A former FBI agent who created the bureau’s first counter-terrorism training program says the FBI and many others in the federal government have lost their way and have no idea how to stop terrorism, a problem that he expects to get much worse in the coming months.
In addition to his time at the bureau, John Guandolo is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who served as a Marine Corps officer in the Gulf War. In contrast to President Obama’s recent comments, Guandolo says the government’s biggest mistake is failing to identify our enemy in any official capacity. He now works to train others in counter-terrorism through his website, “Understanding the Threat.”
“Since 9/11, we have actually failed to identify the threat in any professional manner at the national security level. We have yet to identify the threat, either in our strategic planning documents or our national security documents,” said Guandolo.
He says the consequences of failing to identify the threat have been ghastly.
“What that leads to is what we’ve seen in the last 15 years. We lost Iraq and Afghanistan. We have an incoherent domestic counter-terrorism strategy and our foreign policy is upside-down to where we’re literally, to the tune of more than $100 billion, the largest state sponsor of terrorism – Iran – on the planet,” said Guandolo.
And Guandolo says the problem is about to get a whole lot worse as the priorities of our enemies start shifting.
“The global Islamic movement says that it’s going to begin its turn from its total focus on the Islamic world, where it is seeking to impose Sharia law on the Muslim world first and then the non-Muslim world. That turn is going to begin this year,” said Guandolo.
What will that mean in the West?
“That means instead of a couple of people in San Bernardino, several people in Brussels and lone shooter in Orlando, you’re going to have dozens of jihadis doing multiple operations in conjunction with the Marxists and the socialists of groups like Black Lives Matter, which will be burning and looting cities like they did in Ferguson and Baltimore,” said Guandolo.
It’s in this context that he fears jihadists will attempt to trigger a major chaotic event.
“If those events are precipitated, which they likely will be, from a cyber attack, a power grid attack where power is lost in several states or something similar to that, then it’s truly going to be much more horrific,” said Guandolo.
He says stopping something like that will require massive improvement from the FBI and other relevant agencies. Guandolo says reports that the FBI had multiple chances to screen Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen and then ignored a concern from Disney that Mateen and his wife were casing the theme park, are signs the feds are not ready for prime time.
“There are a couple of problems here. The first is the total ignorance of the FBI leadership as to this problem. [FBI Director James Comey] said in his comments that they were still trying to confirm a motive. That should be a huge red flag for anybody listening to him or reading a transcript of the comments that he is clueless,” said Guandolo.
But Guandolo says the FBI wasn’t always clueless, namely when he created the bureau’s counter-terrorism training program in 2006. But it wasn’t long until politics undermined his work.
“Since then, programs like it that are run by people I trained have all been shut down because it’s not politically correct,” said Guandolo.
“The Muslim community said this offended them. Of course it offends them, because it identifies the leadership of the Muslim community as being members of the Muslim Brotherhood network here whose stated goal is civilization jihad. Americans have got to wake up to this immediately, because this is going to go downhill rapidly in the next 12-16 months,” said Guandolo.
He says the Orlando case is a perfect example of how the government allows a terrorist to slip through its fingers. He says the FBI’s interrogation policy is very weak.
“If you had him sitting there and said, ‘Are you a terrorist and do you know of any acts of terrorism that are being planned?’ and he were on a polygraph and he said, ‘No, I don’t,’ he would register as not being deceptive. That’s because in Islam a terrorist is somebody who kills a Muslim without right,” said Guandolo.
He says a subtle change would make a huge difference.
“If you asked the question, ‘Are you a jihadi? Are you aware of any jihadi plots or actions to support the jihad in the immediate future?’ and then he said no, he would register as deceptive. Something as simple as that 99.9 percent of law enforcement don’t understand,” said Guandolo.
Another simple but significant improvement in training, says Guandolo, is to make law enforcement personnel understand what motivates terrorists.
“One hundred percent (of captured terrorists) say they are jihadis waging jihad in the cause of Allah in order to impose Sharia and establish the Islamic State. Not only do they say the doctrine they are fighting for is Sharia, but their blueprint for everything they do is Sharia,” said Guandolo.
“The fact that we’re not teaching our federal agents and our combat warriors about Sharia is one of the reasons that we’re so catastrophically failing in identifying the threat. The threat doctrine is Sharia and anybody who subscribes to Sharia and seeks to impose it on others is the threat,” said Guandolo.
According to Guandolo, the bright spot in this frustration is the growing number of local law enforcement officials welcoming the basics of how to investigate possible threats. He says it’s making a big difference in many communities.
“Once you understand that, it changes how you do interviews, interrogations, basic investigations, when you do search warrants, when you stop somebody in a vehicle for a traffic violation. What you see and how they talk to you, you know how to interpret with the lens of somebody who actually understands the threat,” said Guandolo.
