‘Blood on their hands’: The intelligence officer whose 2009 warning over white supremacy was ignored
Ten years ago, the Department of Homeland Security sent American law enforcement agencies an intelligence briefing warning of a rising threat of domestic rightwing extremism, including white supremacist terrorism.
The economic recession and the election of America’s first black president would create fertile ground for rightwing radicalization, the 2009 report concluded. Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, would be attractive targets for recruitment.
Republican politicians and conservative pundits reacted with outrage and demanded a retraction. The report was politically motivated and unfairly demonized conservative views, they argued. “Americans are not the enemy. The terrorists are,” the head of the American Legion, a veterans group, wrote.
The head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly apologized. The small team of domestic terrorism analysts who had produced the report was disbanded, and analysts were reassigned to study Muslim extremism, according to Daryl Johnson, the career federal intelligence analyst who had led the team. By the next year, Johnson says, he had been forced out of the DHS altogether. [Continue reading…]