(MintPress) — Recent actions by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have skeptics worried that the department is preparing for the worst after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deemed that domestic terrorism attacks from hate groups has grown into a serious problem – now equating it with terrorism from foreign organization. The DHS recently redacted information that detailed how much ammunition it was purchasing after it was discovered the agency purchased more than 1 billion rounds of ammo on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the last six months. Documents reported on by InfoWars show that the DHS did not shop around for competitive prices for the ammunition, something the DHS said was necessary because of an “unusual and compelling urgency” and that a shortage of bullets could soon cause “substantial safety issues for the government.”
High-profile political events that have a history of drawing large swaths of protests are scheduled for the next few months, as the Republican National Convention (RNC) and Democratic National Convention (DNC) prelude to the presidential election in November. And if the treatment of Occupy protesters serve as an indicator to how authorities deal with demonstrations, future political conventions have the potential to turn violent.
Many indications point to the U.S. government looking to ward off any potential dissent at all costs. In emails leaked by WikiLeaks, members of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor – a private global intelligence company – acknowledged the existence of a central surveillance hub used by police forces and government agencies to aggregate identities into a facial recognition program. TrapWire, as it is called, is said to help monitor behavior indicative of terroristic activities.
Local police forces have also become significantly more militarized over the past decade, opting for military equipment such as Taser shotguns, long-range acoustic devices and riot gear when quelling demonstrations, which are oftentimes peaceful. This ideological shift has been documented by the U.S.-issued National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, an overview of practices to thwart terrorism efforts.
“The paradigm for combating terrorism now involves the application of all elements of our national power and influence,” the document reads. “Not only do we employ military power, we use diplomatic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement activities to protect the Homeland and extend our defenses, disrupt terrorist operations and deprive our enemies of what they need to operate and survive. We have broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.”
The CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, speculates that a domestic army could become as well-stocked as the military with continued ammunition contracts. The think tank believes that American authorities could be preparing for a citizen uprising, which has caused local and federal authorities to respond with increased raids, tactical changes and unnecessary preventative measures. To a degree, we’re already in that transitionary period, the group says.
“These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers,” CATO notes. “These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders and innocent suspects.”
A culture of attacks
The response could also be to the rise of domestic terrorism instances, something the FBI has developed a growing concern over. But the threat of domestic terrorism has brought the dialogue of America back to a historic period.
There was a time after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks where the United States largely felt like a unified nation, mostly because we were told of a common enemy from a faraway land who hadn’t taken kindly to us. We were one force: America vs. Iraq, and then America vs. Afghanistan.
Then the political rhetoric changed; peace activists challenged the wars while the wars’ advocates said they were necessary measures to take against terrorism. Suddenly, we were divided again like a Sunday afternoon NFL rivalry. We were willing to give up freedoms to feel safe, and the government took a heavy-handed approach by implementing wiretapping and other surveillance tactics along with increasingly militarized local police forces.
To an extent, America is going through a similar dilemma, albeit on a smaller scale. The threat of terrorism has infiltrated the conscious of many Americans again as the shootings at the “Batman: The Dark Knight Rises” premier in Aurora, Colo. and Sikh temple shootings outside Milwaukee, Wis. have the government scrambling to respond to what the FBI calls domestic terrorism.
But even the term “domestic terrorism” has divided the nation. The FBI has gone ahead with its investigation into the Sikh temple shooting as a domestic terrorism inquiry, much to the criticism of some. Arguments have been made that the shooting in Aurora, Colo. was an act of domestic terrorism, or the shooting at Fort Hood in 2009. That, in turn, has sparked debates of guns in America, national security and the Second Amendment. National Public Radio’s (NPR) Linton Weeks wrote that for anything constructive to happen in the public’s response to the shootings, the level of contentiousness must first decline.
“Do Americans disagree about everything? Are we such factious and fractious folks that we just naturally start arguing and choosing sides whenever something comes up? Are we always contentious, never content? Always warring, never loving?” Weeks questioned. “Have we reached such a pointed, poisoned, partisan point in our history that any topic, once it rises to the surface of national dialogue, triggers angry standoffs on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else?”
The RAND Corporation, a nonprofit global policy think tank, says domestic terrorism is domestic violence against civilians or infrastructure that often comes with the intent to “intimidate, coerce or influence national policy.” The FBI has no formal definition of domestic terrorism, saying it only depends on the motive of the crime and not how many people are killed. And under the U.S. Patriot Act – passed as a security measure post-9/11 – defines the act as a measure to “affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”
Why, then, was the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords not considered domestic terrorism? The accused shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, is said to most likely attempt a mental defense argument in court. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence suggesting that Loughner didn’t have a political motivation behind the shooting.
So it seems the U.S. government does not have a widespread standard for what actually constitutes as domestic terrorism, leaving the basis of investigation resources and trials on nothing more than an arbitrary whim.
Anticipating attacks
The FBI also has little say of whether or not an investigation should be conducted of the pretense of domestic terrorism; that determination belongs to local and federal law enforcement, who can use resources of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces if they feel domestic terrorism is a possibility.
Regardless of citizens self-diagnosing America’s sporadic attacks, the FBI is moving forward under the presumption that domestic terrorism by members of extremist groups has become a serious problem in the United States. Many of these groups are classified as hate groups – an all-encompassing term used to describe a movement that has seen its numbers grow significantly over the past decade. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) tracks hate groups and counted 1,018 across the country in 2011, a record figure.
A majority of the groups being classified as hate groups have come post-2008 when a “Patriot movement” was resurrected after President Barack Obama’s inauguration. The Patriot groups identify with radical right ideologies and have grown by 755 percent since Obama took office. Focal points of the groups are centered around ethnic and racial minorities’ place in America and traditional American values.
Two years ago, the FBI was tipped off by an informant of a white supremacist group based in Florida called the American Front. Just last month, Florida’s state Attorney Office released its findings of the group after a two-year investigation. The informant, once a member of the group, told investigators that American Front was planning for violence throughout Central Florida. But the FBI is quick to point out that its increase of domestic terror groups comes in a variety of forms, and what was once seen as a growing threat post-9/11 has now become a serious threat.
“Today’s domestic terror threats run the gamut, from hate-filled white supremacists … to highly destructive eco-terrorists … to violence-prone anti-government extremists … to radical separatist groups,” the FBI has conceded. “One particularly insidious concern that touches all forms of domestic extremism is the lone offender – a single individual driven to hateful attacks based on a particular set of beliefs without a larger group’s knowledge or support.”
In April, a handful of members in Congress sent a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Eric Holder to express their concerns of “hate-motivated attacks.” Another arm of the government is also worried about the increased attacks on American soil, which has prompted the DHS to acknowledge that lone-wolf attacks and hate groups will likely continue their increase.