St. Louis CofCC Blog

American Thinker:

Last month I had the pleasure of briefing a large group of local and state law enforcement officials on the Islamic extremist threat in their area. My interaction with these professionals reminded me that they are THE frontline defenders in the War on Terror and play an indispensable role in our Homeland Security.

Joining me in speaking at this event was my friend and occasional American Thinker contributor, LTC Joseph C. Myers. What struck us both is how quickly they “got it” when presented with the right amount of actionable information about what Islamic extremist groups were already operating in their communities. It was also impressive to see some of these agencies and departments who were doing very high-quality counterterror investigations even with limited personnel and financial resources. And in this case, those departments were working together to share that knowledge.

Having been raised in a police family (both my father and brother are retired from the job), I’m familiar with the unique instincts developed by police officers day-by-day as they go about their beat. Recognizing something or someone out of place and a natural curiosity are necessary tools to being a good cop. However, one does not develop these skills and instincts sitting at a desk; they come from doing hundreds of traffic stops, shaking door knobs, talking to people and doing patrols in the community every day.

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What this trend of local intel units indicates is that while FBI and Homeland Security efforts might be all well and good, local law enforcement authorities facing growing terror threats are not content to believe the Feds can handle the task all on their own. Citing an incident in Summer 2003 involving a reported “dirty bomb” threat (which later proved to be false), Miller reports that the NYPD discovered the peril of relying exclusively on federal agencies: “What we learned from that episode was that when and if we needed federal assets, we were still on our own, even after 9/11,” one former official told Miller. This assessment from the city that suffered the brunt of the 9/11 attacks.

A lot of the arrests for terrorist plots by AQ-types pre-9/11 were by local law enforcement officials. For example, the “millennium bomber” that wanted to set off a bomb at LAX crossed into the USA from Canada at Blaine, Washington. It was a local cop in the area that noticed suspicious behavior on the part of a certain Middle Eastern-looking driver, and when the cops decided to shake him down, they found all the “goodies.” And where were the Feds during this time, in December 1999? The Clinton-Reno-Gorelick InJustice Department started “Project Megiddo,” which aimed to monitor and thwart terrorist plots among those evil white Christian fundamentalist-evangelicals who might have believed that the changing of the thousands’ digit on the calendar had some religious/armageddonist implications which they wanted to hasten. Needless to say, they didn’t find anything, and if left to the Feds alone, the real terrorist threat would have never been apprehended.

As it is now, local cops are spying and bagging the real threats, while the FBI’s great “successes” are in, i.e., bagging a bunch of Haitian-American drug gang bangers in south Florida who mouthed off to an FBI informant about bombing the Sears Tower in Chicago, but who probably couldn’t find spell Chicago, much less find Chicago on a blank map, much less find Chicago on a detailed map, much less travel there, much less plan a sophisticated bombing plot that would slip past the heightened awareness of Chicago authorities.

This otherwise good article spoils itself with this:

Develop public/private partnerships. Some of the best experts in some areas of the counterterrorism field are not in government. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the best resources for any law enforcement agency to get trained on the threat from neo-Nazi and other racist organizations. And at times private partners are able to go beyond what law enforcement can occasionally do in terms of intel gathering and open source data mining.

Oh, you mean like the local cops in Vermont who aren’t aware of any activity by that white sheet group in their state, yet a bunch of paper-pushers behind desks in Montgomery, Alabama know that they’re there? Who are you going to believe, Morris Dees, or your own eyes? About the only “local” cops that believe the SPLC are suck-up chiefs of large urban departments. As far as I can tell, most other cops dump SPLC material into File 13. This is not a very cogent paragraph from a blog that has “thinker” in its title.

For this blog to say this is for A.T. to prostrate itself to the mentality that, like I said above, leads the U.S. Justice Department to focus its energies on right-wing Christians in December 1999 rather than radical Islam and AQ.