Domestic terrorismCritics: U.S. not doing enough to combat domestic terrorism

The Murrah Federal Office building in Oklahoma City // Source: egloos.com

The effectiveness of the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda and its affiliates may have reduced the threat of foreign terrorists launching attacks on targets in the United States, but the threat of terrorism the United States is facing has not been reduced owing to the rise in domestic terrorism. Recent terrorist incidents – some of which succeeded, like the deadly attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin; and some which were stopped in time, like the attempts by anarchists to blow up a bridge in Ohio; the arrests of a group of soldiers in Georgia who belonged to an anarchists cell; and the arrest of a Chicago suburb teenager who drove a pick-up truck, which he believed was filled with explosives (it was filled with harmless material provided by FBI informants), and parked it on a Friday night outside a crowded bar in downtown Chicago — have left communities in fears and raised questions among security experts why more attention is not being paid to domestic terrorism.

Daryl Johnson, a former counterterrorism expert at DHS, thinks that domestic terrorism lacks the shock value of foreign terrorism. “9/11 has set the threshold for what terrorism is in the minds of many Americans, and if domestic terrorism lacks the magnitude, it must not be terrorism,” Johnson, who left the DHS in 2010 out of frustration, told CNN.

According to Johnson, the government has developed a tunnel vision when it comes to terrorism, making it difficult for law enforcement and counterterrorism agencies to deal with other threats than those posed by al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

A May 2012 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report says that counterterrorism efforts have largely been in response to the 9/11 attacks. The main focus of counterterrorism since then has been on jihadist terrorism — but, the report says, domestic terrorism is responsible for more than two dozen incidents since 9/11.

The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) has publicly listed thirty-five terrorist incidents which took place in the United States from early 2004 to September 2011. Of these thirty-five incidents, twenty-five have been linked to domestic terrorists.

CNN reports that a September 2011 study by the New America Foundation and Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Policy examined 114 cases of non-jihadist terrorist acts in the decade following 9/11. In comparison, they found 188 cases of Islamist terrorism in the