Ex-CIA Officer: FBI Failure to Prevent Orlando Terror Exposes Incompetence

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The Orlando, Florida terror attacks again proves that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cannot defend the American people against terror attacks on US soil, former CIA analyst and whistleblower John Kiriakou told Sputnik.

"Something ought to change, and quickly. That is the consistent failure of the FBI to do its job, to infiltrate terrorist groups, domestic and foreign, and to prevent attacks on US soil," Kiriakou said. "This is not something new. The FBI has been incompetent for a very long time."

Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 people in an attack on a night club in Orlando, Florida on Sunday reportedly had planned the massacre for a long time and had purchased a semi-automatic handgun and an automatic rifle.

Yet, the FBI did not act despite having interviewed Mateen earlier, Kiriakou noted.

"The FBI knew Mateen had worked for G4S Secure Solutions, one of the world’s largest private security companies. FBI officials interviewed Mateen in 2013 and 2014… because he had expressed support for a suicide bomber. And still the FBI did nothing," he observed.

The FBI’s failure to take Mateen seriously was part of a long-established pattern of incompetence, Kiriakou insisted.

"This is a longstanding pattern. After Syed Farook killed 14 people in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California last year, the FBI said it was aware that Farook had been in contact with terrorism suspects, but that its agents had done nothing about it," he maintained.

Kiriakou recalled that he had described a major example of FBI incompetence he personally witnessed in Pakistan in 2002, when he was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations there.

"I was part of a team that raided the Taliban embassy in Peshawar that year. As part of our "haul," we confiscated a set of… phone bills [that] showed hundreds of calls from the Taliban to phone numbers all across the United States… Those calls ended abruptly on September 10, 2001," he pointed out.

Kiriakou acting on orders sent the original phone bills to the FBI, but in the summer of 2002, he learned from an FBI agent that the bills had been put into storage until they could be translated from Pashto into English, even though they were all printed in English.

"The box of phone bills was never even opened. We’ll never know if there was or [still] is a threat to Americans originating with the Taliban. We’ll never know why those Americans were in contact with the Taliban immediately before and immediately after September 11," he warned.

Kiriakou also suggested that the FBI should be dismantled if it continued to fail to combat the terrorist threat adequately.

"The FBI’s ongoing, long-term incompetence has led to far too many dead Americans. San Bernardino and Orlando are only the beginning. If the FBI can’t do its job, it should be scrapped," he stated.

Moreover, President Barack Obama should immediately demand FBI Director James Comey’s resignation, Kiriakou concluded.