Washington”•The surge in attacks by right-wing extremists in the United States has caught law enforcement flat-footed and calling for tough new “domestic terrorism” laws.
But the tendency of attackers to act alone with no support network and little forewarning, plus the Trump administration’s hesitance to pursue a movement that many identify with the president, continue to hamper prevention efforts, experts say.
According to the New America think tank since the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks the number of deaths inside the United States from far right extremist attacks has outpaced those by Islamic jihadists, 109 to 104.
After treating extremists like neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites as a secondary threat for a long time, the FBI has stepped up its monitoring of such groups.
Yet that didn’t stop a 21-year-old Texas man who wrote of an “invasion” of immigrants across the Mexican border from shooting dead 22 people, many of whom were Latinos, in El Paso on August 3.
Nor did it keep a 26-year-old anti-Semitic truck driver from slaughtering 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October.
Critics say, President Donald Trump, himself accused of fomenting racism, has not firmly put his own support behind a campaign against right-wing extremism.
“It’s time that we dealt with this domestic terrorism set of issues with as much energy and commitment and resources as we’ve dealt with the set of international terrorism issues,” Nick Rasmussen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told MSNBC on Tuesday.
“If we don’t have that backing from the president, if the president doesn’t grab onto this and actually show some leadership on it, it’s hard to imagine we are going to make some progress.”
Since the 9/11 attacks, US counter-terrorism investigators have been laser-focused on jihadists like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS).
With a surge in domestic mass shootings unrelated to extremist Islam, FBI Director Christopher Wray insisted in July that they were now putting significant resources into domestic terror threats.
With some 850 “domestic terrorism” investigations currently open, Wray said that so far this year around 100 people have been arrested in relation to political extremism.
The majority of those cases, he said, are “what you might call white supremacist violence.”
But success has been impeded by both US laws and the nature of the attackers and their ideology.
None of the attackers in the recent mass shootings were on the FBI’s radar.
The agency was not aware of the El Paso shooter, who published a racist screed upon his attack.
Nor did they know about the 19-year-old man who subscribed to white supremacist ideals and killed one person in Gilroy, California in an attempted mass attack on July 28.
By contrast, the FBI was able to arrest nearly 200 potential jihadists over the past decade because they sought affinity online or by other means with IS or other jihadist groups, which investigators monitor closely.
FBI assistant director Michael McGarrity told Congress that it is extremely hard to detect people who self-radicalize online and are not connected to any organization.
“The current racially motivated violent extremist threat is decentralized and primarily characterized by lone actors,” he said in a May hearing.
Experts also say it is impossible to monitor potentially hundreds of thousands of people legally expressing extremist views online.
And given the open US market for guns, a potential white supremacist attacker can easily arm himself without attracting attention.
“Frequently, these individuals act without a clear group affiliation or guidance, making them challenging to identify, investigate, and disrupt,” said McGarrity.
The FBI is also hamstrung by the US constitution, which guarantees free speech and guards against unreasonable searches.
Post-9/11 laws gave authorities sweeping powers to monitor any international communications between a US individual and someone linked to a designated terror group like IS.
But they don’t have that power to monitor American discussing extreme ideas domestically.
Those discussions are considered free speech and the FBI cannot open a probe without evidence of a violent plot developing.
“Our focus is on the violence,” Wray told Congress last month. “We, the FBI, don’t investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant. When it turns to violence, we’re all over it.”
For that reason, the FBI and some politicians are calling for Congress to legislate a specific federal crime of domestic terrorism that would expand law enforcement’s ability to get ahead of attacks.
Such a law “would ensure that FBI Agents and prosecutors have the best tools to fight domestic terrorism,” the FBI Agents Association said on Tuesday.
“We need to wrestle with the balance between free speech and privacy, free discussion of ideas, and the moment that flashpoint occurs when you change from hate to violence,” former FBI counterintelligence official Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC.
Even Trump’s hard-line Department of Justice is wary of that.
“Designating domestic groups as domestic terrorism organizations and picking out particular groups that you say you disagree with their views and so forth is going to be highly problematic,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann told Congress in May.