'Blood on their hands': the intelligence officer whose warning over white supremacy was ignored

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/07/white-supremacist-terrorism-intelligence-analyst

Lois Beckett in San Francisco
@loisbeckett
Thu 8 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT

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.

Since then, Johnson has watched a rising tide of white nationalist terror attacks around the world. This year, he published a book, Hateland, on American extremism.

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Why do you think the Republican Party doesn’t want to talk about rightwing terrorism and white supremacy?
Partly because they’re the ones who are arming Americans. No matter how many times you can try to blame the person for carrying out the act, they still have access to weapons that are meant for war.

And I also believe, going back to their campaign strategy for the 2010 midterms, there’s blood on their hands. They’re definitely fanning the flame and providing the fuel, and it’s all to win elections.

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