Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, May 14, 2009 1:15:59 PM
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano finally acknowledged defeat publicly
on her department’s report on right-wing extremism. In a hearing
yesterday held by the House Homeland Security Committee, Napolitano
acknowledged that the report should never have been issued, that it
replaced specific threats with generalities, and that the new report
would focus on actual threats. The person who released the report
faces “personnel action”
It was actually neither. Unlike its counterpart report on the left
wing, it mentioned no actual threats nor reviewed any specific groups
with histories of violent action. Those groups exist, and they do try
to recruit people, including but not limited to military veterans.
Instead of focusing on the groups, though, the DHS report instead chose
to associate broad policy positions with violence as well as describe
returning veterans as a potential national-security threat in and of themselves.
Napolitano then told the committee that no process for vetting
reports existed, and that DHS is now working to fix that. However,
that’s not true either. We already know that civil-liberties lawyers
at DHS saw the report before it went out and objected to it. DHS released it over their objections. Obviously, a vetting process does exist;
it just got overruled. Who made the decision to send out the report
over their objections? Why didn’t the vetting process that apparently
took place get taken seriously by senior DHS leadership? Is it because
they themselves believe what the report said about conservative positions on federalism and abortion?