Former NSA Analyst: Obama Administration Will Not Confront Terrorism
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Security expert and former NSA Analyst, John Schindler, says the Obama administration's approach to fighting terrorism hampers the FBI's ability to catch suspects like the alleged shooter in Orlando, Omar Mateen.
Schindler, who writes for the Observer, alleged during an interview with Rich Zeoli on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that White House is standing in the way of agents trying to do their jobs.
"The reality, I won't impugn the FBI, which is made up largely of really great Americans working very hard to protect us, but they're leadership is ultimately at the whim of the White House and of the Department of Justice, that is Attorney General Lynch and President Obama, and they've made very clear, this administration has made very clear now, for more than seven years, that their take on our jihadist problem is, shall we say, not adhered to by most professionals. We had the President on TV telling us how calling it radical Islamic terrorism doesn't help anything. It doesn't matter. Obviously, I and most people working in the field don't agree with that."
He claimed that Mateen may have been stopped years ago, if the agency approached him with a different mindset.
"I think the real problem is the FBI, despite a really quite detailed investigation of Mr. Mateen, which determined that he was really kind of a crank. This was a guy who was mentally unstable, clearly, who liked guns a lot, who wanted to affiliate himself, at least in his own mind, with numerous Islamic terrorist organizations. They determined he was really the victim. What they determined was that he was acting like a lunatic at work, and the first long investigation in 2013 that went on for ten months, was spurred by violent, crazy comments he was making to co-workers at the security firm where he was working security. The FBI ultimately determined he was making these comments because he felt persecuted as Muslim. In other words, this is really about Islamophobia and Mr. Mateen was the victim. I'm sorry. That dog just ain't gonna hunt. We have 49 innocent dead Americans and that's just not good enough."