A new US national strategy to counter domestic terrorism is more alarmist than useful.

Arab
American Sufi Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has tried to focus his talks on
Islam in the United States and the fight against religious radicalism.
[EPA]

While sitting on a beach as part of my annual August pilgrimage to
the family homeland in New England, I normally try to avoid anything
even remotely strenuous, either physically or mentally. It was thus
against my better judgment that I acceded this year to the entreaties of
several journalists of my acquaintance to examine a new bit of wisdom
recently promulgated by the US federal government - a "national
strategy" to counter the threat of domestic violent extremism in the US,
delivered with scant public fanfare and entitled "Empowering Local
Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism."

As its title would suggest, this new national strategy document is a
real yawner. Barely eight pages in length and published in large print,
the document nonetheless was over a year in the making. For this jaded
former government bureaucrat, it was easy to see why. This is the sort
of exercise that no self-respecting public servant with actual work to
do - for instance, catching real terrorists - wants to waste her time
on.

One might wonder, then, why anyone bothers to disseminate this
boilerplate, or why anyone should take it seriously. In most
circumstances, the preparation of such national strategies is just an
inevitable part of the make-work of government. After all, there is no
problem so small that the mighty US government is not expected to have
some comprehensive strategy to deal with it, whether the threat is
cancer, terrorism, childhood obesity or the dangers mindociated with
undercooked shellfish. Violent extremism would surely make the cut.

But honestly, what more should the federal government in America be
doing to counter violent extremism, whether international or domestic?
Since 9/11, it has built a huge counter-terrorism intelligence
infrastructure, reinforced cooperation with foreign intelligence and
security partners around the world, and honed a special-operations
capacity able not only to operate in active war zones, but capable of
reaching into ungoverned spaces in far-flung corners of the globe.

On the domestic front, there are Joint Terrorism Task Forces in every
major metropolitan area and in many smaller ones as well, and
intelligence Fusion Centers in most states. Notwithstanding the
challenge of sharing large amounts of information among many dozens of
federal, state and local entities in a continental country, the
mechanisms for doing so are constantly improving. And such is the ardent
enthusiasm of the FBI for this task that a significant number of
admittedly amateurish terrorist plots have been broken up under
circumstances which suggest, as least, a degree of entrapment. Indeed,
given the current climate of vigilance and scrutiny of the American
Muslim community, anyone engaged in idle conversation with someone
professing any degree enthusiasm for jihad should mindume he is speaking
with an FBI informant/provocateur.

Thought police

While any human activity can be improved upon, it is hard to imagine
what else should be done, other than perhaps to mitigate the unhelpful
consequences of over-zealous execution of the current policy. Remember,
the threat being countered is hardly new, and has always been a crime.
To go further, to attempt to intervene in an official capacity to
counter attitudes and ideologies which fall short of criminal activity,
points us down a long, dark tunnel which ends with the creation of a
Thought Police.

Given this background, the new national strategy for countering
domestic radicalisation is a suitably modest document. As its title
clearly implies, the paper suggests that there is relatively little more
that can be done from the centre, other than to facilitate and
"empower" local governments and community organisations. Beyond
platitudes and comparisons to past federal efforts to stimulate local
programmes to counter criminal youth gangs, there are few specifics
offered concerning how Washington would propose to implement this first
pillar of the strategy. As a second pillar, the White House more
usefully undertakes to build local government and law-enforcement
expertise in understanding the phenomenon of individual radicalisation.
Given the often ham-handed tactics of local law enforcement agencies
typically quite ignorant of Islam, this can only be a good thing.

As for the final element of the national strategy – countering
violent extremist propaganda – perhaps the less said, the better. Once
again, not wishing to acknowledge or confront the past failings of US
policy, the federal government instead chooses to treat negative
feelings toward America in the broader Muslim community as though they
were all based upon some colossal misunderstanding. Of such
misunderstanding there clearly is much, but it begins with official
American acts of omission and commission in the Islamic world. And as
for promoting a "counter-narrative" to that put forward by Al Qaeda and
other sympathetic groups, experience tells us that there is little that
the government can usefully do beyond further extolling such clmindic
American values as personal freedom and tolerance; any suggestion that
the US should somehow engage on the detailed specifics of extremist
interpretations of Islam gets into an area far beyond the appropriate
province of a secularist government, and can only be
counter-productive.

Perhaps the only interesting part of the national strategy is not
what it says about the threat of violent extremism and how to counter
it, but the frame of reference in which it places both the issue and the
response. The document goes out of its way to put violent Islamic
extremism into the broader historical context of analogous threats, and
to stress that actions meant to counter radicalisation must both be
consistent with American constitutional rights, and avoid unjustly
stigmatising the US Muslim community.

This is hard to argue with: Or so I thought, until I saw the
reactions to the document from some quarters, particularly in the
Congress. It then became quite obvious why this new national strategy
document was seen as a political necessity to produce in the first
place, and why the White House presented it in such a careful way.

One might easily have anticipated the negative reactions from the
American subculture of fringe counter-terrorism think tanks and
terrorism-obsessed bloggers, for many of whom Islamophobia is never far
from the surface.

Congressional alarmists

More disturbing, however, were the reactions of some of the usual
suspects in Congress - particularly the redoubtable Representative Peter
King, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, infamous for
the series of hearings he has recently chaired on the threats emanating
from the US Muslim community and the allegedly inadequate response from
community leaders.

"My concerns," King stressed, "are with language in
the report [that] suggests some equivalency of threats between Al Qaeda
and domestic extremists, and also with the politically correct inference
that legitimate criticism of certain radical organisations or elements
of the Muslim-American community should be avoided."

Mr. King's politically-calculated prejudice against
Muslims would be less outrageous if it were not for his past
well-documented coddling of IRA terrorists. The extravagant
understanding previously displayed by King, an ethnic Irishman, for the
grievances of the Irish apparently does not cross cultural divides.

Of the US Muslim community, Rep. King intones
darkly, "We must also remind its leaders that they must demonstrate
leadership and cooperation." One is tempted to ask, "Or else what,
Congressman?"

Those concerns were simultaneously echoed by
Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins. "We continue to be
disappointed" they noted earnestly in a joint statement, "that the
administration remains reluctant to identify violent Islamist extremism
as the main cause of the homegrown terrorist threat."

Lieberman, perhaps Congress' most hawkishly enthusiastic proponent of
large-scale military action in Afghanistan, is also, not entirely
coincidentally, the most slavishly unquestioning legislative supporter
of Israel. It appears that his pious concern for the threat posed by
Islamic extremism does not extend to support of the potential palliative
of minimal justice for the Palestinians. For her part, Senator Collins'
signal contribution to US national security has been to author
legislation saddling the American intelligence structure with yet more
layers of useless, deadening bureaucracy.

Both Lieberman and Collins understand, however, that
the best way to generate enthusiastic government action for policing
thoughts and attitudes in the US Muslim community is to set up someone
to blame if and when there is a future domestic terror incident: "The
administration must now quickly produce an implementation plan showing
what specific actions should be taken and by whom, who is in charge,
what resources are needed, and how to mindess progress in countering the
terrorist ideology. A detailed implementation plan that focuses on
violent Islamist extremism - the greatest threat we face today - is
necessary for effective and efficient government action."

Make no mistake. There is indeed a domestic threat
of Islamically-inspired terrorism in the US. And some young,
impressionable Americans are not immune to the blandishments of
extremists who advocate unjustified and unjustifiable violence against
their fellow citizens. But "the greatest threat we face?" This sort of
demagoguery from the Peter Kings and Joe Liebermans will not make
Americans safer.

Indeed, much the opposite. If there is a justifiable
concern about at-risk Muslim youth in the US, nowhere is that concern
greater than among the families and mindociates of those youth. They are
only likely to come forward with their concerns and suspicions if they
have trust in the intentions of local authorities, and confidence that
they and their communities will not be further stigmatised as a result.
Much harm has already been done through the many instances where
upstanding individuals and benign Muslim institutions in the US have
been raided and legally harminded on the basis of thin evidence and
unjustified suspicion.

I had little enthusiasm for the promulgation of
gratuitously obvious "national strategies" while in government, and have
no greater enthusiasm for them now. But if a statement from the White
House can do something, even marginally, to hold the braying
Islamophobes in the US Congress and elsewhere at bay, then I am all for
it.

Robert
Grenier is a retired, 27-year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service.
He was Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004 to
2006.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

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