After the deadly Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, then-Attorney General Janet Reno formed a special task force to coordinate the country’s response to the threat of domestic terrorism.
The task force was scheduled to hold one of its monthly meetings on Sept. 11, 2001, but did not for obvious reasons. In fact, because the threat of jihadist terrorism has taken so much of the government’s attention since 9/11, the special task force has never met again.
The killings in Overland Park, Kansas, last Sunday remind us, however, that the threat of domestic terrorism is still very real. What’s more, Saturday is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, an event that killed 168 people and led to the formation of the now-defunct special federal task force. It is time, therefore, to ask whether the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of jihadist terrorism.
There were actually good reasons to ask this very question before the events of the past week – a point we made in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last year.
A 2006-2007 survey of state police agencies sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for example, found that more states reported the presence of far-right anti-government, neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups than Islamic extremists. Since the time of that survey, our tracking shows that the number of far-right anti-government groups has exploded, and the number of neo-Nazi and racist skinhead groups has remained at an extraordinarily high level.
Why it's time to take domestic terrorism seriously | MSNBC
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