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In light of the violence in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, over the weekend, there's been a renewed interest in some circles about 2009 reports on threats posed by homegrown extremists. At the time, the Department of Homeland Security released reports about fringe radicals, alerting officials to potential violence. The DHS specifically said some extremist groups may specifically target American military veterans for recruitment.
Sunday's alleged gunman, Wade Michael Page, was dishonorably discharged from the military in 1998, and became a white supremacist.
As we discussed on Tuesday, though, Republican outrage about the DHS reports was so intense three years ago, Homeland Security officials deliberately "stepped back ... from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism." The DHS unit responsible for the 2009 report was "effectively eviscerated," and much of its work related to white supremacists was "blocked," for no other reason than pushback from the right.
With this in mind, Spencer Ackerman talked with one of the officials affected by the DHS reaction to Republican apoplexy.
Daryl Johnson had a sinking feeling when he started seeing TV reports on Sunday about a shooting in a Wisconsin temple. "I told my wife, 'This is likely a hate crime perpetrated by a white supremacist who may have had military experience,'" Johnson recalls.
It was anything but a lucky guess on Johnson's part. He spent 15 years studying domestic terrorist groups -- particularly white supremacists and neo-Nazis -- as a government counterterrorism analyst, the last six of them at the Department of Homeland Security. There, he even homebrewed his own database on far-right extremist groups on an Oracle platform, allowing his analysts to compile and sift reporting in the media and other law-enforcement agencies on radical and potentially violent groups.
But Johnson's career took an unexpected turn in 2009, when an analysis he wrote on the rise of "Right-Wing Extremism" (.pdf) sparked a political controversy. Under pressure from conservatives, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repudiated Johnson's paper -- an especially bitter pill for him to swallow now that Wade Michael Page, a suspected white supremacist, killed at least six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. For Johnson, the shooting was a reminder that the government's counterterrorism efforts are almost exclusively focused on al-Qaida, even as non-Islamist groups threaten Americans domestically.
What we saw in 2009 was a bizarre form of conservative political correctness -- security officials feared violence from ideological extremists, and Republicans reflexively responded with an assumption that DHS was talking about the mainstream Republican activists.
But this conservative political correctness meant a shutdown in due diligence from law enforcement on legitimate threats posed by American radicals.
Ackerman's report is well worth considering in detail. Ideally, congressional Republicans would reconsider their knee-jerk reaction, and law enforcement would revisit its work addressing what Johnson calls "the rising white supremacist threat."
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There is an extensive review of this material on democracynow.org, with Amy Goodman today, Aug. 9th. I highly recommend listening to it. We, the people of America, are being seriously deceived by the government and the military with regard to the dangers posed by radical domestic terrorists among us. She interviews Daryl Johnson as well as other researchers familiar with the neo-nazi/skinhead movement, including someone who knew Page from his extensive interviews and research. Please visit: www.democracynow.org. This is the link to the interview with Johnson. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/9/former_dhs_analyst_daryl_johnson_on. And another link to the military's avoidance of responsibility for the proliferation of neo-Nazis and gang members in the military.
The public is always deceived by government and the business sector on any public danger of any plausible magnitude. The more significant a threat, like Three Mile Island, the greater the deception. The public is the last to be told, if ever told at all. We don't usually find these things out until 20 to 50 years later and only because of mandatory disclosure laws that provide access to "sensitive materials" we all should have known to begin with and where after 20 to 50 years all the irresponsible responsible parties are dead or off-scene. Info like what you are sharing, st john, gets us some of this information much closer to real-time.
Thanks for the info, st john.
I am amazed that the dangers of the white supremacists is largely ignored. I live in Arizona, which seems to have more of this kind of activist than most. We just had JT Ready, an openly Neo-Nazi (who was backed by one of the most powerful Republicans in the state), shoot and kill four family members, including an 18 month old toddler, before turning the gun on himself. Ready also fit this profile: ex-Military, dishonorably discharged, leader of a Minuteman group who regularly patrolled the border looking for illegals (i.e. a hate group).
Homeland Security needs to start doing its job and paying a bit more attention to domestic terrorists. They are out there, and there are many of them. What's really ironic is that Napolitano, head of Homeland Security, was governor of Arizona before accepting the appointment to her present position. She has to know better.
Why amazed? For more than a decade the right have pushed the idea that only brown-skinned people with Arabic names can possibly ever be terrorists, and many if not most people believe the lie. Plus, there is a lot of sympathy between 'mainstream' Republicans and the terroristic fringe element of the right, and the more the GOP moves to the right the less daylight there is between the two. And then there is the fact that white people as a rule aren't willing to face the fact that terrorists can look just like them. Terrorism is a political tactic, not a religion nor a race, but the Republican Party has done it's best to confuse the issue for it's own political purposes. So, really there's no reason to be amazed.
Here is the link to the military piece from democracynow. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/9/author_sikh_temple_massacre_the_outgrowth
Imagine if these groups were primarily people of color.
How quickly do you think the Republicans would make an issue of it?
Very good point.
Don't let the smoke make you bump into the mirrors. The people who sought to silence the results of this study and obstruct any attempt to prepare for its possible predictions knew what they were doing. They want to have their unhinged fringe members go on shooting sprees and accuse you of being unpatriotic if you try to stop them. The Left has been insufficiently terrified of the power of the Dark Side of the Right. They need to fear the fury of the Conservative Movement, and they need to feel the helplessness of knowing nothing can or will be done to protect them.
In Jesus' name, of course, after all, they're not savages.
But, but, but they'll take our AK47s, 30+ round clips and explosives and then the next thing you know they'll take our guns, bows, arrows, bullets and even knives. Where will it all end!!!
All that will really happen is that the NRA will lose money. The munitions manufacturers will lose money; their investors will lose money. OMG could it be this is really about money? Who'd a thunk it. ;-/
They'll have to rip that butter knife out of my greasy, cold hand.
Yawn this was on NPR yesterday.
They defended and condemned Janet Napolitano for not pimp-slapping the wing-nuts crying about reality.
...the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repudiated Johnson's paper...
Completely consistent with the cowardly administration of The Capitulator-In-Chief. Hope to hell that RMoney is defeated, but without belief that the quality, show some spine, campaigner Obama's 2nd term will have any more spine as an administration than they have shown in his first.
I'm sorry to have to mention this but this has parallels with the rise of right wing militia and extremists in Germany during the Wiemar Republic and the actions of mainstream conservatives in protecting them from government interference. Those German conservatives hoped to use the extreme right to their advantage and instead were eaten alive by them when an economic crisis brought the National Socialists and other extremists into the coalition government. The rest is history. Just sayin'.
And the Republicans in House and Senate have been following the playbook of the NSDAP when they got into the Reichstag in 1931-33 - make the system unworkable, then campaign against the unworkable system with the promise they can make it work.
This election is as important for the United States as a democratic republic as the January 1933 election was for Germany.
Sorry for the double post.
Brown people that worship Allah are terrorists.
White people that worship Jesus are patriots.
And that is ALL you need to know. Get on with your lives, sheeple.
Only if they worship the 'right' Jebsus...
I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians, they are so unlike your Christ. Gandhi
So why did that nice Christian Patriot shoot the Sikhs who worship the Waheguru?
Or Officer Murphy, for that matter?
White people who worship Jesus overlook the fact that Jesus was much closer to being a brown person than a white person.
And what about the white people who don't worship Jesus? It is beyond ridiculous that people are even this conversation in the century.
If things continue to go bad for Romney, I would expect to see another mass shooting to distract the media and the voters. No one brings up secret tax returns with fresh bodies on the news. To be clear, I did not say this was a vast conspiracy, but all you need is a few wackjobs who think they are doing God's work and the ends justify the means to get rid of Obama. We shall call them "suicide gunners."
Some days it seems like everything is totally messed up, and the good guys don't have a chance.
"Do your little bit of good where you are; it is those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world." Desmond Tutu
I hold on to this.
It's really too bad that the people who vilified the DHS report in 2009 didn't take time to read it. It's not like it was some huge report, it's 8 pages.
They don't need to read it - wingers don't operate on facts or supporting evidence. Only ideology and whether the person in front of them agrees with them or not.
I bet the wingers will really be happy when the nightmare of nightmares for counter-terrorism experts happens: Al Quaeda gets a nuke into the country (most likely in a shipping container sent to the Port of Los Angeles, where 5,000 of them sit every day, all uninspected) and it's delivered to a crew of white supremacists who set it off to start their race war. White supremacists have long talked about "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and some of their "leaders" have proposed just such an alliance on several occasions.
For a frightening look at how propaganda from right-wing sources is re-writing history, take a trip to Breitbart, or MRC, or NRO, or any of a dozen "mainstream" conservative-leaning sites, and see how they've been brainwashed into believing that Naziism and fascism are left-wing ideologies.
Maybe that's a sign of how far to the right American "conservatives" have moved. Of course, the more likely explanation is that nothing has any real meaning to the American right, but the possibility that Hitler really is to the left of American "conservatives" can't definitely be ruled out.
The media is always creating false equivalencies around the actions and statements of politicians. How about if they show enough courage to discuss an actual equivalency. Skinhead/neo-Nazi violence, murders and bombings by abortion protestors, and other threats on the right constitute terrorism just as much as do incidents of violence by al-qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic groups.
The problem is, the conservative media machine is invested in this new narrative that it's just more left-wing ideology driving those crimes, and any mention that it's really of the right sparks outrage from them. Equating it to terrorism is no problem for them: they say it falls in the lap of the Democrats.
Timothy McVeigh anyone?
This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but Wade Page didn't get a dishonorable discharge. My understanding is that you have to have done something pretty nasty to get a DD and it's handed down by a court martial. Page received a general discharge, which isn't a great way to go, but it's not the worst either.