It Was John Brennan Himself Who Halted LEO Training on Islam, Jihad

While testifying in an open session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA director John Brennan admitted Thursday:

Despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.

He added that a significant element of that global reach is because the Islamic State:

… has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West … [ISIS is] probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel.

What Brennan did not say — and what no one in the committee or media challenged him about — was that he himself is largely responsible for this state of affairs.

As I reported earlier this week, John Brennan is the person who — after U.S. Muslim groups demanded he do so – “purged” all mention of Islam and jihad from law enforcement counter-terror training materials in 2011.

A chief reason that the Islamic State’s “global reach” has not been reduced is because the U.S. has failed to identify, confront, and oppose the ideology that has enabled it to amass “a large cadre of Western fighters.” That ideology has spread unchecked in the U.S. in large part because Brennan didn’t think it was worth teaching law enforcement about it.

The enforcement of his “purge” edict has been thorough.

Intelligence and law enforcement agents training to counter terrorist threats today are taught all about militiamen and white supremacists — but they hear nary a word about the beliefs, motives, and goals of Islamic jihadists. Unless they educate themselves on their own, our agents have no training on what jihadis are intent on doing and why. They are left abjectly incapable of devising effective strategies for countering them.

Five years ago, John Brennan — via a letter on White House stationery — assured U.S. Muslim groups that the Obama administration’s politically correct “Countering Violent Extremism” program had been satisfactorily cleansed, because:

… misinformation about the threat and dynamics of radicalization to violence can harm our security by sending local stakeholders in the wrong direction and unnecessarily creating tensions with potential community partners.

Our counter-terror material no longer contains accurate information on jihad because Brennan feared — correctly — that it would offend Muslim communities in the United States. These groups have consistently responded with anger towards any and every counter-terror measure aimed at stopping jihad terror.

Brennan also told U.S. Muslim groups this:

[The CVE program] emphasizes that our security is “inextricably linked to our values,” including “the promotion of an inclusive society.”

Well, now Brennan has his inclusive society. We saw just how inclusive our screening process has been last Saturday night in Orlando.

Had Brennan not purged the training materials, the FBI would have been better prepared when they questioned Mateen. THREE times.

There will be many more Orlandos, because John Brennan himself made sure that the U.S. would never challenge the beliefs and assumptions that have enabled the Islamic State to have the “global reach” he now laments.