Mercury Rising

Why does this not surprise me? Perhaps because I noticed something similar a couple of weeks ago?

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not include extreme right-wing groups, some of which have ties to the Republican Party, on its list of potential terrorist threats, according to a report last month by the Congressional Quarterly, a publication with high-level sources in Congress and the federal government. CQ Homeland Security, an online publication of Congressional Quarterly, obtained a draft planning document which outlines the foreign and domestic terrorist groups the DHS expects to face. The threats originating from overseas are attributed primarily to Al Qaeda and other extreme Islamic groups. The threats originating from within the United States are attributed to radical environmental and animal rights groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which have attacked scientific laboratories using animals for experimentation, as well as construction sites. According to CQ Homeland Security, the report “does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans.” [...] Fascist, racist and anti-abortion groups are responsible for nearly all the terrorist attacks in the United States—with the exception of September 11, 2001—over the past two decades. These include the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which killed 168 people, as well as bombings of abortion clinics and assassination of abortion providers, and multiple cases of individual rampages, like that of Benjamin Smith, who went on a killing spree directed at blacks, Jews and immigrants in 1999. In several of the mass shootings at US high schools, including the two worst cases, at Columbine High School in 2000 and at Red Lake High School in rural Minnesota last month, the youth who carried out the murder-suicides were influenced by neo-Nazi propaganda which they accessed on the Internet. [...] Just as significant as the DHS decision to minimize the threat of right-wing terrorism is the media reaction. Congressional Quarterly is one of the most widely read publications in official Washington. Yet its March 25 report drew no comment in the daily press until April 19, when the Washington Post made a passing reference to it in the course of an article on the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Post included in this article a comment by John Lewis, deputy chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, who essentially conceded the truth of the CQ report, while defending the focus of domestic counter-terrorism on environmental groups. Other government officials were quoted, without direct attribution, claiming that “eco-terrorist” rather than right-wing groups had been more active in recent years, at least in the number of attacks, if not in the death toll. If there has been a decline in the overall number of attacks by right-wing terrorists, at least compared to the peak period of the middle and late 1990s, that has a political explanation: the anti-abortion, racist and militia groups see at least a significant portion of their program being carried out by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.

# posted by Phoenix Woman @ 5/02/2005 06:15:00 PM