But that warning came on a private channel for law enforcement agencies. Terrorism warnings issued to the public like Wednesday’s bulletin are rare: the most recent occurred a year ago, during a period of tension with Iran, after the death of Major General Qassim Suleimani by the American military.
Bulletins issued by the Department of Homeland Security, created after the September 11, 2001 attacks, typically identify foreign terrorist threats. Federal authorities took years on warnings about the threat of terrorism from within the borders of the United States, perpetrated by American citizens.
“It is important to ask the public for help in identifying and alerting authorities to suspicious activity,” said Brian Harrell, former assistant secretary of internal security for the Trump administration. “The attentive public will always be the best ‘eyes and ears’ for law enforcement.”
Asked during a briefing on the motivation for the new terrorism bulletin, Michael Chertoff, a former homeland security secretary to President George W. Bush, said: “In my opinion, it is domestic terrorism mounted by right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi groups. “He added:” We have to be frank and face what the real risk is. “
This openness has always been an exception.
When an alert in a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report at the beginning of the Obama administration that military veterans returning from combat could be vulnerable to recruitment by terrorist or extremist groups sparked a backlash from conservatives, the Homeland Security secretary of the time, Janet Napolitano, was forced to apologize.
The report was withdrawn and an edited version was reedited.
“It was an initial lesson in how dealing with these issues can be complicated, but the report itself and the content of the report were quite prescient,” said Napolitano in an interview. “What we saw two weeks ago is what I think we saw in 2009, but it has only grown and looks like it has exploded in the past four years.”
This week, Biden ordered a comprehensive assessment of the threat of domestic violent extremism. During his confirmation hearing, the choice of president for homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, said he would empower the department’s intelligence arm, which has long struggled to differentiate its assessments from those of the FBI.