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Lone wolves, free speech hinder FBI’s domestic terror fight
WASHINGTON, Aug 7, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The surge in attacks by right-wing
extremists in the United States has caught law enforcement flat-footed and
calling for tough new “domestic terrorism” laws.
But the tendency of attackers to act alone with no support network and
little forewarning, plus the Trump administration’s hesitance to pursue a
movement that many identify with the president, continue to hamper prevention
efforts, experts say.
According to the New America think tank, since the September 11, 2001 Al
Qaeda attacks the number of deaths inside the United States from far right
extremist attacks has outpaced those by Islamic jihadists, 109 to 104.
After treating extremists like neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-
Semites as a secondary threat for a long time, the FBI has stepped up its
monitoring of such groups.
Yet that didn’t stop a 21-year-old Texas man who wrote of an “invasion” of
immigrants across the Mexican border from shooting dead 22 people, many of
whom were Latinos, in El Paso on August 3.
Nor did it keep a 26-year-old anti-Semitic truck driver from slaughtering
11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October.
Critics say President Donald Trump, himself accused of fomenting racism,
has not firmly put his own support behind a campaign against right-wing
extremism.
“It’s time that we dealt with this domestic terrorism set of issues with as
much energy and commitment and resources as we’ve dealt with the set of
international terrorism issues,” Nick Rasmussen, the former director of the
National Counterterrorism Center, told MSNBC on Tuesday.
“If we don’t have that backing from the president, if the president doesn’t
grab onto this and actually show some leadership on it, it’s hard to imagine
we are going to make some progress.”
– Hundreds of probes –
Since the 9/11 attacks, US counter-terrorism investigators have been laser-
focused on jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS).
With a surge in domestic mass shootings unrelated to extremist Islam, FBI
Director Christopher Wray insisted in July that they were now putting
significant resources into domestic terror threats.
With some 850 “domestic terrorism” investigations currently open, Wray said
that so far this year around 100 people have been arrested in relation to
political extremism.
The majority of those cases, he said, are “what you might call white
supremacist violence.”
But success has been impeded by both US laws and the nature of the
attackers and their ideology.
None of attackers in the recent mass shootings were on the FBI’s radar.
The agency was not aware of the El Paso shooter, who published a racist
screed upon his attack.
Nor did they know about the 19-year-old man who subscribed to white
supremacist ideals and killed one person in Gilroy, California in an
attempted mass attack on July 28.
– Evasive ‘lone wolves’ –
By contrast, the FBI was able to arrest nearly 200 potential jihadists over
the past decade because they sought affinity online or by other means with IS
or other jihadist groups, which investigators monitor closely.
FBI assistant director Michael McGarrity told Congress that it is extremely
hard to detect people who self-radicalize online and are not connected to any
organization.
“The current racially motivated violent extremist threat is decentralized
and primarily characterized by lone actors,” he said in a May hearing.
Experts also say it is impossible to monitor potentially hundreds of
thousands of people legally expressing extremist views online.
And given the open US market for guns, a potential white supremacist
attacker can easily arm himself without attracting attention. “Frequently,
these individuals act without a clear group affiliation or guidance, making
them challenging to identify, investigate, and disrupt,” said McGarrity.
– Freedom of speech –
The FBI is also hamstrung by the US constitution, which guarantees free
speech and guards against unreasonable searches.
Post-9/11 laws gave authorities sweeping powers to monitor any
international communications between a US individual and someone linked to a
designated terror group like IS.
But they don’t have that power to monitor an American discussing extreme
ideas domestically.
Those discussions are considered free speech and the FBI cannot open a
probe without evidence of a violent plot developing.
“Our focus is on the violence,” Wray told Congress last month. “We, the
FBI, don’t investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant. When it turns to
violence, we’re all over it.”
For that reason the FBI and some politicians are calling for Congress to
legislate a specific federal crime of domestic terrorism that would expand
law enforcement’s ability to get ahead of attacks.
Such a law “would ensure that FBI Agents and prosecutors have the best
tools to fight domestic terrorism,” the FBI Agents Association said on
Tuesday.
“We need to wrestle with the balance between free speech and privacy, free
discussion of ideas, and the moment that flashpoint occurs when you change
from hate to violence,” former FBI counter-intelligence official Frank
Figliuzzi told MSNBC.
Even Trump’s hard-line Department of Justice is wary of that.
“Designating domestic groups as domestic terrorism organizations and
picking out particular groups that you say you disagree with their views and
so forth is going to be highly problematic,” Deputy Assistant Attorney
General Brad Wiegmann told Congress in May.
BSS/AFP/GMR/0852 hrs