On restoring the US Office of Intelligence and Analysis

The United States has experienced a half-decade of white nationalist domestic terrorist violence. As the SPLC reports, alt-right extremists in the US have slain at least 81 individuals and injured more than 100 others since 2014. 

These include tragedies such as Dylan Roof's attack that killed African-Americans at their Charleston church; the gunning down of Lori Gilbert Kaye, a 60-year-old Jewish woman at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California; Michael Page's slaying of six Sikhs at a temple in Wisconsin; the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh; and also the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, killed under the tires of James Alex Fields' car as she protested the very hate he'd shown up to promote. 

White nationalism is at the root of much of this murder. The manifestos and online postings of the killers and the accused are flush with the words of white supremacy and other kinds of extremism. The Anti-Defamation League tells us that 2018 was the fourth deadliest year on record for extremism-related slayings in the United States. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress, on July 23, 2019, that the majority of domestic-terrorism arrests since October could be linked to white supremacy.

Yet, in 2017, without much in the way of resulting press, the administration of President Donald J. Trump eliminated the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which was a group operating under the Department of Homeland Security and specifically assigned to assess and report on extremism-fueled terrorism within the United States.

To fix a siloed and inefficient threat-intelligence system — the kind that helped enable the 9/11 attacks — the I&A gathered information and issued reports that the FBI, the CIA, and other government organizations could use to prevent further violence. Its elimination seems unfathomable, given the events we face, given the numbers and the list of massacres, until we look at the circumstances and the individuals involved.

This is how it happened. 

David Glawe, as Acting Under-Secretary at the DHS, found himself in choppy waters in 2017. The President's appointee, grilled during his Senate confirmation hearings (which would make his post permanent), had to deal with the fact that the Office of I&A at the time was generating reports — draft documents that leaked to the public — explicitly contradicting Trump's assertions that the seven countries on the President’s travel ban were high-level terrorist threats. 

It doesn't take a room of experts to understand what next transpired. In the weeks and months that followed, Glawe quietly reassigned all the I&A analysts, thereby depopulating the office. The reports and analytics — so irritating to Trump's team — stopped coming. The roundtables sat empty. Local and state officials found there was nobody picking up the phone.

Finally, as a handful of reporters caught on to the shift, the DHS offered a vague concession. The I&A wasn't disbanded, officials said, rather its members were reassigned. Furthermore, in a statement that could only emerge from the mind of a bureaucrat, one official told The Daily Beast, in April 2019, that the elimination of the office actually improved the office's performance: "We just restructured things to be more responsive to the I&A customers within DHS and in local communities while reducing overlap with what the FBI does. We actually believe we are far more effective now."

The upshot of the situation is that the Trump administration has rolled back a critical element of the United States' terrorism-intelligence apparatus to a pre-9/11 status. 

No need to worry, though, because, as the President tells the people of the nation, there is no growing threat of extremism-fueled terrorism in the US … or anywhere. The scores of dead in the United States alone, since 2014, it turns out under his analysis, are the unfortunate victims of a small group of outliers. Or, as The Washington Post reported, back in March 2019:

When asked at the White House whether white nationalists were a growing threat around the world, Trump replied: "I don't really. I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It's certainly a terrible thing."

Despite the killers' manifestos and online postings, in which a significant number of the perpetrators hail each other, and the movement of alt-right extremism around the world, as a powerful inspiration — as is the case with the Christchurch mosque killings in New Zealand, an event which John Earnest, the accused murderer in the Poway synagogue shootings, specifically cited as inspiration for his own acts — Trump and his team have eliminated precisely the government office tasked with checking the chatter and movements of extremists and terrorists on US soil. 

As an event, this has been underreported. As a reality, going forward, it is a source of concern for officials who best understand the cruciality of I&A's role within the DHS. "The analysis provided by I&A personnel on domestic extremism was essential during my tenure at DHS," John Cohen, formerly the acting head of I&A, told The Daily Beast. "Based on the current threat environment, I believe those same efforts are essential today."

As a country, we should demand that Congress call on DHS to answer for the disbanding of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The department should be commanded to make a full accounting of the data no longer centralized and made available by I&A to law enforcement, and it should be required to assign resources that replace what has been taken away, restoring threat-intelligence access to pre-2017 levels. Every life lost in the interim in the United States will be blood on the hands of the government, which is through these actions working in the interests of extremists — those who would kill innocents to bring about a world in which the murderous rule.