This morning, Marcy Wheeler posted a piece at her Emptywheel blog that, for lack of a better phrase, simply blows me away, in terms of what it reveals about the truly down-and-twisted, institutionalized, racist nature of our surveillance state.
In her post, we learn that white supremacist and Overland Park, Kansas shooter Frazier Glenn Miller (who's been all over law enforcement's supposed radar for decades) was directly communicating with Spokane MLK Parade bomber Kevin Harpham to the point, as noted by "...HuffPo’s Ryan Reilly, while he was still at TPM. Back in 2012, Reilly interviewed Miller about his contacts with Kevin Harpham, the MLK bomber...Federal prosecutors had used Harpham’s contacts with Miller to argue for harsher sentencing."
More from Reilly in 2012...
...Less than a week after 36-year-old Kevin Harpham was arrested for allegedly attempting a racially motivated bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Spokane, white supremacist leader Glenn Miller sent him a letter offering to help start a legal fund on his behalf.
“Keep your chin up and stay strong,” Miller wrote in a letter dated March 14, telling Harpham that he and other members of an online white supremacist forum believed he’d “been set up.”
[snip]
Federal prosecutors used Miller’s jailhouse letter and Harpham’s response — in which he said he might have Miller screen individuals as he looked for “someone to house sit for a while” – as one of the factors that “supports the imposition of a sentence that will maximize the time the Defendant is incarcerated and subject to judicial oversight.”
Evidently Harpham’s lawyers soon informed him it probably wasn’t a good idea to be sending letters to a well-known white supremacist while in jail accused of a hate crime, as he didn’t respond to any of Miller’s follow up letters.
“He’s kind of let me know he doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Miller said. “It’s not in his self interest to associate with me, and I can understand that, can’t you?” [my emphasis]
Much more from Marcy...
The Terror Networks and the Hate Criminals
Published April 15, 2014 | By emptywheel
In response to Frazier Glenn Miller’s arrest in the murder of 3 people at Jewish targets the other day, Peter Bergen reminds that white supremacist terrorists have been more dangerous in recent years than Islamic terrorists.
Now let’s do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting “Heil Hitler” after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted “Allahu Akbar.” Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.
Yet the death toll in the shootings in Kansas is similar to that of last year’s Boston Marathon bombings, where three people were killed and the suspects later killed a police officer as they tried to evade capture. (Many more, of course, were also wounded in the Boston attacks; 16 men, women and children lost limbs.)
In fact, since 9/11 extremists affiliated with a variety of far-right wing ideologies, including white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and anti-government militants, have killed more people in the United States than have extremists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology. According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. (The total includes the latest shootings in Kansas, which are being classified as a hate crime).
By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 23 people in the United States since 9/11.
But, as Bergen notes, thus far these murders have been called “hate crimes,” not terrorism...
...
...As I noted at the time, the FBI called Harpham a “lone wolf” “hate criminal.” That, in spite of the fact that the crime to which he plead guilty — attempted use of a WMD — is one of FBI’s favorite “terrorist” crimes with which to entrap young Muslims, and in spite of the fact that Harpham’s contacts with Miller and his abundant online activity showed him to be a part of a network sharing the same ideology.
Harpham was one of the few white people convicted of a terrorist enhancement crime (the 3 anarchists tied to Occupy who discussed bombing a bridge were found also found guilty on WMD charges; both the Hutaree and Schaeffer Cox were initially charged with terrorist-associated crimes, but not found guilty of them; see this a post for Dianne Feinstein’s catalog of such crimes). Whether the FBI called Harpham one or not, he is technically a terrorist.
Just two years ago, they made a big deal out of Harpham’s ties to Miller and used that to substantiate the severity of Harpham’s crimes. Yet not only did the FBI not catch Miller in a sting before he killed. But they’re not even calling Miller a terrorist … yet...
There's significantly more to Marcy's post than I've reported here, so I strongly encourage readers to checkout her entire story.
# # #
And, what is our vaunted U.S. Department of Justice doing about all of this?
First the transparent spin, very capably reported by the NYT's Matt Apuzzo who's, arguably, one of the very best in the MSM when it comes to the subject of pervasive, institutionalized racism in law enforcement.
Profiling Rules Said to Give F.B.I. Tactical Leeway
Matt Apuzzo
New York Times
April 8, 2014
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s long-awaited revisions to the Justice Department’s racial profiling rules would allow the F.B.I. to continue many, if not all, of the tactics opposed by civil rights groups, such as mapping ethnic populations and using that data to recruit informants and open investigations.
The new rules, which are in draft form, expand the definition of prohibited profiling to include not just race, but religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation. And they increase the standards that agents must meet before considering those factors. But they do not change the way the F.B.I. uses nationality to map neighborhoods, recruit informants, or look for foreign spies, according to several current and former United States officials either involved in the policy revisions or briefed on them.
While the draft rules allow F.B.I. mapping to continue, they would eliminate the broad national security exemption that former Attorney General John Ashcroft put in place. For Mr. Holder, who has made civil rights a central issue of his five years in office, the draft rules represent a compromise between his desire to protect the rights of minorities and the concern of career national security officials that they would be hindered in their efforts to combat terrorism.
The Justice Department has been reworking the policy for nearly five years, and civil rights groups hope it will curtail some of the authority granted to the F.B.I. in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Muslims, in particular, say federal agents have unfairly singled them out for investigation. The officials who described the draft rules did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them...
And, here's a harsh dose of reality from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), from yesterday...
The Perversity of Profiling
American Civil Liberties Union
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Hina Shamsi, Director, ACLU National Security Project at 2:19pm [4/14/14]
The Justice Department is considering revised racial profiling guidance that, if issued, could set back race relations and basic fairness in this country. We hope that it does not make that mistake.
The New York Times on Thursday reported that “long-awaited revisions to the Justice Department’s racial profiling rules would allow the F.B.I. to continue many, if not all, of the tactics opposed by civil rights groups, such as mapping ethnic populations and using that data to recruit informants and open investigations.” In light of the Obama administration’s recent and deservedly lauded criminal justice policy reforms, we had expected it would take a far different approach to racial profiling than this. After all, revisions to racial profiling rules that retain loopholes permitting racial, religious, and national origin profiling are not the reforms that Americans need and deserve.
The Justice Department guidance that urgently needs revision was issued in 2003 by Attorney General John Ashcroft. The Ashcroft Guidance bans racial profiling, which it condemns as discriminatory, “not merely wrong, but also ineffective,” and “patently unacceptable.” Despite these strong words, the Ashcroft Guidance contains gaping holes: It does not prohibit profiling based on religion or national origin and permits racial, religious, and ethnic profiling in national security investigations and at the nation’s borders.
The Ashcroft Guidance’s loopholes thus gave federal law enforcement express permission to discriminate against America’s minorities. And wrongful discrimination in the national security and border contexts quickly spread to others. Government records obtained by the ACLU showed the FBI mapped minority communities around the country based on crude and false stereotypes about their propensity to commit crime. The targeted communities include Arab Americans in Michigan, African Americans in Georgia, Chinese and Russian Americans in California, and Latino Americans in multiple states.
Mapping is just one part of the problem.
Using expanded authorities that permit investigations without actual evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI has also targeted minority communities for interviews based on race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion. It has used informants to conduct surveillance in community centers, mosques, and other public gathering places and against people exercising their First Amendment right to worship or to engage in political advocacy. And among America’s minority communities, “flying while brown” soon joined “driving while black” as a truism of government-sanctioned discrimination and stigma. It’s hard to overstate the damage done to the FBI’s relationship with minorities, particularly American Muslims.
The damage, however, has spread further.
When federal law enforcement leads in discriminatory profiling, state and local law enforcement will follow. Nowhere is that clearer than in New York City, where the NYPD – which is twice the size of the FBI – launched a massive program of discriminatory surveillance and investigation of American Muslims, mapping the places where they carry out daily activities and sending informants to spy on mosques and Muslim community organizations, student groups, and businesses. After the Associated Press broke a series of stories describing this program in stark and shocking detail, the NYPD defended itself, arguing that it was only doing what the FBI was permitted to do. Again, it’s hard to overstate the harm.
From the ACLU’s work with New York’s Muslim communities, we know that a generation of youth is growing up fearful of its local police force, scared to exercise the rights to freedom of worship, speech, and association...
Copyright 2014 American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union https://www.aclu.org
# # #
Pervasive, institutionalized racism throughout our surveillance state is a subject I've covered here many times, in posts such as THIS. It's also a primary topic that educator Henry Giroux continually discusses in his writing.
Last but not least, I’d like to conclude this post with a statement by Kossack ChaunceyDevega, in his post here on April 7th, “White Racists Are the Real 'Victims': Jonathan Chait Turns Heel in His Feud With Ta-Nehisi Coates”…
...how white folks can commit any number and type of heinous crimes such as destroying the American economy or committing mass shootings--and Whiteness and White Privilege shields the white community from any amount of recrimination, consequences, or communal reflection about what are in fact deadly white pathologies--is terrifying in the extreme...
# # #