Fusion centers, created to fight domestic terrorism, suffering from mission creep: Critics

Fusion centers, created to fight domestic terrorism, suffering from mission creep: Critics

Published 21 April 2015

 

Years before the 9/11 attacks, law enforcement agencies throughout the country, alarmed by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, began to monitor and investigate signs of domestic terrorism. That increased monitoring, and the need for coordination among various law enforcement agencies, gave rise to the fusion centers. A new report, which is supported by current and former law enforcement and government officials, concludes that post-9/11, fusion centers and the FBI teams which work with them shifted their focus from domestic terrorism to global terrorism and other crimes, including drug trafficking.Experts say that at a time when the number of domestic terrorism threats, many of which are linked to right-wing extremist groups, is surging, law enforcement must refocus their attention on the threats from within.

Years before the 9/11 attacks, law enforcement agencies throughout the country, alarmed by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, began to monitor and investigate signs of domestic terrorism. The sovereign citizen movement gave birth to several groups which advocated independence from the U.S. government.
In 1997, two undercover officers with the Missouri Highway Patrol listened to militia leader Brad Glover speak to thirty people about setting up their own government and kidnapping a public official. The group’s ultimate plan was to attack Fort Hood at its annual Freedom Fest celebration on 4 July 1997. The plot was foiled when FBI agents arrested Glover and an accomplice at a campground forty miles southwest of Fort Hood before dawn, just hours before the planned attack. Officers at the scene found an automatic weapon, explosives, a silencer, 1,600 rounds of ammunition, and bullet proof vests. Glover and his associate were sentenced to five years in prison.
The case exemplified effective cooperation between various law enforcement agencies to conduct preemptive strikes against domestic terrorists. The concept was later introduced to law enforcement agencies across the country in the form of fusion centers. Today, there are seventy-eight fusion centers authorized by DHS and funded by the federal government via grants.
A report based on a one-year investigation by the Kansas City Star claims that fusion centers are not living up to their mission. The report, supported by current and former law enforcement and government officials, concludes that post-9/11, fusion centers and the FBI teams which work with them shifted their focus from domestic terrorism to global terrorism and other crimes, including drug trafficking.
“I think they’re an absolute waste,” said former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), who retired in January. “I don’t have any problem with the federal government working with local governments on organized crime and drugs and terrorism, too,” said Coburn, who had been a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which extensively studied fusion centers. “But I don’t think you need a fusion center.”
Coburn initiated a two-year bipartisan study which led to an October 2012 congressional report which criticized fusion centers (see “Senate panel’s report harshly criticizes role, utility of DHS fusion centers,” HSNW, 3 October 2012). The report, written by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, identified problems “with nearly every significant aspect of DHS’s involvement with fusion centers.” It claimed that the information put out by fusion centers was “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely,” and “more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
The study also questioned the funding of fusion centers, saying DHS could not provide an accurate accounting of how much it had given to states and cities to support their fusion centers. DHS estimated the total amount of federal money spent on fusion center efforts from 2003 to 2010 ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. In 2011, San Diego’s fusion center spent about $75,000 on fifty-five flat screen TVs but failed to purchase the intelligence training program for which the TVs were intended. When asked what the TVs were actually being used for, officials said “open-source monitoring” — which they defined as “watching the news.”
At a time when the number of domestic terrorism threats, many of which are linked to right-wing extremist groups, is surging, law enforcement must refocus their attention on the threats from within. “We are five years into the largest resurgence of right-wing extremism that we’ve had since the 1990s,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, which trains more than 10,000 law enforcement officers a year about domestic terrorism, extremism, and hate crimes. According to Pitcavage, from 2009 to July 2014, authorities were involved in forty-six shootouts with domestic extremists. A 2012 study by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that from 2000 to 2011, the average number of attacks per year from “individuals and groups who self-identify with the far right of American politics,” was more than four times the number of attacks in the 1990s, when anti-government groups began to flourish.
Michael German, a former FBI special agent who spent sixteen years working on domestic terrorism and covert operations, said fusion centers have lost sight of their main focus — counterterrorism. “Almost immediately, the fusion centers — or the state and local entities that were involved in the fusion centers — sort of began resisting that idea,” said German, who turned whistleblower and is now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “They wanted it to go to an all-crimes, and ultimately to an all-hazards, mission. There’s been complete mission creep.”
German points to Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Fusion Center, which in regards to the Boston Marathon bombing, did not receive notice of an FBI investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the suspected planner of the attack, even though several fusion center personnel were assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task force. “The whole point of having fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces is to share information and coordinate,” said Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. “Here we are, twelve years later; we put billions of dollars into this. Why are we still having problems connecting the dots?”