From the Under the Radar list: The US has revived a law enforcement group that focuses on domestic terrorism. Maybe this should go onto the About Time list…
In early June, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the revival of the moribund Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee in the wake of the shooting at a Jewish community center in Kansas City, the latest in a spate of domestic terror incidents. It is already busy investigating, among other incidents, the shooting of two police officers and a civilian in Las Vegas by white supremacists with ties to the militia presence at the Cliven Bundy Ranch; the brief, lethal standoff at a Georgia courthouse by a “sovereign citizen;” another “sovereign citizen” arrested on suspicion of?murdering a neighbor; and more.
Seems the group will stay busy for a good long while.
The DTEC was formed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and was dissolved after the 9/11 attacks, when law enforcement agencies decided to focus exclusively on foreign terror threats. Holder says that the US remains vigilant for threats from abroad, but the DTEC focuses on homegrown terrorism:
We must also concern ourselves with the continued danger we face from individuals within our own borders who may be motivated by a variety of other causes from anti-government animus to racial prejudice.
The DTEC will draw on personnel and resources from the FBI, the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, which includes representatives of federal prosecutors.
According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the DTEC
…met regularly for quite a few years [after the OKC bombing], and apparently, was rather useful, at least in coordinating agency’s response to the threat, and was scheduled to meet, literally, on the morning of 9/11. Of course that was canceled after the al-Qaeda attacks, and the committee never met again.
Civil Liberties Concerns
The ACLU says it will work with Holder and the Justice Department to make sure the task force does not engage in racial profiling or other bias targeting of citizens who may wrongfully be suspected of harboring violent intentions. ACLU staff attorney Lee Rowland says,
Attorney General Holder’s announcement that the new task force will focus on evidence of anti-government animus and racial intolerance raises concerns that it could be a sweeping mandate to monitor and collect controversial speech.
Gabriel Rottman, the ACLU’s legislative counsel on the First Amendment, is even more leery:
Given the already lenient standards for when the government can launch an investigation, the announced task force is both unnecessary and an invitation to investigate Americans because of the beliefs they hold, not because of any wrongdoing.
Right Wing Howls in Response
Predictably, the right wing has erupted, and continues to erupt, in response to the revival of the DTEC, issuing wild threats and wilder warnings of vast government conspiracies. It wasn’t long after the announcement was publicly made that Jerad Miller, one of the Las Vegas shooters, wrote on his Facebook page,
Well, if you been waiting for the thought police, here they are.
Hmmm. Which to believe, the Attorney General, or a suicidal terrorist who murdered two cops at a pizza joint? Decisions, decisions.
The more “mainstream” lunatics at Infowars (Alex Jones’s little psycho ward which has grown enough in influence to drive some of the narrative being promulgated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others), go with the suicidal terrorist every time. They say that the entire program is designed to conceal the “fact” that almost all of the domestic terror plots that have been unearthed since 9/11 “have been created by the FBI,” and “will undoubtedly focus on the Obama administration’s political enemies, mainly returning military veterans, conservatives and those who identify with the Tea Party.” Right you are, Alex. All those militia nutjobs at the Bundy ranch, including the snipers?training their scopes on police and BLM officials from the nearby overpass,?were really FBI plants? Alex praises them to the heavens one day and then says they are FBI infiltrators the next. Nothing like a nice, cohesive narrative.
Infowars embeds a clip from Fox News’s Andrew Napolitano “proving” that every domestic terror incident from the Boston Marathon bombings to your neighbor’s kids TP’ing your front yard are all “false flag” events conceived and executed by the FBI. Watch it if you have the stomach for it.
In the real world, the Obama administration gave in to the screamers on the right in 2009, withdrawing a groundbreaking report by the Department of Homeland Security that showed just how dangerous the threat of right-wing domestic terrorism is. Potok says that the administration,
…in an act of real political cowardice, did withdraw the report, which said nothing untoward, which was very prescient and very accurate in what it is said about the resurgence of the radical right in the United States since, essentially, the appearance of Barack Obama on the national political scene. So, yeah, there has been a kind of taking an eye off the ball of domestic non-Islamic terrorism. … All of the studies by terrorism experts show that in the last few years, this kind of terrorism has become more of a threat than at least homegrown Jihadist terrorism and really in terms of numbers of people killed by various types of terrorists.
Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, seems to wrap the civil liberties concerns of the ACLU around the chewy nougat center of Jones’s psychotic rantings:
The question is what and whom does the attorney general really intend to target via the DTEC? Would a group advocating strenuously for smaller government and lower taxes be included in the attorney general’s definition of a group with ‘antigovernment animus’? Given that the administration appears to have used the IRS to intimidate its political opponents, the re-establishment of the DTEC should cause us all to sit up and take notice.
Do we have to remind Goodlatte, who has no more business chairing the Judiciary Committee than I have jumping the Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle, that the IRS was not used to target the administration’s “political opponents”? Yes, I think we do.
Check out this Young Turks report on how the right treats domestic terrorism. Short version: if it doesn’t fit the “Obama tyrant!” narrative, right-wing news outlets and pundits ignore it entirely.
The former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), adds a voice of reason to the ranting from the right:
The FBI plays a fundamental role in confronting extremist violence here at home. The bureau has called the so-called sovereign-citizen movement a ‘growing domestic threat.’ Congress has empowered the FBI with considerable authority — including federal hate crimes legislation — to root out this extremism.
And FBI Director James Comey, who is anything but a radical leftist, has testified that federal authorities will only investigate actual crimes, and not interfere with free speech.
We face domestic terrorism from individuals and groups who are motivated by political, racial, religious or social ideology — ideology fueled by bigotry and prejudice — as we saw in [the Jewish community center shootings]. Most of the time, domestic extremists are careful to keep their actions within the bounds of constitutionally protected activity. And for the FBI, protecting those civil liberties — such as freedom of speech — is of paramount importance, no matter how hateful that speech might be. We only get involved when words cross the line into illegal activity.
Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and an expert on extremism, says,
Holder’s decision is more than overdue. … We had 9/11 and there was a 180 to concentrating on Islamic extremists. It should not be seen as an either/or. … The federal government, aside from the FBI, basically gave up [on domestic terrorists]. And while they gave up, the number of hate groups grew, the number of anti-government groups grew, and the number of domestic terrorism incidents from these people proliferated.
Domestic Terrorism Concerns Warranted
As usual with all things political, there’s no clear “good guy – bad guy” stance here. The federal government is not known for treating Americans’ civil liberties with kid gloves, so to my mind, the ACLU’s wariness is quite warranted. On the other hand, Alex Jones’s slobbering about “false flag” conspiracies and Republican snuffling about Obama’s “political police”?targeting their base are ridiculous on their face. We will do well to keep an eye on exactly what the DTEC does, while breathing a sigh of relief that the federal government is finally waking up to the extraordinary threat that right-wing extremists pose to our democracy and our well-being.
Edited/Published by: JA
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Published writer since 2001, focusing on politics, history, Web development, and other topics. First book is coming soon.
