CA attack could have been prevented

BackgroundChecksA counterterrorism program gutted in 2012 may have been able to thwart the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employee declared on Fox News during an interview with host Megan Kelly.

Phillip Haney said that during his work on the Intelligence Review Unit (IRU) at DHS, he flagged the Redlands, Ca., mosque that was attended by Syed Farook, one of the two shooters in California. Haney said the program would have likely singled out Farook and prevented him from bringing the other shooter, his fiancée Tafsheen Malik, into the country on a K-1 visa.

“I can tell you how I would have identified it, because individuals that were already in the case in 2012 went to that mosque,” Haney said Thursday night on Fox News’s “The Kelly File.” “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 would have been put on the no-fly list because of his association with that mosque, and/or the K-1 visa that his wife was given may have been denied because of his affiliation with a known organization,” he added.

Haney, a founding DHS member, said the program was shut down in 2012 by the State Department and the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties because it profiled Islamic groups.

“They specifically said that… we are not allowed to develop a case based on … any Islamic group,” he said.

Read more on the story from The Hill.com by clicking here.

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