ProfilingLawmakers urge DHS to use profiling to detect terrorists
Republican lawmakers criticized DHS secretary Janet Napolitano for not focusing more on Islamic extremism and that “political correctness” was hindering her department’s ability to keep the United States safe; at a House Intelligence Committee hearing, Representative Paul Broun (R-Georgia) attacked Napolitano for not acknowledging Islamic extremism as the source of the current terrorist threat and urged DHS to use racial profiling in screening passengers at airports; Napolitano defended DHS efforts by saying threats emanated from more than just the Muslim community; a recent report found that last year twice as many plots to attack the United States were planned by non-Muslims than Muslims; the director of the National Counterterrorism Center said that focusing solely on one group could alienate them and exacerbate the problem
Republican lawmakers criticized DHS secretary Janet Napolitano for not focusing more on Islamic extremism and said that “political correctness” was hindering her department’s ability to keep the United States safe.
At a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing last week, Representative Paul Broun (R- Georgia) said, “We’ve got to focus on those people who are going to do us harm and this administration and your department has seemed to be very averse to focusing on those.”
Broun went on to attack DHS for not acknowledging “the ideological factor behind” the terrorist threat, “namely Islamic extremism.”
Napolitano defended her department by saying that the use of the term “violent extremism” rather than “Islamic extremism” is used so that DHS does “not overlook other types of extremism that can be homegrown and that we, indeed, have experiences with.”
She explained that “many kinds of violent motivations threaten our security,” and “we see a variety of different types.”
As evidence she cited “anti-government groups” and pointed to Joseph Stack who crashed an airplane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Texas last year.
A recent report by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that in 2010 the number of plots by non-Muslims to perpetrate attacks in the United States was twice as great as the number of plots by Islamic extremists.
The report recognized threats to the United States posed by non-Muslims, but also acknowledged that “Muslims are engaging in terrorism at a greater rate than non-Muslims.”
In focusing on other threats, Napolitano assured lawmakers that DHS was not ignoring Islamic extremism.
She said, “We understand full well that Islamist-inspired, al Qaeda-inspired, however-you-want-to-call-it terrorism is part and parcel of the security picture that we now have to deal with in the United States.”
Broun continued to press her on the issue and suggested that DHS begin to use racial profiling. The Congressman described an incident at an airport where he recently saw people “very obviously of Arabian or Middle Eastern descent” not being patted down, while a senior citizen and a small child were.
“I have yet to see a grandma try to bomb any U.S. facility with chemicals in her bloomers,” he said.
He went on to tell Napolitano that “we’ve got to profile these folks,” and that “y’all have not been willing to do so.”
Napolitano explained that “we cannot categorize by ethnicity or religion or any of those sorts of things,” and “we have to make decisions based on intelligence about particular individuals. That’s what is required under the United States Constitution.”
She added that “when we add random screening to whatever we are doing, it has to be truly random. Otherwise, you lose the value of unpredictability. And secondly when we set firm rules about we won’t screen this kind of person or that kind of person, our adversaries, they know those rules and they attempt to train and get around them.”
Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who was also present at the hearing, bolstered Napolitano’s defense by adding that focusing on a singular community would alienate its members and possibly exacerbate the situation.
“We have to build into those required and necessary preventative steps, additional programs, to address those second-order effects so you’re not worsening the situation inadvertently. That applies to screening, applies to homegrown extremism, it applies to overseas efforts,” he said.
