In 2009, an Islamist planned to kill 290 civilians on a Christmas Day flight from Europe to Detroit. Fortunately, the bomb material concealed in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear failed to detonate after alert passengers subdued and detained him. At that time, Barack Obama condemned the intelligence community, declaring, “This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” But Obama has disabled our national security capabilities in order to avoid the appearance of “profiling Muslims,” which has made “connecting the dots” more difficult. In the latest report from DHS whistleblower Philip Haney, just before the “underwear bomber” incident, he 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… These types of records are the basis for any ability to ‘connect dots’. … Even worse, going forward, my colleagues and I were prohibited from entering pertinent information into the database. … [T]he type of information that the Obama administration ordered removed from travel and national security databases was the kind of information that, if properly assessed, could have prevented subsequent domestic Islamist attacks like the ones committed by Faisal Shahzad (May 2010), Detroit ‘honor killing’ perpetrator Rahim A. Alfetlawi (2011); Amine El Khalifi, who plotted to blow up the U.S. Capitol (2012); Dzhokhar or Tamerlan Tsarnaev who conducted the Boston Marathon bombing (2013); Oklahoma beheading suspect Alton Nolen (2014); or the Muhammed Yusuf Abdulazeez attack (2015) killing five military personnel in Chattanooga Tennessee.”

Haney also notes the 2015 San Bernardino attack, killing 14 and severely wounding 22 others, could likely have been thwarted had intelligence not been scrubbed.

This politically correct “cleansing” of references to Islamic terrorist ties from critical national security databases is not only reckless, but is reminiscent of the last Democrat president’s obsession with keeping up PC appearances. In 1998, almost three years prior to the devastating 9/11 attack on our nation, the al-Qa'ida terrorist cell which organized that attack was already on U.S. Then-Demo chief Bill Clinton, had declined numerous opportunities to capture or kill their leader, Sheik Osama bin Laden, including TWO opportunities when our Spec Ops shooters had him, literally, in their sights. Clinton also refused an FBI field agent’s efforts to open a case file on Arab nationals who were, curiously, training to fly commercial aircraft, but not training for takeoffs or landings. The rationale for the case file denial was to avoid the appearance of any presumption of religious bias against Muslims.