Gaubatz, undercover investigator and former federal prosecutor, and former federal prosecutor and author, Andrew McCarthy. There were also representatives from ISNA and a retired FBI agent on the panel. 

In Haney’s view, the 3 hour plus hearing was a watershed moment. It revealed the extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence in Congress, the Administration and in advisory positions in national law and immigration enforcement agencies. The hearing also exposed their ultimate goal of supplanting our Constitution with Sharia, Islamic law. Asked what could be done to thwart entry of such threats, Haney said, give the CBP officers in all the ports in the US three weeks training in the Islamic supremacist threat doctrine and the message would be spread globally in the Muslim ummah they could be stopped.

 

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Also see Jerry Gordon’s collection of interviews, The West Speaks.

 

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