DHS bows to political pressure and ceases monitoring domestic terrorists

tpsbmam

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Thu Jun-09-11 10:54 AM
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DHS bows to political pressure and ceases monitoring domestic terrorists

While SWAT is busy invading the home of and roughing (the wrong) people up over a student loan default, the Department of Homeland Security has bowed to political pressure to the degree that they no longer monitor domestic terrorism.

In an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, former DHS domestic terrorism expert Daryl Johnson describes the response to the DHS report, "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,"

But DHS ultimately reacted to criticism from conservative columnists and groups like the American Legion by withdrawing the report. (Ironically, given the criticism of his report, Johnson describes himself as a registered Republican who "personifies conservativism.") In the months following the leak, Johnson says in the interview below, DHS gutted its domestic terrorism analysis unit.

What was your mission at DHS?
DHS's mission was identified in the 2002 Homeland Security Act. Part of the department's responsibilities includes identifying and assessing possible terrorist threats to the homeland and notifying law enforcement officers of those threats. We looked at extremist groups who had histories of violent activities, but who might not necessarily be doing anything right now. We also studied radicalization: the process of adopting an extremist belief system and showing a willingness to use or facilitate violence to change the world. We wanted to know how a law-abiding person becomes radicalized to the point of being willing to hurt people. No one else was doing this work from a uniquely domestic, non-Islamic perspective.

What ultimately happened?
Napolitano eventually told Congress that DHS was going to remove the report from its websites. Some of the people in the media assumed they were recalling the report. That never happened. There is actually a formal process involved when you want to rescind a report. The only reason you do so is if there was something erroneous in the document. Napolitano also told Congress that DHS was going to pull this report back and refashion it into a much more usable format. It never happened.

What happened to your DHS unit?
When the right-wing report was leaked and people politicized it, my management got scared and thought DHS would be scaled back. It created an environment where my analysts and I couldn't get our work done. DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies. Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. All of this happened within six to nine months after the furor over the report. Analysts then began leaving DHS. One analyst went to ICE , another to the FBI, a third went to the U.S. Marshals, and so on. There is just one person there today who is still a "domestic terrorism" analyst.

Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism—whether it's anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, "sovereign citizens," eco-terrorists, the whole gamut.

So there you have it, in cold clear terms. Because of Republican whining in response to an accurate report, DHS/the Obama administration, totally caved and, as Johnson opines later in the interview, has left us more vulnerable and will likely embolden domestic terrorists. And this at a time when the US has seen a resurgence in hate groups and hate group activity, as documented in the SPLC 2009 report (PDF): TERROR FROM THE RIGHT: 75 PLOTS, CONSPIRACIES AND RACIST RAMPAGES SINCE OKLAHOMA CITY.

The SPLC reported this resurgence in 2009, saying:

As the first months of the Obama Administration unfold, a growing consensus is emerging that a resurgence of right-wing hate groups and radical ideas is spreading across the United States. Law enforcement officials, civil rights groups, and many others have all expressed worries about this troubling trend.

This February, in the last issue of the Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on the continued growth of hate groups, whose numbers have risen by more than 50% since 2000. It attributed that growth mainly to fears about non-white immigration, but pointed out that the rise of a black man to the White House also appears to have contributed. And it said the ongoing economic meltdown, which some have already blamed on racial minorities and undocumented Latino immigrants, could well add to a worsening situation.

Two months later, a Department of Homeland Security report, "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," was leaked to the press. Dated April 7, the report mirrored many of the conclusions of the SPLC and added that "rightwing extremists attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans." (The Report has written extensively about the problem of extremists in the military.)

Already, there is evidence of the violence that an expansion of the radical right may portend. Some of it is chilling.

There is much more at all of the links. The SPLC has urged DHS to rethink their moronic, gutless policy (except they did it diplomatically).

So there we have it. The only terrorists are Islamic terrorists, at least in terms of our totally spineless DHS under Napolitano and the Obama administration who have, once again, buckled under the weight of Republican pressure. In this case, they've done it in a way that really does leave all of us more vulnerable.