Oct. 26, 2007 – 8:07 p.m.
Who needs to spend $22 million on a commission to study homegrown terrorism? Only Congress, of course. It thinks the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, think tanks, universities, journalists and independent scholars aren’t doing enough.
By a vote of 404 to 6 last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill (
With staff, travel and other costs added in, the bill “would cost $22 million over the 2008-2012 period,” according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The commission is the brainchild of Rep.
A 2005 prison-based plot to bomb synagogues in Los Angeles moved her to float the proposal, said a source familiar with the committee’s deliberations.
“She had to be seen doing something about it,” he said.
Harman’s office did not respond to requests to explain what knowledge gap the commission is intended to fill.
But her Republican cosponsor,
“We know that all these intelligence elements are looking at [American homegrown Islamic terrorism],” Reichert said in an interview, “but where’s the focal point where all this information is coming to?”
The congressman, a former county sheriff, said U.S. intelligence was slow to address the issue and still not focusing enough on it, despite alleged plots to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago, soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., and the aviation fuel lines at John F. Kennedy Airport on Long Island.
The commission would “focus exclusively on homegrown terrorism,” Reichert said, and become “a gathering point” for knowledge gleaned from both government agencies and academia.
A Senate version is under construction by
One of the half-dozen no votes came from
”Setting up a commission is the worse type of posturing,” he said in a prepared statement in response to my query. “Is spending $20 million so people can talk more and pay for their hotel rooms and expenses really going to solve anything? I don’t think so.”
A former Intelligence Committee chief of staff, a Republican, scoffed at the whole commission idea.
“Congress is a commission,” he said.
But the commission is only the beginning. At the end of its 18-month term, it would cede its work to one of the Homeland Security Department’s university-based Centers of Excellence, according to the bill.
Rohrabacher said the $22 million would be better spent on cops, “so they can coordinate with one another to track violent radical groups.”
It’s not that the commission is a big-ticket item. It’s redundant.
The entire U.S. intelligence budget is $44 billion a year, a top intelligence official said in 2005, and climbing,
Plus, the FBI already has a domestic terrorism unit that tracks homegrown threats — with the emphasis on criminal acts, not beliefs.
The Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI), founded in 2004 to harness the work of America’s 16 spy agencies, has also addressed the issue, most recently in its July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland.”
Islamic extremists here bear watching, it said, but those carrying European passports were identified as a more immediate security concern.
The DNI also sponsored a conference of government and outside experts in the summer of 2006 “to tackle the complex issue of what causes individuals and groups to form movements that become radicalized.”
Even the New York Police Department has studied it. Its August report called American prisons, mosques, universities and the Internet “radicalization incubators” that are “rife with extremist rhetoric.”
It’s not that Congress has ignored the subject, either.
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is just now wrapping up its investigation of homegrown terrorism, with plans to issue a report in the near future, says Collin’s press secretary Jen Burita. A hearing on “Local Police and Islamic Extremism” is scheduled for Oct. 30.
The legislation also would direct the Homeland Security Department to work with friendly foreign counterparts and report back on their successes in combating domestic terrorism.
But DHS officials already meet regularly with their foreign counterparts, as do those from the FBI and CIA. DHS has also been studying the threat of homegrown terrorism, particularly in prisons.
“Working with our state and local partners, we initially have focused on assessing radicalization in California and in the New York City metropolitan area, to include New Jersey,” DHS Chief Intelligence Officer Charlie Allen told reporters in March. “We’re now focusing on the Midwest, the national capital region and Texas.”
Harman, Reichert and Collins could save taxpayers money by sponsoring a field trip to the local Barnes and Noble, whose shelves are groaning with tomes on terrorism.
There, they would learn that most experts don’t consider America’s Muslim communities to be terrorist incubators, certainly nothing like the huge, largely poor, South Asian and Arab immigrant ghettos of Western Europe.
In the eyes of many critics, a number of the homegrown terrorist suspects arrested since 9/11 look more like wannabees with big dreams rather than the real thing.
“It’s clear that Europe has much more of a problem,” says Michael Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who focused on domestic intelligence issues on the 9-11 Commission. “We don’t have the same kind of terrorist threat here in the U.S.”
Indeed, only two years ago, a senior FBI official testified that “environmental and animal rights activists who have turned to arson and explosives are the nation’s top domestic terrorism threat.”
Ironically, the bill doesn’t actually single out Islamic radicalism as a target, although a reasonable interpretation of the bill leads to that conclusion.
Pressed on that, Reichert said the commission will look at white power groups, neo-Nazis and other extremists, too.
“We don’t want to focus on any one group or leave anybody out,” he said.
That’s too broad, said a Senate staffer who has examined the legislation. If a commission is really necessary — a highly dubious proposition to start with, he said — it should at least be specific about its target: radical Islamic extremists.
To former FBI agent Mike German, who spent 16 years undercover in white power groups, zeroing in on Muslims is “wrong headed. It focuses too much on ideology rather than [criminal] behavior.”
In any event, the staffer said on condition of anonymity, what’s needed is action. Homegrown terrorism has been studied to death.
“We don’t have a national strategy to combine an outreach effort with law enforcement,” he said. “This just punts the issue two years down the road.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.