US White Supremacists Now Given Free Rein to Commit Terror

This is for groups outside the govt:

The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The program, "Countering Violent Extremism," or CVE, would be changed to "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

As well as white supremacists in the govt:

Official FBI guidelines acknowledge that white supremacists and right-wing extremists have infiltrated U.S. law enforcement agencies, according to a classified 2015 counterterrorism policy guide obtained by The Intercept. “Domestic terrorism investigations focused on militia extremists, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizen extremists often have identified active links to law enforcement officers,” the guide, which explains how individuals qualify for inclusion on a terrorism watchlist, reads, according to The Intercept.

While the FBI has been aware of this infiltration for some time and raised concerns in a 2006 internal assessment, federal agencies have been wary of discussing the issue publicly. Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano even disavowed a 2009 intelligence study warning of the “resurgence” of far-right extremists sparked by President Barack Obama’s election, as The Intercept noted.

Daryl Johnson, the lead researcher on the 2009 DHS report who was pushed out of the agency, told The Intercept that he was deeply disappointed by DHS’ decision to shrink the unit investigating right-wing extremists. “Federal law enforcement agencies in general—the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups,” he said.

The Oath Keepers and Constitutional Sheriffs Associations, both anti-government groups, actively recruit current and former law enforcement officers. An Oregon sheriff who belonged to the latter group supported the efforts of the armed militants who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for more than a month in early 2016.

Last October, a Maryland police officer was suspended after a woman circulated a photo she took of an Oath Keepers hat displayed in his squad car. According to The Intercept, police officers determined to have close ties to white supremacist, militia or sovereign citizen groups can end up on the terrorism watchlist as “silent hits.” That allows the FBI to secretly monitor them, as they are not publicly identified as known or suspected terrorists in the national crime database that is accessible to law enforcement agencies.

So it's double-plus good if you're a white supremacist who wants to commit violent acts -- you won't be investigated and you can even work from the inside now.

Speaking of which, Stephen Bannon's appointment in the WH is quite disturbing:

Process is crucial to factual accuracy, ideological neutrality and operational efficacy—and that’s precisely why Trump’s presidential memorandum inserting Bannon, a political adviser, into the NSC Principals Committee is disturbing to so many (the technical phrase, courtesy of former national security adviser Susan Rice, is “stone cold crazy”). The change strikes fear in us because it is a formalization, at the NSC level, of what we just witnessed with the drafting and issuing of the immigration order: the wrong people calling the shots and the wrong people being left out. And let’s dispense with the shoptalk in favor of real candor: we are not this upset simply because the national security adviser is sitting in that seat—as unusual and inadvisable as it may be, past presidents have in the past used all sorts of configurations to customize their use of the NSC and Principals Committee. What truly has us jumping up and down is that the man sitting in that seat is Stephen Bannon. This is not an overreaction.

We are living in an age when Reddit has taken it upon itself to ban an alt-right group from its megaforum, but the White House is allegedly being run by the man responsible for building the biggest alt-right platform in the world.

I woke up Sunday to David Rothkopf’s warning in the Washington Post that Bannon’s addition to the NSC could pose, in the long term, more dangerous consequences for our national security than Trump’s immigration order. But given the president’s broad discretion when it comes to NSC meetings, and more importantly, given that Bannon’s fingerprints are all over the immigration order—both what’s in it and how it was issued—we should focus not on which edict is worse but on the total continuity between them. Both evince the administration’s anti-professional approach to security decisions of the utmost magnitude. And many in the national security community are rightly frightened.

I believe deepening that fright is the apparent gap between how so much of the national security community feels and how our lawmakers are behaving. Almost nothing Trump had done is at odds with the person and president he promised to be on the campaign trail. This is true, too, of his top advisers. And yet from the outset, denial has been the favored approach of several prominent legislators. In November, when civil rights groups and commentators on both sides of the aisle sounded the alarm about Bannon’s appointment, Rand Paul and others insisted on “giv[ing] the guy a chance.” We don’t have reason to think he is personally racist, their argument went, notwithstanding the concededly horrific material he had built his professional career disseminating and his numerous personal statements endorsing ideology repugnant to American values.

This line of argument is most disingenuous because it ignores the very talent for which Bannon was explicitly recruited by the Trump campaign: he is a strategy professional with an astonishingly successful track record in reality distortion. As I emphasized in November: “Bannon’s website, Breitbart, is not a vacuous hate site, as is so often suggested. Breitbart is a carefully honed platform, and its clear and consistent approach to communicating the alt-right messaging on national security issues should give policy experts and principled politicians pause.”  

So, strange and creepy times indeed.

So, the trillion dollar questions are:

1) are Bannon et al planning a false flag terror attack to be blamed on Muslims, that is run by their white supremacist pals? 

2) what is the end-game for Bannon et al? Some sort of genocide of non-whites?