Early in the Obama administration, conservatives seized on a report on the potential for terrorism conducted by "right-wing extremists" to argue that the administration was planning on criminalizing conservatives. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that state surveillance powers are often subject to abuse, but what conservatives were really saying was that all that state power really needs to be focused on Muslims where it belongs.
According to the Washington Post, since that incident, DHS has drawn resources away from studying right-wing extremism, despite the fact that "a majority of the 86 major foiled and executed terrorist plots in the United States from 1999 to 2009 were unrelated to al-Qaeda and allied movements." I don't think the Post article quite makes the case that the changes have hampered the government's ability to respond to domestic terrorism not related to Islam, but the politics are pretty interesting.
A senior department official provided by Fetcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence practices, confirmed that “the number of analysts on a daily basis has decreased somewhat, compared to what it was two years ago.” But the official disputed claims by several current and former DHS officials that only two analysts — including one who is a contract employee — now study the issue full-time.
DHS's caution or avoidance, as its critics claim, may partly stem from worries that aggressive intelligence operations could be seen as civil liberties violations. A DHS official explained that “unlike international terrorism, there are no designated domestic terrorist groups. Subsequently, all the legal actions of an identified extremist group leading up to an act of violence are constitutionally protected and not reported on by DHS.”
The official added that the FBI — not DHS — is “the primary lead for the federal government” on domestic terrorism. But Johnson, the former DHS analyst, said that if the FBI is the only agency to disseminate detailed reports on domestic extremist groups, “you’ve lost a separate set of eyes that could be looking at this before it develops into a criminal matter.”
The same doesn't hold true of individuals or groups suspected of Islamist terrorism, however, because the political incentives are very different. Not only is the administration far more sensitive to complaints from the right than it is to complaints from American Muslim groups, Americans don't usually react to domestic terrorism with the kind of hysteria reserved for even small-scale incidents with ties to Islamic extremism. So there's far more political pressure on the government to stop Islam-inspired terrorist attacks before they happen, even though people die either way. So Joe Stack can fly a plane into a federal building and kill more people than hapless underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab has in his entire life, but the former won't spark a conversation about whether we need to start waterboarding people again.
For all the complaints about the administration "coddling terrorists" by refusing to identify Islam as the enemy, it seems far more concerned about political correctness when it comes to Neo-Nazis or people who kill abortion doctors.
