Thread: Southern Poverty Law Center: Monitor domestic terror threat

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Southern Poverty Law Center: Monitor domestic terror threat

By Marty Schladen \ El Paso Times
Posted: 03/11/2013 12:00:00 AM MDT

Domestic terror threats

Do you think the United States should do more to monitor domestic terror threats? Read story

Total Votes = 89

Yes: The number of anti-government groups within this country has grown. 62.92 % No: Homeland Security has taken the right steps to ensure our safety. 25.84 % I am not sure. 11.23 %

There has been explosive growth in the threat of domestic terror -- including in El Paso -- during President Barack Obama's administration, but his Department of Homeland Security is not monitoring it, according to a former DHS official and a civil-rights organization that tracks hate groups.

The number of anti-government "Patriot" groups has grown from 149 in 2008, the year Obama was elected, to 1,360 in 2012, according to "The Year in Hate and Extremism," an annual report published last week by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Montgomery, Ala.-based organization has tracked hate groups since 1980.

The center has been in the news in El Paso because last year it listed Tom Brown Ministries as an anti-gay hate group.

Brown vehemently denies the charge, but he has blogged that militant gays forced the American Psychiatric Association to stop calling homosexuality the mental disorder that Brown believes it is.The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks groups that it believes might be violent themselves or inspire others to violence.

The number of Patriot groups, many of which stockpile weapons and explosives, spiked during Bill Clinton's presidency, fell off during George W. Bush's, and then rose to unprecedented levels during Obama's, Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said last week during a conference call.

"It's hard not to be afraid of what's coming down the road," Potok said, adding that his organization.

warned the Clinton administration of the rise in Patriot groups six months before a federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed in 1995.Perpetrators of non-Islamic domestic terror, such as the man who killed six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last year, often act alone, so it's unclear whether such attacks would be stopped by monitoring groups that espouse violent anti-government, racist or sectarian ideologies. But Daryl Johnson, who joined Potok on last week's conference call, said the federal government isn't even doing that.

Johnson headed up a seven-person unit in the Department of Homeland Security that tracked those groups. But when, in April 2009, it produced a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," some on the right said the Obama administration was trying to portray all conservatives as potential terrorists.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano repudiated the report and shut down the agency's ability to track domestic, non-Islamic terror threats, Johnson said.

"There was this huge backlash, and people took things out of context, and congressional members weighed in and it became a politically charged topic that nobody wanted to deal with because they have career aspirations," Johnson said. "It just generates controversy."

The Southern Poverty Law Center last week wrote to the Department of Homeland Security, urging it to restart its surveillance of non-Islamic domestic terror threats. The department did not respond last week to questions for this story.
But Johnson said the threat the agency is ignoring is real.

"A lot of these groups engage in weapons stockpiling and a lot of them do not recognize the federal firearms and explosives laws," he said. "The ability to inflict mass casualties -- a mass shooting, for instance -- is quite high within these extremist groups."

Potok said the fact that Obama is the first black president has something to do with the rise in the number of Patriot groups, but the problem runs deeper.

It's "the change he represents," Potok said, noting that non-Hispanic whites will cease being the majority of Americans around 2043. "That is animating a really remarkable level of anger, fear, discomfort in a pretty substantial hunk of the American population. Many Americans feel this is not the country they grew up in."

Mass shootings last year at a Connecticut elementary school and a Colorado movie theater were followed by calls for more firearms regulation.

Potok said that only fed the far-right conspiracy theories that the government plans to seize Americans' guns.

El Paso could be the target of domestic terror for several reasons, Potok and Johnson said.

Two of them are the area's high number of federal and law-enforcement facilities.

"The enemy of the Patriot movement, which is the most dynamic part of the radical right today, is the federal government," Potok said. "The last time around it ended with the destruction of the Murrah building and the murder of 168 people in Oklahoma City. The federal government certainly is a target and that includes surprising places, like Army installations."
Potok cited a plot last year by an anti-government group to take over Fort Stewart, Ga., and assassinate Obama.

He also cited the 2010 shooting deaths of two Arkansas state troopers by a father-and-son team of "sovereign citizens" who don't believe in the authority of the government.

El Paso also is a potential target because its population is heavily Hispanic, Potok and Johnson said.
"Latinos are a target," Potok said. "I don't think there's any question about that."

As evidence, Potok cited the 2011 arrest of neo-Nazi Jeffrey Harbin in Arizona.

Police said Harbin was headed for the Mexican border and had improvised explosive devices that were built to "maximize human carnage."
http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_22762071/rights-group-monitor-domestic-terror-threat?_requestid=9766646

These sick bastards at the SPLC are back at it again trying to label peaceful civic groups that do not share their love of illegal immigration and liberal causes with people that want to stockpile weapons and blow up buildings.

The American public needs to put its foot down and say it is time for these kinds of lies and distortions coming from the SPLC to end!

W

Report Prepared for Obama’s DHS & DOJ targets Survivalists, Patriots & Conservatives as Terrorist Threats

Filed under News, Police State March 6, 2013 Posted by: Off Grid Survival

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a group who regularly attacks patriotic Americans by masquerading as a civil rights group, is compiling lists andconducting surveillance on what it calls “patriots”, “survivalists”, and “conspiracy theorists”. Even more disturbing, is the access this group has to the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.

In a report prepared for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is asking the Federal Government to create a new inter-agency task force which will be dedicated to tracking and taking down conspiracy theorists, survivalists, “Patriot groups” and the “American radical right”.

The Government Supported Attack Group, who is actively creating lists and conducting surveillance on Americans, says the following people need to be tracked by the Federal Government.

• Those who talk about, or believe in Conspiracy Theories.
• Those who talk about or believe in Agenda 21 — a United Nations sustainability plan that was signed by President George H.W. Bush and is part of a plan to impose socialism on America and strip away private property rights.
• Those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns.
• Those who believe the President is trying to impose Socialism on the American people.
• Those who call themselves Survivalist or belong to Patriot Groups.
• Right-wing groups like the Tea Party, the Constitution Party, the Oath Keepers, or other “conspiracy-oriented Patriot groups”

The report was written by J. Richard Cohen, President of the SPLC and a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group.

The fact that our government entertains the thoughts of a raving madman is a testament to how far this country has fallen from its founding doctrines. How a person who labels patriotic Americans as a terrorist threat is allowed to work with the federal government, especially at a time when the DHS is in the middle of so many Spying & Drone Scandals, is a complete mystery that should scare the hell out of every American in this country.

We have a government who is declaring war on the thoughts, opinions and principles that founded this country. When a man who declares Patriots to be a “terrorist group” is allowed such high level access to our leaders, there is something seriously wrong with our system.

Report Prepared for Obama’s DHS & DOJ targets Survivalists, Patriots & Conservatives as Terrorist Threats

Letter sent to Holder ans Napolitano March 5,2013

http://www.splcenter.org/sites/defau...DHS_Letter.pdf