SPLC's Potok Calls Out Obama Administration For Its 'Political Cowardice' On Domestic Terrorism

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

[H/t Heather]

Apparently, the SPLC's intelligence director, Mark Potok agrees with our assessment of the Obama administration's disastrous failure to take right-wing domestic terrorism seriously. Here is on The Ed Show the other night, discussing the report in the Washington Post on ex-Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson raising the red flag on the issue:

POTOK: What it means in concrete terms is that law enforcement officials, agencies out there in the 50 states, are not getting the intelligence that was very useful to them in helping to understand what was going on out there.

What DHS really did or used to do was to produce intelligence. It wasn‘t so much building actual criminal cases as in intelligence as to what was going on out there on the radical right.

Daryl‘s report was really a very prescient report. It very much fell in line with our own independent findings. And of course, it was immediately confirmed. As it was being pilloried by people like Michelle Malkin, the columnist, by the American Leagues and so on, things were happening that absolutely confirmed it.

Very shortly after the leak of the report, for instance, George Tiller, an abortion provider, was murdered. Not long after that, I‘m sure viewers will remember, a guard was murdered at the Holocaust Museum by a well-known neo-Nazi.

And the list goes on and on. In January of this year, a man tried to murder hundreds of people at a Martin Luther King Day Parade in Spokane, Washington, A well known neo-Nazi, allegedly at least.

SCHULTZ: Daryl Johnson—

POTOK: So it‘s a disaster basically.

SCHULTZ: You spoke with him. How adamant is he about the fact that this lack of resources being focused here is really playing into the increase of some of these events that you are talking about?

POTOK: Well, Daryl is a friend. And I think that Daryl is really deeply concerned. And it is not only him. I know that he‘s received all kinds of messages in the last few days since he went public from other people in law enforcement, talking about how very right he was.

And, you know, the shame of this, as you suggested in your intro, is that Secretary Napolitano essentially seemed to have acted out of mere political cowardice. You know, the fact is that the DHS report of 2009 did not pillory conservatives. It did not suggest that all veterans were potential Timothy McVeighs or people who were concerned about abortion or immigration were terrorists.

And yet it was accused of all of those things. And the reaction of the Department of Homeland Security was after a very brief and kind of weak knee defense of the report, was to absolutely pull back and, moreover, to suggest that Daryl had gone out of normal channels, that this was an unauthorized release of the report, when in fact it had been fully authorized.

The secretary was briefed on the report by Daryl personally before it was released. And then beyond that, as you suggested already, the unit was gutted. It has produced not a single substantial report since the report of 2009. Daryl has left the agency, as have four other senior analysts there.

So essentially, the department is doing nothing because it is afraid of offending conservatives, or at least the leadership of the department.

Of course, we've been writing about this issue for awhile now. But it is yet further confirmation -- beyond simply the reported data already available -- that we have a serious problem on our hands.

Unfortunately, there has been no indication whatsoever from the administration that it intends to address the issue. Apparently it's bought into the Beltway Village narrative that merely bringing up these matters is deeply uncivil.