Irregular warfare, inside the United States
Two stories from this morning’s New York Times discuss some internal security trends inside the United States that are headed in the wrong direction.
Defying all expectations, the United States has avoided another serious domestic terrorist attack since 2001. Part of the credit for this success may be due to good cooperation between the FBI and Muslim community organizations inside the U.S. But a recent string of “self-radicalization” terror cases has put pressure on these relationships. FBI field agents and managers are under pressure to prevent another attack. According to the New York Times article there is a debate within the FBI about how it should manage its relationships with the U.S. Muslim community:
It also attests to differing views within the bureau about the effectiveness of community outreach, said Michael Rolince, a former director of counterterrorism in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office. Some factions within the agency, he said, have always been leery of Islamic and Arab-American organizations, considering their loyalties to be divided … But by most accounts, the unraveling of ties between the F.B.I. and Muslim-Americans began two years ago, with the F.B.I.’s decision to stop sharing information with the nation’s most prominent Muslim civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The F.B.I. said it was motivated by council executives’ failure to answer questions about links with the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The executives denied any such connection, and accused the F.B.I. of staining the council’s reputation without due process.
The FBI is caught in a vise. It will get the blame if there is another spectacular attack and is responding by putting more pressure on its contacts with U.S. Muslim groups. Those groups increasingly don’t like the pressure and are pushing back.
In the second story, the game of spy-versus-spy is back, this time on the U.S.-Mexican border. The U.S. Customs Service attempts to infiltrate Mexico’s drug cartels. But the drug cartels have their own spies embedded inside U.S. law enforcement agencies:
James Tomsheck, the assistant commissioner for internal affairs at Customs and Border Protection, and other investigators said they had seen many signs that the drug organizations were making a concerted effort to infiltrate the ranks.
“We are very concerned,” Mr. Tomsheck said. “There have been verifiable instances where people were directed to C.B.P. to apply for positions only for the purpose of enhancing the goals of criminal organizations. They had been selected because they had no criminal record; a background investigation would not develop derogatory information.”
I recommend reading both articles.
