Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Domestic Terrorism Analyst Ignored

Wired:
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.
“DHS is scoffing at the mission of doing domestic counterterrorism, as is Congress,” Johnson tells Danger Room. “There’ve been no hearings about the rising white supremacist threat, but there’s been a long list of attacks over the last few years. But they still hold hearings about Muslim extremism. It’s out of balance.”
I am SHOCKED that conservative politicians push for the government to investigate brown people and tell them not to pay attention to the white racists shooting brown people.  Who would have ever guessed that?  Why do right-wing and racist go together so easily?  I'm not sure, but they sure seem to.

1 comment:

  1. About three years ago, I was taking a university class when the topic of terrorism and its perceptions came up. Out of the entire class of intelligent people in their early to mid twenties, close to half of them did not know of the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. Their mindsets had been shaped to believe that all terrorists were "others from away". And these were smart, aware people.

    Says a lot about the direction of the public discourse about terrorism.

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