Conservatives Blast Obama On Terror Attack, Miss Key Clues

At the National Press Club this week, a panel of conservatives this week harshly attacked President Obama and his administration’s handling of Orlando-type terrorism threats. Their partisan passion helps illuminate the nation’s deep voter divides and lack of basic information even among elected officials about covert intrigues.

Author Philip B. Haney and four other current or former officials accused the president of leading an incompetent administration whose top law enforcers and other key personnel coddle radical Islamists.

Our column today reports on their allegations, which matched similar claims being raised by presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and conservatives elsewhere around the nation. Indeed, nearly half of the two dozen attendees at the press conference were Trump supporters who rose in near-unison several times to applaud the major panelists.

In Florida, RealClearPolitics reported, Florida Governor Rick Scott: “We’re Fed Up” With Radical Islam.

A second part of our coverage will report facts about the Orlando massacre and the Obama administration that are trivialized or suppressed by both authorities and the mainstream media. These revelations show that at least some of the conservatives’ complaints are valid even if many of the critics lack information on the root causes of their complaints.

The gist in our view is that top officials at the very highest levels apparently do not trust many subordinates and elected oversight officials with sensitive information even though the U.S. constitutional system requires that an elected congress maintain oversight over governmental operations. We provide on that in Part II of this report.

For now, we begin with the featured speaker June 14, Philip B. Haney. The author and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counter-terrorism expert is shown at left in a screen shot from a television interview.

Haney alleges that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, hamstrings the DHS and other public safety personnel with this rule for suspects: “Even if a person is affiliated with a known terrorist organization you [the federal employee] can’t assume he is a terrorist.”

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and former Bush Administration Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz were among those at the press conference endorsing Haney’s warning and his new book, See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, co-authored by WND editor Art Moore.

Bachmann, for example, said the FBI and DHS repeatedly thwarted her attempts to get answers to her questions on the kinds of security issues raised by Haney, even though she is an attorney who had been a member of the House Intelligence Committee before leaving office in 2015.

Haney complained that after he identified some 300 suspected “terrorists” from non-classified documents he was subjected to a federal grand jury probe and treated with such suspicion otherwise that he was ousted from his office, confined to cubicle, and forced to surrender the gun that he normally carried as part of his workday.

Haney and other panelists described his longtime concerns as especially timely following the fatal shootings in the early morning hours of June 12 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Authorities have said the shooter was Omar Mateen, 29, a security guard who had been been under repeated FBI investigation on suspicions of sympathy for radical terrorism.

Mateen, shown in a photo, was reported to have vowed allegiance to both ISIS and Al Qaeda as he used an AK-47 semi-automatic and a handgun for the killing spree that killed 49 nightclub patrons and staff at the gay club before police team killed him at approximately 5 a.m.