Note: This is a republish of a previous diary I found relevant in the wake of yesterdays shooting.
Last month here in Plano, TX a suburb of Dallas, residents were treated to a curious news story:
A man was critically injured in Plano on Monday while apparently tampering with a high pressure gas line.
The incident happened just after midnight in the 3600 block of W Parker Road, in the central portion of the city, police said.
Investigators responding to 911 calls reporting a loud boom in the area said they found the injured man and a trail of blood leading to a damaged Atmos natural gas regulation and distribution station that was leaking gas.
Police said the unidentified man lied about just having been hit by a car. Instead they believe he successfully detonated an explosive device he had attached to the gas pipe and was hit with shrapnel.
You'll remember a few years back a man killed a worker and committed suicide by flying a plane into an Austin IRS office in an Anti-IRS motivated attack.
You may also remember when the DHS issued a report warning about the rise of right-wing domestic lone wolf terrorism, the republicans threw a fit. Well a few weeks before the events in Plano, the story was in the news again when it was learned that DHS has stepped back domestic monitoring. Why?:
The Department of Homeland Security has stepped back for the past two years from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism, according to current and former department officials, even though law enforcement and civil rights experts have warned of rising extremist threats.
The department has cut the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous state and local law enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups, the officials and others said.
The decision to reduce the department’s role was provoked by conservative criticism of an intelligence report on “Rightwing Extremism” issued four months into the Obama administration,
Yes, because of Republicans. The 'Patriotic, america loving' Republicans have caused a halt to preventing Terrorist attacks.
In the two years since, the officials said, the analytical unit that produced that report has been effectively eviscerated. Much of its work — including a digest of domestic terror incidents and the distribution of definitions for terms such as “white supremacist” and “Christian Identity” — has been blocked.
Multiple current and former law enforcement officials who have regularly viewed DHS analyses said the department had not reported in depth on any domestic extremist groups since 2009.
Based on the comments to that YouTube video, I would think maybe some monitoring is overdue. But you know if something really, really big happens....
'nobody could have possibly predicted it".