Imagine If Our Intel Agencies Targeted More Actual Terrorists Instead Of Conservative Americans

by Elle Purnell

The barbaric attack on Israeli civilians over the weekend by Hamas terrorists has left people wondering, as we often do after mass tragedies: How did no one see this coming? As a surprisingly sophisticated, coordinated surprise attack left nearly 1,000 people dead and countless more innocents wounded or kidnapped, anyone can recognize the massive intelligence failure without calling into question who is morally culpable for the invasion. Iran-backed militants attacked civilians from multiple points of entry, hang-gliding into a music festival and dragging the bodies of murdered women through the streets, all effectively livestreamed on the internet.

It wasn’t just an intel failure on Israel’s part — as a close ally with an intelligence presence all over the world, the United States also failed to foresee the attack. A senior U.S. military official admitted to NBC News that “We were not tracking this.” CIA counterterrorism veteran Marc Polymeropoulos told the outlet he was “stunned” that American intel agencies were caught off guard.

Intelligence operatives are fallible, yes. But instead of identifying the threat from Hamas terrorists, the Biden administration was busy sending money to their state sponsors in Iran and employing Iranian conspirators at the Pentagon.

There’s another task that’s been keeping America’s so-called “counterterrorism” apparatus busy lately, though. Instead of focusing their efforts on actual terrorists — those abroad and those doubtless infiltrating our porous southern border — the Biden administration has continued, and escalated, the trend of turning our post-9/11 surveillance state against Americans, smearing them as “terrorists” for their political beliefs.

Just last week, Newsweek reported that the FBI is targeting Trump supporters as “domestic terrorists” ahead of the 2024 election. The universal line from the Biden administration is that “domestic terrorism” and its aliases — all of which are used as code for political right-wingers — are the No. 1 threat to national security. The effort to make an example out of Trump supporters who demonstrated at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is only one of numerous instances in which Democrats within and beyond intelligence agencies are working to equate “domestic terrorism” with their political opponents.

Two years ago, Biden’s Education Department infamously planted a letter from the National School Boards Association to Attorney General Merrick Garland, urging him to target concerned parents who showed up at school board meetings to protest Democrats’ Covid policies and their racialist and sexually graphic curricula in public schools. The letter smeared those parents as domestic terror threats and urged the Department of Justice to wield counterterrorism laws against them, and Garland happily acted on the suggestion.

A few months later, the politicized Department of Justice announced a new “domestic terrorism unit” to deal with “an elevated threat from domestic violence extremists,” including “those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” (Who knew the Founding Fathers were domestic terrorists?)

Taking things a step further, disgraced former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe claimed that targeting the “fringes of the right-wing movement” was insufficient to “catch this threat,” and instead called for federal suspicion of “mainstream” conservatives.

In June 2021, the Biden administration released a “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” It proposed to “counter domestic terrorism by addressing underlying racism and bigotry” — and they weren’t talking about the racism that led Hamas militants to slaughter Israeli civilians this past weekend and has driven violence against Israel in the region for decades. A National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin issued the same year lumped “conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud” and “responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases” in the same sentence as “domestic violent extremist ideologies.”

Our intelligence apparatus expends resources on things like telling Big Tech companies which free-thinking Americans’ social media posts to censor, as we discovered via the “Twitter Files” and Missouri v. Biden.

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