Posts

The Predictable Result of Asymmetry in Terrorism Policing: Andrew McCabe’s Demise

I recently finished Andrew McCabe’s book.

It is very effective at what I imagine its intended purposes are. It provides some fascinating new details about the genesis of the Russian investigation. It offers a great introduction in how the FBI (at its best) can work. It gives a self-congratulatory version of McCabe’s career, including key events like the Najibullah Zazi and Boston Marathon investigations; even if McCabe had wanted to tell fully honest stories about those investigations, I’m sure the less flattering details wouldn’t have passed FBI’s publication review.

The book also says satisfyingly mean things about Trump, Jeff Sessions, and (more obliquely) Rod Rosenstein. (I think McCabe’s book release significantly explains the rumors reported as fact that Mueller’s report was imminent some weeks ago; that claim served, in part, to once again eliminate any pressure to fire Rosenstein immediately).

The latter of two, of course, implemented McCabe’s firing. McCabe’s excuse for lying to the Inspector General, which led to his firing, is one of the least convincing parts of the book (he admits he can’t say more because of his continued legal jeopardy, but he does raise it). That’s true, in part, because McCabe only deals with one of the conversations in question; there were a number of them. But he also excuses his chief lie because he was frazzled about learning of the Strzok-Page texts in the same conversation. I can understand that, but elsewhere, one of his digs against Rosenstein is how overwhelmed the Deputy Attorney General was in the wake of the Jim Comey firing. McCabe suggests, in that context, that because he had dealt with big stressful issues (like the Boston Marathon attack), he wasn’t similarly rattled. Which is why I find it disingenuous to use being frazzled for not being fully truthful to the Inspector General. Plus, virtually all defendants prosecuted for lying to the FBI (including George Papadopoulos, but not Mike Flynn, who is a very accomplished liar) are frazzled when they tell those lies; it’s a tactic the FBI uses to catch people unguarded.

I was most frustrated, however, by something that has become increasingly important in recent days: McCabe’s utter lack of awareness (at least in the book) of the import of the asymmetric focus on Islamic terrorism across his career.

After moving to counterterrorism in the mid-00s from working organized crime, McCabe became an utterly central player in the war on Islamic terror, founding the High Value Interrogation Group, and then leading the CT and National Security Divisions of FBI. He was a key player in investigations — like Zazi — that the FBI is rightly proud of.

But McCabe normalizes the choices made after 9/11 to pursue Islamic terrorism as a distinct danger. He (of course) whitewashes Jim Comey’s decision to retain the Internet dragnet in 2004 under an indefensible use of the PATRIOT Act. He argues that it is politically impossible to survive a failure to prevent an attack even though he managed the Boston Marathon attack, where FBI and NSA had some warning of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s danger, but nevertheless got very little criticism as a result. Most remarkably, McCabe talks about Kevin Harpham’s attempted attack on the Martin Luther King Day parade, mentions as an aside that this was (obviously) not an Islamic terror attack, but offers no reflection on how Harpham’s attack undermines much of what he presents, unquestioningly, as a greater risk from Islamic terrorism (here’s a story on how Barack Obama did not get briefed on Harpham, a decision that may well have involved McCabe).

Granted, McCabe’s blind spots (at least in the book) are typical of people who have spent their lives reinforcing this asymmetry. You see it, too, in this utterly nonsensical paragraph in a largely ridiculous piece from Joshua Geltzer, Mary McCord, and Nick Rasmussen — all likewise accomplished players in the War on Just One Kind of Terrorism — at Lawfare.

The phrases “international terrorism” (think of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda) and “domestic terrorism” (think of the Oklahoma City bombing and the October 2018 shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue) have often been a source of confusion to those not steeped in counterterrorism. The Islamic State has its roots internationally, but what makes it such a threat to Americans is, in part, its ability to influence domestic actors like Omar Mateen to kill Americans in domestic locations like Orlando, Florida. The group may be “international,” but its attackers and attacks can be, and have been, domestic—to tragic effect.

This paragraph, in a piece that admits the focus of their career has been wrong (and neglects to mention that Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant named Donald Trump, along with Anders Behring Breivik, as an inspiration), suggests that the reason international terrorism is “such a threat” is because it can inspire domestic actors. The logic inherent to that paragraph is that terrorism carried out by “domestic terrorists,” inspired by a domestic white supremacist ideology is any less dangerous than terrorism carried out by people inspired by what is treated as an international ideology. International terrorism is worse than domestic terrorism, these experts argue, because it can lead to domestic terrorism.

Dead is dead. And given the significant number of white supremacists who have had experience in the military and greater tolerance for their training, white supremacists have the potential of being far more effective, as individuals, at killing than US-based Islamic terrorists.

One thing the Lawfare piece studiously avoids acknowledging is that what it calls “domestic” terrorism (the racist ideology of which they never describe) is an ideology significantly exported by the United States. Even in a piece that rightly calls for an equal focus on both white supremacist terrorism and Islamic terrorism, it ducks labeling the ideology in question. And while this WaPo piece does label the ideology in question, it bizarrely calls an attack in New Zealand carried out by an Australian a “domestic” attack.

The WaPo piece describes one problem with the asymmetric treatment of different kinds of terrorism: that governments don’t share intelligence about international violent racist ideology. In fact, in the US, such intelligence gets treated differently, if the FBI’s failure to track the networks around Frazier Glenn Miller and Eric Rudolph is any indication.

Ironically, that’s one reason that McCabe’s failure to track white supremacist terrorism in the same way he tracked Islamic terrorism led to his demise. While the network behind the election year operation that helped elect Trump involves a lot of Russians, it also clearly involves a lot of white supremacists like Nigel Farage (and David Duke), a network Russia exploited. Additionally, as I have argued (and at least one study backs) white supremacist networks provided the real fire behind the attacks on Clinton; Russia’s information operations had the effect of throwing more fuel on a blazing bonfire.

The other problem with the US government’s asymmetric treatment of terrorism is legitimacy. Labeling Islamic terrorism “foreign” and pursuing material support cases based partly on speech has had the effect of criminalizing some speech that criticizes US foreign policy, even well-deserved criticism about the effect of US killing of Muslims. By contrast, white supremacist speech, even that which  more aggressively advocates violence is treated as speech. Yes, deplatforming has begun to change that.

But we’re still not at a place where those who incite white supremacist violence are held accountable for it.

That’s how it was possible for a man to kick off a campaign by inventing lies about Mexican immigrants and how the entire Republican party, up to and including the new supposedly sane Attorney General, are permitted to pursue counterproductive policies solely so they can appear to demonize brown people.

Irrespective of the merit or not in the finding that Andrew McCabe lacked candor with the IG, he got treated the way he did because a man whose entire political career is based off feeding white resentment needed to appear to be a victim of Andrew McCabe. That act, by itself, was not about Trump’s white supremacist ideology. But it is a structure of power that is white supremacist (exacerbated by Trump’s narcissism).

We have a President Trump in significant part because this country has tolerated and even rewarded white supremacist ideology, institutionally ignoring that it poses as much of a risk as violent Islamic ideology. It would be really useful if people like Andrew McCabe spend some time publicly accounting for that fact.

The white supremacy that brought us the Trump presidency would not be possible if we had treated violent white supremacist terror as terror for the last twenty years.

A Modest Proposal: Ban the Interstate Travel of Kansans

It may be that Kansas is actually one of the most dangerous hives of terrorist activity in the US today.

Consider the case of Adam Purinton, who allegedly shot three men on Wednesday night outside of Kansas City, believing two of them — who are actually engineers from India — were Middle Eastern.

Details are emerging of what happened in and around Austins when a man known to some bar staffers became disgruntled in the patio area, spouting racial slurs at two men of Indian descent and then shooting them and another regular who stood up for the two.

At least one witness reportedly heard the suspect yell “get out of my country” shortly before shooting men he reportedly thought were Middle Eastern. Both men, engineers at Garmin, appear to be originally from India.

[snip]

The suspect fled on foot as police descended onto his neighborhood just behind Austins. Purinton eventually left the Kansas City area.

About five hours later, he was having a drink at the Applebee’s at Clinton, Mo., when he told a bartender he needed a place to hide out because he had just killed two Middle Eastern men.

The bartender called police, and he was arrested without incident.

The FBI is investigating whether this is a hate crime, but it falls squarely into the kind of crime that Trump wants to treat as terrorism in order to defend his Muslim ban.

More serious still is the attack that three conspirators on the other side of the state plotted against Somali refugees — a plot the FBI broke up not long before Election Day last year. The men (at least one of whom is a Trump supporter) called themselves the Crusaders. They had already scoped out a mosque, churches that sponsored refugees, and an apartment complex where many Somalis live. They were both trying to make their own bombs, as well as trading drugs with an undercover officer to get help building a fertilizer bomb. They spoke of the Somalis as “cockroaches” and planned to launch a “bloodbath” to take “this country back.”

The only fucking way this country’s ever going to get turned around is it will be a bloodbath and it will be a nasty, messy motherfucker. Unless a lot more people in this country wake up and smell the fucking coffee and decide they want this country back…we might be too late, if they do wake up…I think we can get it done. But it ain’t going to be nothing nice about it.

In 2014, Frazier Glenn Miller killed three people at two Jewish sites near Kansas City. Like Purinton, Miller didn’t succeed in targeting his desired type of victim; all of his victims are Christians. A former Klan member, Miller had also previously conspired with MLK parade terrorist Kevin Harpham.

In 2009, Scott Roeder assassinated abortion provider George Tiller in his church in Wichita, Kansas. Roeder conspired with a network of other anti-abortion terrorists, and he continued to call for violence even after being imprisoned.

In 1994 and 1995, Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols carried out most of their preparation for the Oklahoma City bombing in Kansas.

Under Trump’s logic, the best way to deal with spiking violence such as we see in Kansas is to wall it off, to prevent it from infecting the rest of the country.

I realize this will create a lot of undue hardship for the people of Kansas. I realize, too, it will prove to be a royal pain in the ass for anyone trying to drive across the vast expanse in the middle of the country, particularly long haul truckers.

But we have to keep our country safe.

So Kansans will have to be cooped up in their violent state, along with the dangerous whackjobs that mean to do them harm, until we can figure this out.

Update: Fixed spelling of Purinton. Thanks to DFDG for reminding me about the Tiller assassination. Thanks to KG for reminding me that McVeigh prepped the Oklahoma City attack in Kansas.

Kansas to Execute White Supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller

While the focus on racial justice has been on Columbia, MO in recent days, a Judge in Kansas sentenced the white supremacist Frazier Glenn Miller to death for his murder of three people he presumed were Jewish.

A judge has sentenced a white supremacist to death for the killing of three people at two Jewish centres.

Frazier Glenn Miller Jr, 74, targeted the sites in Kansas last year and will be put to death by lethal injection.

Johnson County District Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan said: “Your attempt to bring hate to this community, to bring terror to this community, has failed.”

Miller responded to the sentence, by shouting “heil Hitler” before he was removed from the courtroom.

This is why I don’t support the death penalty: because even when you argue it should only be used for the worst of the worst, like Miller, it usually ends up allowing those people to claim to be martyrs. That’s especially true in Miller’s case–he’s old and ill and would die alone and forgotten in prison otherwise, but now gets to claim to be martyred.

FBI Disclaims Material Support for Terrorism Prosecutions — for White People

Tara McElvey wrote a piece for the Beeb coming close to espousing a very (dangerous, IMO) British view: that the FBI should criminalize white supremacists’ speech the way they have Islamic terrorists’.

[Frazier Glenn Miller’s] writings are a reminder of the virulence in white supremacist views. Earlier this month a married couple, Jerad and Amanda Miller (no relation to Frazier Glenn), shot and killed three people in Nevada.

The couple was steeped in white-supremacist ideology and spoke openly about their views. Police said they placed a swastika on the body of one of the victims.

Some wonder whether authorities were too easy on Frazier Glenn Miller before the killings – and are too soft on the white supremacists in the US.

The piece is most interesting for the quotes from FBI’s spokesperson, which falsely suggests it doesn’t target groups as groups.

Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the FBI, said: “We don’t target groups for who they are. If you want to be a white supremacist – legally there’s nothing wrong with that.

“What we’re concerned about is breaking the law.”

[snip]

As Bresson said: “There’s nothing illegal about being weird.”

Anti-Semitism and extremist ideology seem to play a role in the violence, but Bresson and other officials say that knowing when a white supremacist – or anyone – will explode is beyond their purview.

This is, of course, bullshit. For groups named as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the FBI does target groups for who they are, under well-worn material support laws. But even without membership in an FTO, the FBI routinely sets up stings to catch young men to precipitate their “explosion” (invariably using inert bombs).

To be fair, the FBI also set up a bunch old white men in the Waffle House plot, in part because they had an informant affirmatively trying to work off his sex crime charges by setting up fellow anti-government activists.

But the FBI’s approach to both groups deserves reconsideration. If the FBI believes it’s not in the job of precipitating personal explosions, it should stop doing so, and instead investigate actual crimes (as Bresson says they do).

In the case of Miller, McElvey misses a key detail. The FBI did not have just his speech. The had — and DOJ had already used — his open support for the MLK bomber, Kevin Harpham, as evidence of criminality. Miller already supported the use of violence against African Americans.

The difference,  of course, is that FBI also called that a “hate crime,” not terrorism. And as a result, treated Miller’s support for terrorism as a First Amendment issue rather than a crime issue.

The Terror Networks and the Hate Criminals

In response to Frazier Glenn Miller’s arrest in the murder of 3 people at Jewish targets the other day, Peter Bergen reminds that white supremacist terrorists have been more dangerous in recent years than Islamic terrorists.

Now let’s do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting “Heil Hitler” after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted “Allahu Akbar.” Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.

Yet the death toll in the shootings in Kansas is similar to that of last year’s Boston Marathon bombings, where three people were killed and the suspects later killed a police officer as they tried to evade capture. (Many more, of course, were also wounded in the Boston attacks; 16 men, women and children lost limbs.)

In fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).

By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 23 people in the United States since 9/11.

But, as Bergen notes, thus far these murders have been called “hate crimes,” not terrorism.

That’s particularly interesting given this remarkable report from HuffPo’s Ryan Reilly, while he was still at TPM. Back in 2012, Reilly interviewed Miller about his contacts with Kevin Harpham, the MLK bomber. As Reilly notes, Federal prosecutors had used Harpham’s contacts with Miller to argue for harsher sentencing.

Less than a week after 36-year-old Kevin Harpham was arrested for allegedly attempting a racially motivated bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Spokane, white supremacist leader Glenn Miller sent him a letter offering to help start a legal fund on his behalf.

“Keep your chin up and stay strong,” Miller wrote in a letter dated March 14, telling Harpham that he and other members of an online white supremacist forum believed he’d “been set up.”

[snip]

Federal prosecutors used Miller’s jailhouse letter and Harpham’s response — in which he said he might have Miller screen individuals as he looked for “someone to house sit for a while” — as one of the factors that “supports the imposition of a sentence that will maximize the time the Defendant is incarcerated and subject to judicial oversight.”

Evidently Harpham’s lawyers soon informed him it probably wasn’t a good idea to be sending letters to a well-known white supremacist while in jail accused of a hate crime, as he didn’t respond to any of Miller’s follow up letters.

“He’s kind of let me know he doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Miller said. “It’s not in his self interest to associate with me, and I can understand that, can’t you?” [my emphasis]

As I noted at the time, the FBI called Harpham a “lone wolf” “hate criminal.” That, in spite of the fact that the crime to which he plead guilty — attempted use of a WMD — is one of FBI’s favorite “terrorist” crimes with which to entrap young Muslims, and in spite of the fact that Harpham’s contacts with Miller and his abundant online activity showed him to be a part of a network sharing the same ideology.

Harpham was one of the few white people convicted of a terrorist enhancement crime (the 3 anarchists tied to Occupy who discussed bombing a bridge were also found guilty on WMD charges; both the Hutaree and Schaeffer Cox were initially charged with terrorist-associated crimes, but not found guilty of them; see this a post for Dianne Feinstein’s catalog of such crimes). Whether the FBI called Harpham one or not, he is technically a terrorist.

Just two years ago, they made a big deal out of Harpham’s ties to Miller and used that to substantiate the severity of Harpham’s crimes. Yet not only did the FBI not catch Miller in a sting before he killed. But they’re not even calling Miller a terrorist … yet.

Miller and Harpham were participants in the same kind of network the FBI uses, if they’re Muslim, to identify targets for increased law enforcement attention. Harpham was convicted as a terrorist, in part, based on his ties to Miller.

And yet no one stopped Miller before he (allegedly) killed.