FBI's bizarre system of categorizing domestic terrorists continues to infect Biden's strategy
FBI’s bizarre system of categorizing domestic terrorists continues to infect Biden’s strategy
Jul 09, 2021 5:26pm Eastern Daylight Time
by David Neiwert, Daily Kos Staff
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/9/2039102/-FBI-s-bizarre-system-of-categorizing-domestic-terrorists-continues-to-infect-Biden-s-strategy
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The hysterical proclamations about a free speech crackdown from right-wing apologists like Tucker Carlson notwithstanding, President Biden’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” appears to be largely a sane and careful approach to the problem, respectful of civil rights while recognizing that such terrorism can be a threat to those rights as well. It is not, however, a perfect plan.
Woven into its structure is a problematic approach, left over from the Trump administration, to setting law enforcement priorities in a way almost guaranteed to lock in place federal agencies’ longstanding failures in addressing far-right terrorism, thanks to a classification system that collapses all far-right and far-left extremists together into the same categories, erasing the significant differences in the threat levels. It’s a kind of bothsiderism for the FBI.
According to experts consulted by Daily Kos, the system of categorization for domestic terrorism devised by the FBI in 2017—one in which the category of “racially motivated violent extremists” includes both white supremacists and “Black Identity extremists,” and the category of “anti-government/anti-authority” extremists contains both far-right militias and far-left anarchists—remains in place both in the Biden strategy and elsewhere in the administration’s federal law enforcement agencies.
“It’s very problematic,” Michael German, a national security analyst for the Brennan Justice Center who recently testified before Congress on the subject, told Daily Kos. “I would have preferred to see the Strategy saying, ‘We’re going to rethink these categories and divide out groups that work together.’ Because it would make sense to put white supremacists with far-right militias. Not that there aren’t far-right militias that aren’t white supremacists, but they often act in league together, and recruit from each other’s ranks.”
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