Our Tax Dollars at Work

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 762 active hate groups in the US as of 2004, ranging from neo-Nazis to the KKK to black separatists. To date, however, the Department of Homeland Security has not issued a single Homeland Security Assessment warning us about one of those groups.

It has, however, just issued the following Assessment: “Preventing Attacks by Animal Rights Extremists and Eco-Terrorists: Fundamentals of Corporate Security.”

To be sure, such groups have been known to destroy property as a means of protesting corporate policies that harm animals and the environment. But they never intentionally harm human beings (see here, for example) — something that certainly can’t be said of the the groups tracked by the SPLC. Indeed, the DHS admits as much, because here is the very first set of terrorist acts committed by “animal rights extremists” and “eco-terrorists” the Assessment discusses:

They use non-invasive tactics such as organizing protests and flyer distribution. They also seek to raise the cost of doing business by low-technology acts of vandalism such as graffiti, sending continuous faxes in order to drain the ink supply in company fax machines, inundating computers with e-mails causing them to crash, and tying up company phone lines to prevent legitimate calls.

We can only pray that al-Qaida hasn’t obtained a copy of the Assessment. Should it ever decide to take a page from the eco-terrorists’ playbook — repurposing the cellphones it now knows we’re monitoring to prank call the Pentagon, for example — the damage to our national security could be incalculable.

Keep up the good work, DHS! A weary nation thanks you for your vigilance.

Hat-tip: TPM Muckracker.

UPDATE: Patrick O’Donnell, one of our most loyal readers, sent me a 2005 article from CQ.com that furthers illustrates DHS’s ideological litmus-test for whether a terrorist group bears monitoring. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.

According to the list — part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security — between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.

It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.

DHS did not respond to repeated requests for comment or confirmation of the document’s authenticity.

The conspirators behind the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and wounded more than 500, were inspired by radical right-wing movements. Eric Rudolph, the man charged with carrying out the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, which killed one woman and injured more than 100, was a member of the radical anti-abortion group Army of God. Initially, Rudolph was the object of a massive North Carolina manhunt in connection with a Birmingham, Ala., abortion-clinic bombing that killed a police officer and seriously maimed a nurse.

Another Army of God member, James Kopp, was convicted in the 1998 shooting of a doctor who performed abortions.

Individuals affiliated with such groups have also been involved in many smaller terrorist acts, including mailing hundreds of bogus anthrax letters to abortion clinics, and in plots to obtain and use conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons against civilians. In 2003, for instance, a Texas man prosecutors say was a white supremacist and anti-government radical pleaded guilty to charges of possessing a weapon of mass destruction. Authorities had discovered enough sodium cyanide bombs to kill hundreds of people; machine guns and several hundred thousand rounds of ammunition; 60 pipe bombs; and remote-control explosive devices disguised as briefcases in a storage space he rented. The man, William J. Krar, was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.

My thanks to Patrick.