Haney: I can tell you I would have identified it because individuals who were already in the case [i.e., of Tablighi Jamaat and its associated mosque networks] in 2012 went to that mosque. Therefore, as we were tracking them, we would have put the red light on them.
Therefore, two things very plausibly would have happened. Either Syed [Farook] would have been put on the no-fly list because of his association with that mosque [unclear]; and/or, the K-1 visa that his wife was given may have been denied because of his affiliation with a known organization.
Kelly: And you say they shut you down because they felt this was essentially profiling of Muslims.
Haney: They specifically said that, because we FOIA’ed the case, and we got the internal memos, and it says that we are not allowed to develop a case based on Tablighi Jamaat specifically, and/or any Islamic group.
There really is no nuanced spin that can be put on something like this. No valid argument can be made that a Pakistani Islamist group whose members have so frequently been implicated in terror plots and attacks (again, see the Daily Caller list of overseas attacks) should be left untracked in the interest of “civil rights.”
Haney himself, meanwhile, wasn’t just shut down. When he tried to fight for his program to track Deobandis (whose ranks, not coincidentally, include prominent figures in the Islamic State hierarchy), he was hounded out of DHS. According to The Federalist:
[Haney] met with the DHS Inspector General in 2013, in coordination with several Members of Congress. DHS and the Justice Department then subjected him to investigations, none of which showed wrongdoing, he said. In September 2014, they sequestered him, revoked his access to the database and revoked his security clearance.
Unfortunately, the level of Haney’s concern about the fundamentalists he was tracking comports perfectly with the level of threat they have posed in the past 15 years. His scenario, in which tracking Tablighi Jamaat would have flagged Farook and Malik, is indeed very plausible.
But the Obama administration specifically and explicitly shut that tracking program down in 2012, and destroyed the records associated with it.