(OPINION) Michael Snyder – Many Americans were perfectly fine with Islamic terrorists being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay where they would be endlessly waterboarded and tortured in countless other ways. But now members of Congress are talking about “applying the same penalties” to domestic “extremists” here in the United States.
Does that mean that American citizens will soon be grabbed off the streets and sent to prison camps indefinitely without a trial? Personally, I am very much against terrorism wherever it is found all over the globe, but what some of our politicians are proposing to do to fight “domestic extremism” goes way over the line.
Once you are done reading this article, I believe that you will share my concerns. Even before the last election, the Department of Homeland Security was putting out some very alarming statements. For example, last October DHS officials came to the conclusion that U.S.-based extremists are now “the primary terrorist threat inside the United States”…
“The primary terrorist threat inside the United States will stem from lone offenders and small cells of individuals,” said the department’s first Homeland Threat Assessment. “Some U.S.-based violent extremists have capitalized on increased social and political tensions in 2020, which will drive an elevated threat environment at least through early 2021.”
If DHS officials had been referring to the groups that have been rioting, looting, and burning our cities for the past 12 months, that assessment would make a lot of sense. But of course, that was not who they were talking about. Following the election, we witnessed the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
In the aftermath of that attack, Democrats in Congress have been “insisting that domestic terrorism has eclipsed the threat from foreign actors such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda”… The attack has left many lawmakers, and especially Democrats, insisting that domestic terrorism has eclipsed the threat from foreign actors such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
DHS and its agencies are responsible for securing the country’s borders, ports, transportation, and cyber systems, generally leaving the monitoring of extremist groups and terrorism investigations to the FBI. But DHS and its agencies have nearly eight times as many employees as the FBI, and calls for the department to play a more muscular role in combating domestic extremism have policymakers looking at new ways to enlist its resources. READ MORE
