House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul’s (R-Texas) proposed new Office for Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) in the Department of Homeland Security would redirect 40 million taxpayer dollars over four years into a dubious expansion of government programming.
We all want to prevent violent extremism. But currently, CVE programming fails to provide meaningful solutions that would substantively interdict barbaric acts.
{mosads}A 2014 National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) document titled ‘Countering Violent Extremism” serves as food for thought. Its expert authors say CVE’s ends are “not easy to quantify.” This means return-on-investment metrics will be elusive.
The report authors then offer risk factors to help public service providers identify at-risk youth such as “Parent-Child Bonding, Empathic Connection,” “Presence of Emotional or Verbal Conflict in Family” and “Parent Involvement in Child’s Education.” As these factors encompass issues with which most American families have struggled at some point, their use in identifying at-risk individuals is nearly non-existent.
On this subject, McCaul’s proposal assigns the office to the task of “identifying risk factors that contribute to violent extremism.” But such efforts at classification have already been attempted. In 2008, the UK’s counter-intelligence and security agency, M15, concluded that “it is not possible to draw up a typical profile of the ‘British terrorist’ as most are ‘demographically unremarkable.’”
Similarly, in its 2010 report titled “Preventing Violent Extremism,” Britain’s House of Commons’ Communities and Local Government Committee said, “Regarding the Government’s analysis of the factors which lead people to become involved in violent extremism, we conclude that there has been a pre-occupation with the theological basis of radicalisation, when the evidence seems to indicate that politics, policy and socio-economics may be more important factors in the process.”
This pre-occupation with religion raises another problem with expanding the scope of DHS programming. While the security field’s current focus is on Daesh (ISIS), this has not and will not always be the case, and we join other security and civil liberties organizations in our concern that the program’s scope may be expanded at-will in ways not envisioned by its current advocates.
In February, 2009 the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), a DHS “fusion center,” issued a report labeling common ideologies or affiliations as warning signs of being a “right-wing extremist” or member of a domestic paramilitary group.
According to the MIAC report, any U.S. citizen could potentially be a domestic terrorist if they are in favor of “strong state rights,” hold “anti-abortionist” or “anti-Immigration” views, are in strong opposition to “the collection of federal income taxes” or “the Federal Reserve Banks,” or support third-party presidential candidates like Ron Paul. The report also noted that “It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitutional Party, Campaign for Liberty or Libertarian material” or the “Gadsden Flag.” Setting the enormous costs of monitoring everyone who dislikes paying their taxes or votes for Ron Paul aside, such broad-swath categorizations of what might constitute subversive behavior risk criminalizing anyone who holds views with which the government disagrees, a chilling prospect.
Finally, it is worth noting what has already happened on the ground in those areas in which CVE programming has been proposed; after all, CVE can only work if it is widely accepted as effective by the communities in which it would profess to build ties. Last year, former U.S. Attorney General Holder announced a CVE initiative, designating Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis as pilot cities. While the program was supposed to target all forms of violent extremism, in practice only Muslims were actually examined.
In all three cities, local Muslim community leaders, who have longstanding records of supporting efforts to make our nation more secure, engaged in the U.S. attorney-led meetings aimed at shaping local CVE frameworks. In time, however, they distanced themselves from the project as they formed a deeper understanding of CVE’s problematic realities.
In Los Angeles, both the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, an umbrella organization of mosques and Muslim organizations serving the Muslims of Southern California, and the Muslim Student Association of the West Coast (MSA West) voted to oppose the narrow scope of the federal government’s CVE program.
In Minnesota, nearly 50 Muslim organizations joined together to urge law enforcement to “consider our grave concerns” and discontinue this stigmatizing, divisive, and ineffective initiative.
A “top leader of Boston’s Muslim community” opted against the local framework because it targeted only American Muslims and was “founded on the premise that your faith determines your propensity towards violence.”
Given that one of the goals of violent extremists is to transform our nation into their vision of an authoritarian state, Americans must be vigilant that the measures we fund to stop them do not ultimately themselves fulfill these aims. CVE, with its call for teachers, guidance counselors, public health workers, and police officers to assess a person’s thoughts, rather than actions, to identify violent extremists, does not represent an effective solution for these very real threats.
Saylor directs the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization.