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stopbush

(24,396 posts)
Fri Mar 15, 2019, 09:52 PM Mar 2019

10 years ago, Conservatives got the DHS to quash a report on RISING far-right terror in the USA

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.

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/dhs/

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10 years ago, Conservatives got the DHS to quash a report on RISING far-right terror in the USA (Original Post) stopbush Mar 2019 OP
Not the least bit surprised ...nt 2naSalit Mar 2019 #1
They excoriated Janet Napolitano WhiteTara Mar 2019 #2

WhiteTara

(29,719 posts)
2. They excoriated Janet Napolitano
Fri Mar 15, 2019, 11:17 PM
Mar 2019

and I think she might have been forced to resign. I'm too tired to look up the details, that's just from memory.

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