“See Something, Say Nothing” SFR sits down with DHS whistleblower Phil Haney

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. And that will be particularly true today because we’re going to spend the full hour talking with a man of uncommon intelligence and with a background in national security that has drawn upon both intelligence and a lot of hard experience to try to protect our country from enemies foreign and domestic. He is Philip Haney, a career homeland security officer who has become a whistleblower about some of what he saw going on during his thirteen years at the Department of Homeland Security. He has chronicled many of these experiences in a brand new book by himself and Art Moore called See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. I’ve known Phil for some years. I’m a great admirer of his and consider him a personal friend and it’s a real pleasure to have him with us to talk about See Something, Say Nothing. Phil Haney, congratulations on the book and welcome.

PHILIP HANEY:

Thank you, Frank. Hello, everyone.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, thank you for giving us a full hour of your time today. Let me start by asking you to share with our listeners how you became one of our country’s leading counter-terrorism officers. It was an unlikely place to wind up, it seems from the starting point, which was as a career entomologist. A bug guy. Tell us how that migration took place. It’s a terrific story.

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, it’s – I spent a lot of time as a field agricultural entomologist, working on the ground with farmers in Middle Eastern countries, all over the world, for thirty years. That was my first career. But I had particular emphasis on the Middle East. And being on the ground, I naturally would want to learn the language of the people that I worked with, which I started to do. And then I also began studying Koranic Arabic as well. Just to have a better understanding of the gravitational forces within the cultures that I worked in. My particular emphasis was ants. I published quite a few scientific papers, review – peer review papers in that area, during my time at the University of California at Riverside. Really close to where the San Bernardino shootings took place in December. And two of the qualities of an entomologist that have direct application to counter-terrorism are close attention to detail and observation of behaviour. All living creatures have behaviour patterns that they follow. And in entomology, if you want to learn how to control a pest, you have to know how it behaves. So watching that gives you clues to points along their life cycle that you might be able to intervene and help the farmer reduce his pesticide costs. And attention to detail, that’s another key component of counter-terrorism. That’s what we call connecting the dots. Well, it has direct application in science as well. You connect dots, you make observations, your write things down on your famous clipboard, and pretty soon a picture emerges. Then you do statistical analysis on it. Develop your premise and prove that it was true. Well, the other component is, being a specialist in ants, I simply began to follow the trail and I would find the nest. And in counter-terrorism, you do the same thing.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So Phil, you migrated within the government from Department of Agriculture to the Department of Homeland Security at its founding in the case of the latter. I know that you wound up developing, in the course of that time, a considerable degree of familiarity with the patterns of behaviour of jihadists and the kind of trail that they would follow. Talk a little bit about the sort of patterns or what impels the behaviour of those Islamic supremacists, this doctrine they call shariah.

PHILIP HANEY:

Yeah, the shariah is the arena that they operate in. Some people have heard about ants, how they leave scent trails. And other insects do it, too, so they can follow each other around and not get lost. Well, that’s essentially what shariah is. That is the universe that Muslims live inside, it forms the boundaries of the world that they live in. And their attempt to implement shariah on a global basis, from their perspective, is an attempt to establish order in this chaotic, violent world that we live in. That’s why they always say that Islam is a religion of peace. Because for them, shariah equals peace. But the caveat to that statement that Islam is a religion of peace is just not right now.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Or not necessarily for everybody or the way it will come about is going to be pretty ugly for some folks, that’s for sure. And Phil, let me just ask you, this scent trail, as you put it, this attempt to impose order, you mentioned that this is the environment in which Muslims live. I think it’s important to say right up front that that’s not necessarily so for all Muslims, is it?

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, ultimately, if you’re observant, there in the deeper part of the ocean that you live in is the fundamental understanding that ultimately the goal will be to live underneath shariah law. That is the idealised view of the world that Islam intends to implement everywhere. So are all Muslims living under pure shariah? No. Are some? Yes. So there’s a spectrum all the way from almost nothing to as full of an expression of shariah as we know of in the world today, which would be places like Saudi Arabia and other very fundamentalist Islamic countries.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

I guess what I’m getting at, Phil, is that apart from the environment in which they live, and I think unquestionably people living in Saudi Arabia, for example, are definitely in the deep sea when it comes to this dynamic, this force, as you put it, I guess what I’m wondering about is Muslims here, is it fair to say since we don’t live under shariah, that there are some Muslims who embrace it, who aspire to impose it on everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and yet there are Muslims who either because of their culture, their background, their practice of the faith, their understanding of the requirements of the faith, simply don’t understand what shariah entails or don’t seek, at least, to live under it or make everybody else do the same?

PHIL HANEY:

Well, the unique thing about America is that we actually have a composite view of Islam, the full spectrum from virtual complete disavowal of following shariah all the way up to extremely strict application of shariah. We see that in some of these emerging areas of cities around America where it’s becoming more and more obvious that they’re implementing shariah all the way to, you know, people you might call secular Muslims that don’t appear to observe any of the mandates of shariah. It’s all in a kaleidoscope right here in the United States. We can see every portion of it, every form of expression of shariah that exists in the world is being expressed right here in the America, the whole spectrum.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

But I guess, Phil, just to round this out and we’ll pause here in a moment, when you talk about the phenomenon of shariah, and we’ll get into, in the next segment, what it requires of faithful Muslims, shariah-adherent Muslims, there would unquestionably be some, to go back to your metaphor of and your personal history with ants, there would be some that are fire ants, no question about it, there are some that may be ants that are completely benign and not a problem. But that they may all be ants. And I guess the question is, in our country, as you say, we have the spectrum. What I’m interested in, and I know you are, is countering those that embrace this shariah doctrine for the reasons that we’ll be discussing with Philip Haney, the co-author of See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. That and much more with Philip Haney, right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. We are engaged in a most important conversation with a most important man. He is Philip Haney. Important for a number of reasons, as we’ll talk about in the course of this hour long conversation with him, not least those that are described in his brand new book, See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, co-authored by Art Moore. And Phil, you were talking a little bit about this doctrine, this force, this environment that the faithful Muslims and, let’s be clear, the authorities of Islam say it’s the same thing as Islam, but they have as part of their DNA, I guess, something called jihad. And I’d like to ask you to talk a little bit about what that is. Is it a struggle to improve one’s self as a Muslim or something else?

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, but only marginally with the underlying understanding that the true struggle to improve yourself is to implement shariah. We always have to come back again to this gravitational force. The power that drives the global Islamic movement isn’t actually jihad. It is the call to implement shariah law. Jihad is a tactic that’s employed in various kaleidoscopic forms by the different groups that are all seeking exactly the same thing, no matter what their name might be, Boko Haram, Mosh Kitiva [PH], Tablighi Jamaat, Hezbollah, Hamas, they all have exactly the same goal. And that is to fully implement the law of Allah. We call it shariah. Jihad is just a tactic. That is why they say Islam is a religion of peace and I say, just not right now. Because they allow themselves the use of force if necessary to implement this noble goal of shariah law.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. And it turns out it’s necessary a lot when there’s fitna, as you have pointed out, resistance to that effort to impose shariah worldwide. We’re talking with Philip Haney about his new book, See Something, Say Nothing, and the experiences that it chronicles obtained in thirteen years of working as a counter-terrorism officer, assigned, much of it, to Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, one of the front lines of protecting our country against enemies foreign and domestic as well. And Phil, you were talking about jihad as a tactic for achieving the triumph of shariah worldwide, our submission I think is the term, the literal meaning, of course, of the word Islam, for all the world. Give us a sense of how jihad manifests itself. There is clearly, as you were suggesting a moment ago, a very strong element of it that involves violence.

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, there are actually at least five specific forms of jihad outlined in Koranic literature, ultimately in the shariah. We all remember Anwar al-Awlaki. His specialty was jihad fisabilillah-mal [PH] Jihad in the form of money, meaning financial attack. That was his forte. Everybody in the world knew that Anwar al-Awlaki was a specialist, like a kind of a doctor, in this particular arena of jihad, to break the economy of the West, for example. And that’s, by the way, one of the reasons why Anwar al-Awlaki is so popular is that he translated the abstract concepts of Koranic law, shariah, and abstract concepts of the Koran itself into English. He became the Rosetta Stone. He was bicultural and bilingual and translated these heretofore hard to understand concepts into English for everybody to understand. That is his legacy, if you will, from the Islamic perspective. He brought the light of Islam into the Western world by the use of language. His specialty was jihad fisabilillah-mal in money. There’s also jihad of the lisan, the language. In other words, you might call it promotions, like Tablighi Jamaat. Or you might call it outreach, engagement in dialogue. Those terms that we use in our own language, we don’t realise that there’s a mirror meaning to it from the Islamic perspective. And when we engage in outreach and dialogue, we’re actually performing a subtle component or enabling a subtle component of one form of jihad, which is promotion of Islam through words. The one we’re most familiar with is jihad with the sword, al-saif. That’s the one that gets the most attention in the world today, but it is by no means the only form of jihad. I would also like to mention that in all of our discussion of jihad that there are other verbs in the Koran that are magnitudes more violent, more powerful, if you will, than the verb jihad. The verb jihad occurs about forty times in the Koran in its different iterations. There are two other verbs, I call them operative verbs, that occur four times more frequently than the verb jihad. Those are slaughter, dekel [PH] and displace, which is haraj [PH], rhyming with garage. Those verbs are what I call operative verbs because they come into play whenever there is fitna, as you mentioned earlier. Any resistance to the promotion and implementation of shariah law anywhere in the world is seen as a fitna, an opposition. And when necessary, those other operative verbs aside from jihad come into play.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

This is fascinating. And in connection with that last piece, the haraj piece, I am assuming that one of the ways in which that is exercised, Philip Haney, is through what is known as hijra, the migration to expand the faith’s dominion, is that right?

PHILIP HANEY:

Yes, I’ll address that. But hijra is different than haraj. They are two completely different verbs. Haraj means to push away. When they say they were going to drive the Jews into the sea or the Iranians declare they’re going to eradicate this place, the Zionist regime, that’s the verb that they’re using. It’s a direct application from the Koran. But to address hijra, people who do hijra are called the muhajirun. As opposed to people who do jihad, they’re mujahideen. They do sound a little bit similar as well. And here’s the point our listening audience needs to really take to heart, people who are muhajirun, who immigrate to a foreign country for the sake of implementing Islam receive the same reward in heaven as those who fight with a gun. It’s an implicit understanding, it’s not passive or accidental. They know, let’s say intuitively, they’ve learned it from the time they were children, if they immigrate, if they become muhajirun, they are guaranteed the same reward in heaven as the ones who are called mujahideen, the ones who fight with guns.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So, Phil Haney, we’re going to have to pause here in a moment, but the short form of this is that this gravitational force within the faith of Islam, shariah, impels its adherents to engage in one form or another of jihad. It is their duty, it is their god-directed obligation. And what we’re going to confront in our further conversation with you is how that’s manifested itself in your personal experience trying to protect this country against these shariah-adherent Muslims and the jihad in which they’ve engaged. Our guest is, again, Philip Haney, co-author with Art Moore of See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. We’ll talk more with Phil right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. Again, our guest is Phil Haney for this full hour. We’re talking about his important brand new book, See Something, Say Nothing. I cannot commend it highly enough to you. Please, check it out. It’s perfect beach reading for the summer. It will make you extraordinarily knowledgeable about and concerned with the jihad that we are currently confronting in a number of different forms. And Phil, I wanted to turn to one of the groups that has been a prime mover behind several of the kinds of jihad you’ve just been talking about. It’s not that they are opposed to violent jihad, as I understand it, it’s just that they think it’s got its time and its place and in the meantime, some of these other things, the economic warfare, the material support for terrorism, the hijra, or the migration, civilisation jihad, as they call it, talk about those if you would and their perpetrators, the Muslim Brotherhood.

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is the primary driver of the modern Islamic revival movement. You may have heard quite often about the revolution in Iran that started in 1979. That’s the Shia version of the revolution or revival that actually started in 1928, if you want to put a precise date on it, with the founding of an organisation called the Koran al-Muslameen [PH], the Brotherhood of the Muslims. And their goal was to do exactly what we’ve been talking about already, implementation of shariah law starting in their own homeland and the working out from there to everyplace on the world. If you look at their logo, you’ll see that it has two crossed swords. That means implementation and enforcement of jihad internally and implementation and enforcement or promotion of jihad externally. If you look at the word of the bottom of their logo, it means prepare. That is derived directly from Koran 8:60. Prepare yourselves to terrify your enemy. If people say that terrorism is not in the Koran, they’re not telling you the truth because the word tahr-hubina [PH] is in the Koran and it means to terrify. It is actually part of the logo or the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood. They say that dying for the sake of Allah is their highest aspiration. And that jihad is a high calling. That is part of their logo as well, that’s part of their motto. So this group that we have been told repeatedly is a modern – I should say moderate, peaceful representation of the religion of Islam is by no means peaceful.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me ask you about that, Phil, because of course the director of national intelligence, the nation’s top intelligence officer, James Clapper, in 2011 actually went so far as to describe this as a, quote, largely secular group, unquote. And he said that it had no overarching agenda, at least internationally. Would you describe the accuracy of those two comments?

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, you know, I have a great love for our country and I do not enjoy openly contradicting or appearing to be criticising any of our publicly elected officials. But the sad truth is, is what he said is exactly opposite of what is really true.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Where could a guy who’s the top intelligence officer of the United States government – and it’s been pointed out, he was actually reading from what appeared to be official formal guidance on this question, where could he have cottoned an idea that was a hundred and eighty degrees out of synch with reality, Phil Haney?

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, let’s start with the fact that it was obviously a consensus statement that he was making. He didn’t just wake up that morning and decide that that’s what he was going to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. You can imagine several meetings around a big table where people came to a consensus about what statement he was going to make about the Muslim Brotherhood. But their motto is, Allah is our objective, the Koran is the constitution, right there should be a screeching, slamming red light. The Koran is the constitution? Not the US constitution? The prophet is our leader, jihad is our way. That’s fisabillah [PH] jihad, as I mentioned earlier. Death for the sake of Allah is our wish. It’s pretty hard to change the meaning of those words and turn them into something that we could be comfortable with saying that that’s a peaceful religion.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Phil, let me just ask you, is there any basis for thinking that, well, that might be the motto or the creed or the ambition of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, for example, wouldn’t aspire to those things, that they’re, you know, a more moderate strain and therefore have no violent tendencies or internationally overarching agenda.

PHILIP HANEY:

No, because it’s a global organisation and they have very strict rules and regulations they follow. Everything that the Muslim Brotherhood does is based on shariah law. This isn’t a political organisation that happens to be Islamic. This is an Islamic organisation whose highest goal is to implement shariah law. Therefore, of all organisations, they’re going to be most strictly observant of the subtle elements of shariah law. And their role, like in the United States, is to make sure that the Muslim community is doing their utmost to submit to the regulations and guidelines found in shariah law, one step at a time.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And to get everyone else to do the same. Phil, let me ask you, when we talk about these issues, this audience knows I often refer to a document, and I’d just like to get you to calibrate this for me, it was called the explanatory memorandum on the general strategic goal of the group. And people who are interested can download it for free as a PDF at our website securefreedom.org. It’s the explanatory memorandum. This was introduced, as you know, Phil Haney, into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Tell us about that document, tell us what it said is the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood in America that just further reinforces the point you’ve just made, that this is a disciplined international organisation and its American affiliates are every bit as imbued with the same creed and agenda as are the worst of the worst in Egypt.

PHILIP HANEY:

Sure, as with any document, it has an executive summary. So that if people aren’t able to read the entire document, at least they can read the summary paragraph. Well, the explanatory memorandum has that. It’s on page one, paragraph one. It states plainly that the global organisation has set up a shura council, a guidance council, here in North America, which means includes Canada, for a very distinct purpose. That very distinct purpose is to bring to the North American Muslim community, create an observant Muslim base. Again, this is in the first paragraph of the first page. The observant Muslim base. That is al-Musima [PH], al-Islamiyah, al-Qaeda, in Arabic. And I’m sure everybody listening heard the third word and have heard that word many times before, al-Qaeda. The observant Muslim, al-Qaeda, in North America. That’s important because al-Qaeda is not actually an organisation. Even though there are some jihad groups we know of as al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda is an abstract concept. It means the base. The base of operation. The Muslim Brotherhood’s goal is to have all Muslims in the United States observant and essentially submitted to the standards and guidelines of shariah law. And once they do that, that’s a base and from there, they go out and do promotion of Islam –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Phil Haney, hold that thought. We’re going to come right back with more with the co-author of See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad and what that all might mean for you. Straight ahead.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back for this fourth segment of a very, very troubling conversation with Phil Haney, a man who has been inside the belly of the beast, the United States government, for not just the Obama years, much of it, but some of the Bush years before it and has throughout that period been witnessing and, in some cases, struggling against efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood to, well, as they say in their explanatory memorandum, destroy Western Civilisation from within. And, Phil, I wanted to just drill down on that point. This phrase, and one that was also used in this mission statement of the Muslim Brotherhood, the explanatory memorandum, talks about sabotaging its miserable house, meaning the United States of America. Give us a flavour of basically the Koranic lineage of these ambitions and how the Muslim Brotherhood has gone about trying to implement them for the past, over fifty years now.

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, earlier we talked about those two operative verbs, to slaughter and to displace. Well, Koranic verbs are what I call industrial strength words. They have a lot of adjectives compressed into there. You can translate them many different ways or variants, if you will. Well, sabotaging their miserable house is a Koranic concept. But it’s essentially the same as the Koranic concept of displacing, pushing away, destroying, and/or slaughtering. To kill, to remove, to put away. Those concepts are intertwined and overlapping. So when the explanatory memorandum says that they intend to sabotage our miserable house by their hand and the hand of the unbeliever, that is a deeply embedded concept within the Koran. And it is seen as a righteous thing to do. It’s a command from Allah. You are actually doing those miserable people a favour by destroying the miserable way of life that they have and replacing it with the glorious belief of Islam and its guidance of the shariah law.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Specifically, if you would, Phil, as a guy who followed these folks carefully and closely with the entomologist’s eye, give us a sense of what kind of things they’ve been pursuing, notably, but not exclusively, I guess, infrastructure building in America and for what purpose.

PHILIP HANEY:

Sure. I would like to just address the statement that you made about that the religion of Allah would become supreme. For those who want to look it up, it’s in Koran 2, Chapter 2, verse 190 through 193, that lays out the pure strategic and tactical goals of the global Islamic movement, including the phrase that the religion of Allah will be established in the whole world, which is exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood intends to do. So yes, it’s strictly Islamic, strictly Koranic. Now, as far as the infrastructure of the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States, when I became a CBP officer, when the DHS was founded, Department of Homeland Security in March of 2003, I already had —

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Now, again, that’s a Customs and Border Protection officer.

PHILIP HANEY:

Customs and Border Protection officer within Department of Homeland Security. One of twenty-two different organisations. I’d already spent twenty-plus years studying the strategy and tactics of the global Islamic movement. Plus, my time in the Middle East, seeing it up close and personal. So for me, when 9-11 happened, none of it was, let’s just say, theoretical. It was very real to me. So when I came into the DHS as a founding member I, so to speak, hit the ground running. And almost immediately, I began doing intelligence analysis and briefings and sending them up the chain of command. And I was eventually authorised to get pulled completely out of the agricultural arena and I got put into a unit called the Advanced Targeting Unit. Where we look at incoming passengers for possible links to terrorism. And they told me specifically, we want you to keep doing what you have already been doing, which is develop intelligence and help us connect the dots. Well, that’s exactly what I did. And by 2006, I had produced a report on the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States. And basically outlined all of the major organisations and all of the leaders of these organisations and put them into our database so that my colleagues in other parts of the country would be able to have access to the same information. We’re all on the same page, and we’re all looking at the same individuals and organisations. And initially, I was considered an asset and we had great success. We had a lot of what we called law enforcement actions based on those reports that I put into the system. But that changed. The new administration, in particular. Some of the evidence of the change emerged as early as 2006. I wrote an article called “Green Tide Rising: Hamas Ascends” and posted it on FrontPage magazine in March of 2006. You may recall that that’s when Hamas was elected to become the government of Gaza. Well, that article I shared with some of my CIA colleagues at a training course that I took. And I say CIA openly, because they said so openly. I thought that they would be interested in an article on Hamas, which, after all, was a globally designated terrorist organisation already. But I was wrong. Instead of reading the article and having a discussion about it, they turned me into headquarters and said that I had accessed classified information to write the article. And they charged me with unethical use of classified information and plus the fact that I posted it on an open source website. And they investigated me for it. The entire investigation took eleven months and ultimately I was exonerated. But why on earth –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Because all of the information that you had drawn from was in the unclassified domain, I gather. And Phil, this was hardly the only instance in which you were essentially punished for trying to connect the dots. And we’ll talk a bit about that in a moment. When you look at the Muslim Brotherhood, and what I think we’re going to discover, that particular anecdote is an example of what they’ve done in terms of influence operations against the Bush Administration, unfortunately as well as the current one, in addition to that, Phil, is it not of concern to you as a professional that we’ve also seen them building the apparatus in this country that we’ve watched has brought grief to our friends in France and Brussels and Egypt that they use to help foster and, in some cases, it appears even execute the kinds of jihad that are of the violent sort?

PHILIP HANEY:

I’m going to go all the way back to my ants and the ant nest where we started. Well, the Muslim Brotherhood network is just like a giant network of ants’ nests. They’re all interrelated. They all communicate with each other. And every season they spread more, they take over more and more territory. That is a very apropos allegory to the structure of the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And it winds up, unfortunately, feeding into an awful lot of other dangerous vermin as well. Phil Haney is our guest. We’re talking about his experiences in the Department of Homeland Security in the frontlines, ladies and gentlemen, of the war for the free world. Check out his new book, See Something, Say Nothing. We’re going to talk a bit more about another investigation that he conducted and why he was punished for doing so in that case as well. Straight ahead.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. We’re visiting with Philip Haney. He’s generously given us a full hour of his time to talk about his new book, See Something, Say Nothing, co-authored with Art Moore. It is indeed, as the subtitle indicates, a homeland security officer’s exposure of the government’s submission to jihad. And Phil, we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in connection with a particularly egregious example of it. But I did want to give you a moment to finish that thought about are we seeing in this country as we have in Brussels lately, in France, and I think elsewhere in Europe, this ability of the Muslim Brotherhood, that ant network, to provide support of a very material kind to those engaging when they think it’s opportune in the violent kind of jihad?

PHILIP HANEY:

I’d like to switch to another allegory. If you think of the global Islamic movement as a league, like the National Football League, then the team – there are teams in Europe. There are also teams in America. They all play under the same rules. They have to if they’re going to go advance and possibly win the Superbowl. So in a sense, they’re competing with each other, but in the other sense, they’re all members of the same league. The great advantage we have is that we have their playbook. Imagine if the opposite team has the playbook. You might not know exactly what play they’re going to call at any given moment, but as soon as they make the audible, you know what play they’re going to run. That gives you a great advantage. Well, the thing with the Islamic movement is they have a playbook. It’s called shariah law. They are bound by the constraints of shariah law to behave in a very predictable manner. As I mentioned earlier about behaviour, which is why I brought it up. If you put all these allegories together, we can actually expect what they’re going to do. Because they have to live within the boundaries, the communication system as described by shariah law.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

This is a really important insight, Phil. One of the things that I think you were able to do was actually validate this insight by the kind of work that you did, notably following some of the ants associated with an organisation that most of us have never heard of, called Tablighi Jamaat. Would you talk about that experience as a kind of anecdote that really seems to capture a lot of what you went through in your days trying to defend our country against enemies foreign and domestic?

PHILIP HANEY:

Sure. Tablighi Jamaat is an organisation with between seventy-five and a hundred and twenty-five million members. Outside of America, it’s known as the Army of Darkness. It originated in the 1860s and very soon they found out that they had an identical ideology as Wahhabi Saudis. And so they formed an alliance. That is why you constantly hear about Saudis funding madrassas, schools, in places like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. That is essentially the Deobandi movement, the branch of Islam that originated out of the Asian subcontinent.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Phil, can I just interrupt you? Isn’t it fair to say that the reason these two groups, the Deobandis in Pakistan and the Saudi Wahhabis, have arrived at the same program is that is, in fact, reflected in shariah and the traditions and dictates of it, is that right?

PHILIP HANEY:

Absolutely correct. That is – what you’re seeing is branches of the same tree. You’re seeing the Asian subcontinent, that is the – that is a different major branch of the same tree. And the Arabian subcontinent is the other main branch of the same tree.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So talk about this group, how this Tablighi Jamaat performs its role as the Army of Darkness in this larger enterprise.

PHILIP HANEY:

They are evangelists. They travel in groups of two, three, four and five and they go around the world and they visit the mosques in the countries where they go. To encourage the believers to become more Salafi, to become more observant of the original way of Islam. I noticed in 2006 that these groups of men were coming in from the UK, primarily, on visa waiver. We’ve heard a lot about visa waiver lately, about the holes in the system. Well, I noticed they were coming in on visa waiver and they had letters signed by an imam that was already on our law enforcement radar. So that immediately made them worth a secondary investigation, a discussion. Why are you here? Where are you going? What do you intend to do? Well, that case began in 2006 and by 2011, five years later, I was sent to the National Targeting Center to work on it there in Washington, DC. On my own case that I actually started six years prior – five years prior. And the long and short of it is, that in March of 2012, after we had already gotten twelve hundred law enforcement actions based on this case, the Tablighi Jamaat initiative, the Department of State came in one day and we had a meeting with the management of NTC. And they said they had concerns about our focus on Tablighi Jamaat. Because they were not a designated terrorist organisation and we may be violating their civil rights and civil liberties.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Their civil rights and civil liberties? These are people coming from elsewhere in the world through Britain. They have civil rights and civil liberties under US law?

PHILIP HANEY:

Yeah. They are essentially, by default, extending them constitutionally mandated civil rights and civil liberties because of their concern that we might be discriminating against them because we’re focusing on this group called Tablighi Jamaat.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Tell us what happened next after Hillary Clinton’s lawyers and officials from the State Department told you to cease and desist.

PHILIP HANEY:

Well, we’ll fast forward to San Bernardino. The mosque that Syed Farook attended was part of that Tablighi Jamaat network. The administration deleted sixty-seven records out of the system that I had worked on as a component of the Tablighi case. So the question remains, if those records had not been deleted, it’s very plausible that Syed Farook would have never been able to travel to Saudi Arabia and it’s also just as plausible that his pending fiancée would have never been given a visa. And then we would have stopped the attack.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Beyond the prevention of that kind of law enforcement defence of our homeland, what happened to you in the course of all of this?

PHILIP HANEY:

I was investigated a total of nine times. Before it was all over, the last nine months of my career, they took my gun, they suspended – revoked my secret clearance. They cut off all access to all systems and sequestered me in a little cubicle while I sat there, day by day, waiting to see what the outcome of these three, last of nine, simultaneous investigations – what would happen. The Department of Justice investigated me for – they said that I had misused a government computer and they convened a grand jury. They were going to charge me on criminal charges. In the end, I retired honourable. July 31^st, 2015. They dropped the charges on the DOJ case. And nothing else came of the other administrative investigations. I was exonerated.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

You were exonerated, but Deobandis, Tablighi Jamaatis, terrorists were able to perpetrate a murder that might have been prevented by your good work. Phil Haney, this story and many more are told with great clarity and passion in your new book, See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. Phil, I appreciate you taking the time today to talk with us about what the implications of that submission are and the dangers that it exposes us, unnecessarily, to. Thank you for the tremendous work you’ve done as a government employee and our first line of defence. And I regret, on behalf of all of us, that you were subjected to such harassment. I know that you’re performing a vital task now in raising this alarm in the private sector. And we look forward to working with you in doing that. Keep up the good work, my friend. Come back to us again soon. I hope the rest of you will come back to us again Monday. Same time, same station. In the meantime, have a very blessed Memorial Day weekend.