Blinded By The War On Terrorism - LATimes [View all]

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Blinded by the war on terrorism
The U.S. government's focus on thwarting terrorists has not only eroded Americans' privacy, it's opened them to other dangers that have gotten short shrift.
By Sarah Chayes - LATimes
July 28, 2013

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"This is a great time to be a white-collar criminal."

An assistant U.S. attorney I know startled me with this remark in 2002. The bulk of her FBI investigators, she explained, had been pulled off to work on terrorism, which left traditional crime investigations sorely understaffed.

Little has changed since then. For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been focused on one type of threat above all others: terrorism. This obsession has not only been used to justify an erosion of Americans' privacy, it has opened them to other dangers and, paradoxically, made it easier for terrorists to achieve success.

Let me explain.

During the years I worked in the Pentagon, 2010 and 2011, officials there were responding to what many understood to be an implied directive from the commander in chief: to bring the risk of terrorist attack on U.S. soil to 0%. The entire apparatus swiveled toward that single goal.

And it wasn't just the Pentagon. Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has evolved to resemble a paramilitary organization, with most of its effort directed at killing individual suspected terrorists.

But the single-minded focus on that task has led to myopia elsewhere. I have repeatedly watched members of the intelligence community, in their drive to target individuals, overlook other critical aspects even of violent extremism, including how the groups' structures evolve, how they are financed or what underlying grievances fuel them.

Because of the fixation on killing specific terrorist leaders...

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More: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chayes-terrorism-20130728,0,4319811.story?track=lat-pick