Does the U.S. Need Better Laws to Fight Domestic Terrorists?

What's the story?

• Days after another shooting in a house-of-worship, some Americans are asking if the U.S. needs better laws to fight domestic terrorists.
• Max Boot, a Washington Post columnist and senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues this point in his recent column. After outlining a spate of recent attacks – the Sri Lanka church and hotel bombings, the Christchurch mosque shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting – Boot writes:

“The cycle of hatred is endless and now global. Extremism flows across the Internet to all corners of the world, providing demented individuals an excuse for snuffing out the lives of others. We know this; that is why we have been fighting a war on terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001. But our focus has been one-sided: We fight Islamist terrorism while slighting the dangers of white-supremacist terrorism.”

Trump Admin Disbanded Domestic Terror Unit

• While the Anti-Defamation League reports a rise in domestic terrorism and “homegrown extremism,” the Trump administration last year eliminated the Department of Homeland Security’s domestic terrorism unit.
• “The administration’s ‘National Strategy for Counterterrorism,’ issued last October just before the Tree of Life shooting, addresses the imperative of countering domestic terrorism,” George Selim, senior vice president of programs at the ADL, writes in USA Today. “Yet the administration is reducing rather than increasing the resources our security apparatus needs to do so.”

Double standard?

• Last week, a federal judge in Maryland announced that a Coast Guard lieutenant accused of being a domestic terrorist can be released before his trial. Christopher Paul Hasson, a self-described white nationalist, amassed 17 weapons with the alleged intent of killing Democratic politicians and journalists. He had previously drafted an email saying he was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth," according to court filings. 
• “It’s impossible to imagine an Islamic State or al-Qaeda adherent being released under similar circumstances,” Boot writes. “Why is this white supremacist any different? Because there is no law against domestic terrorism that would justify holding him in pretrial custody.”
• “To illustrate how ridiculous the current situation is,” former FBI agent Josh Campbell told CNN, “when I was in the FBI investigating people inspired by international terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, the mere association with those groups was enough to land someone behind bars. Not so with domestic terrorism. Even if someone is politically motivated to cause violence due to their right- or left-wing extremist views, that’s not enough to get them off the street.”

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2019

• This legislation, from Illinois Democrats Sen. Dick Durbin and Rep. Brad Schneider, would require federal law enforcement agencies to regularly address domestic terrorism threats.
• It would also provide training and resources to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement in addressing these threats, including creating programs to reduce the likelihood that individuals would be radicalized to violence.

What do you think?

Does the government need to do more to fight domestic terrorists? Should DHS re-establish its domestic terrorism unit? Do you want your reps supporting the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2019? Take action above and share your thoughts below.

—Josh Herman

(Photo Credit: Rebecca Plevin via Twitter)