Global Policy Forum

By James Ridgeway

In a candid interview with the Associated Press, Joseph Billy, acting assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, made a surprising assessment: Although much attention is being focused on keeping terrorists from entering the United States, he said, homegrown terrorists may present an equal threat. "I don't think one is any more likely than the other," Billy said. "You have maybe a lone wolf, maybe small groups, maybe a small cadre of people who may be working within their own country to want to plan for an act of terrorism."

With the discovery in Canada of suspected domestic terrorist cells, it's understandable that U.S. law enforcement would turn its sights inward. But the agents will have to search far and wide to find such cells, according to Gary LaFree, director of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. LaFree told the AP that homegrown terrorists might only have tenuous connections with Al Qaeda—they might be part of online communities, finding instructions and ordering technology over the Internet. "It's not like they were all trained in camps of Afghanistan or Iraq," he said.

The challenge, then, is tracking down these virtual terrorists. President Bush has insisted that the NSA's controversial wiretapping program was aimed only at calls to or from overseas locations. But if homegrown terrorists are just as dangerous as terrorists abroad, then wouldn't domestic wiretaps become equally justified? And with the Bush Justice Department defining what constitutes a domestic terrorist, who will end up on list of justifiable targets?

There are plenty of answers already on record from the long history of the FBI. During J. Edgar Hoover's reign from 1924 to 1972, a primary mission of the FBI was to gather intelligence on any persons or group Hoover deemed subversive—the "enemies within." At least 26,000 individuals were at one point cataloged on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency." These types of operations have been toned down since then, but the basic concept was never eliminated. In their book Terrorism and the Constitution, David Cole and James X. Dempsey document intelligence investigations by the FBI through the 1980s and 90s of Earth First!, ACT UP, Amnesty International, the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and several Arab American and pro-Palestinian organizations.

The FBI's domestic spying under a program known as COINTELPRO was thoroughly documented in the early 1970s in a Senate investigation that issued a blistering report concluding that the surveillance "had no conceivable rational relationship to either national security or violent activity." The report also showed that COINTELPRO and similar programs had no hope of leading to arrests and prosecutions. The FBI was not seeking to enforce the law; it was seeking to monitor and undermine political organizations by extralegal means.

Today, as the FBI struggles to address the threat of terrorism, not many of its prosecutions have yielded substantive convictions. In one of its few successful cases, the Virginia paintball prosecution, the government won terrorism convictions against three Muslim men for material support of the Lashkar-I-Taiba, an organization fighting the Indian government. (Of the 11 charged, six pled guilty and two were found innocent.)

In the last of those cases, decided June 3, Ali Asad Chandia was found guilty of training at a Lashkar camp in Pakistan and joining others in acquiring equipment that, as the Washington Post delicately put it, had "potential military applications." One juror told the Post he thought the case was "insignificant" and that most of the jury didn't believe Chandia had ever attended the Lashkar camp. Chandia's main offense, the juror told the Post, seemed to have involved helping another defendant ship 50,000 paintballs to the Lashkar.

At the same time, there is considerable evidence that the net being cast to catch "homegrown terrorists" will be spread wider and wider as time goes on. A year ago, testifying before a Senate committee, FBI counterterrorism expert John Lewis said that "Investigating and preventing animal rights extremism and eco-terrorism is one of the FBI's highest domestic priorities," and that "there is nothing else going on in this country over the last several years that is racking up the high number of violent crimes and terrorist actions.'" (People claiming affiliation with the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front have caused extensive property damage, but no deaths.)

On the same day that Lewis testified, the ACLU released one of many statements documenting "the FBI's misuse of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to engage in political surveillance," especially surveillance targeting antiwar and other progressive groups in the months leading up to the 2004 party conventions. The ACLU is working to compile evidence of surveillance directed at Greenpeace, United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

During the Cold War, Americans' genuine fears of a genuine danger—nuclear war—were exploited to justify suppression of domestic dissent. Today, fears of another genuine threat—terrorist attacks—may well be used to serve the same purpose.