In February, reports emerged that the administration of President Donald Trump was considering rebranding the Obama-era Countering Violent Extremism program to “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.” This idea quickly sparked a public backlash from rights groups and Democratic congressional representatives who argue that the re-designation would both discriminate against Muslim communities and ignore the threat posed by white supremacist or other homegrown terror groups. The Trump administration has not released further information about this proposed change. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke with Michael German, a former undercover FBI agent and Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice
The Cipher Brief: You are a 16-year veteran of the FBI, and you spent almost two years undercover infiltrating violent white supremacists. When you look at groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda, do you recognize the tactics and strategies they use?
MG: Absolutely. When I left the FBI, I wrote a book called “Thinking Like a Terrorist,” in which I tried to explain that terrorism is a methodology and that all the groups that use terrorism tend to follow the same strategies.
After 9/11 when there was a focus on Al Qaeda, everyone was pretending these things were brand new, but if you knew the tactics you could predict exactly each step al Qaeda was going to make.
These groups all publish their methodologies. The Al Qaeda manual is really not that different from the Irish Republican Army green book or a lot of the white supremacist documents. A Brazilian Communist, Carlos Marighella, was one of the first to put all of this on paper in the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla. It was very frustrating to me in the three years after 9/11, before I left the FBI, that we weren’t paying attention to those manuals, paying attention to what those tactics were, and trying to get in front of their tactics.
Instead, we [the United States] did what the terrorists wanted us to, which was respond emotionally. This helped them to expand the conflict and, as we can see almost 16 years later, we are continuing to expand that conflict across the globe.
TCB: Today, when you look at the administration of President Donald Trump and what has come out about its proposed counterterrorism policies, what are the biggest takeaways for you?
MG: Over 16 years and two administrations – Democrat and Republican – terrorism has been used to keep the American public in fear to justify extraordinary programs that are not actually keeping us safe.
To have a public that is very afraid but does not have a good understanding of what the conflict is about and what is actually taking place makes it easy to continue giving the intelligence services and the military more power to do more. One of the first pieces that I wrote when I left the FBI took its title from something that a British counterinsurgency expert had written about U.S. policy in Vietnam, where he said that the Americans’ problem wasn’t just that they had a bad policy, it’s that when the policy didn’t work, they doubled down on that policy; they added more troops, more effort, more weapons. He called it “squaring the error.” They were exponentially increasing the error by increasing their involvement.
What we’ve seen the Trump administration do so far is, like the Bush and Obama administrations before it, to ratchet up the violence. At the same time, internally in the United States, you see the rise of the idea that any person who does harm and is Muslim is a terrorist somehow linked to jihadist groups or linked to their ideology. This concept drives the government to create programs that target specific groups, particularly Muslims. It also increases the animosity within the United States, so we have a very divided population.
If you look at the way that authoritarian regimes across the world have been able to secure power, it’s through this cycle of fear and violence. Unfortunately, now that the Trump administration is in charge, we are seeing a broad expansion of the violence and the repression of “suspect” communities here in the United States, starting with the Muslim ban and the aggressive enforcement of immigration policies. There has also been talk of new “tough on crime” policies which, if the policy follows the rhetoric, will focus on minority communities as well. These policies continue to divide the population, rather than bring us together as a nation.
TCB: There have been reports that the Trump administration is planning to revamp the Obama-era program called Countering Violent Extremism program to one focused only on “countering radical Islamic terrorism.” In policy terms, how would this type of change affect the way that the FBI and other agencies combat domestic terrorism? Is there a danger of overlooking white nationalist groups?
MG: There are a number of dangers. At the Brennan Center, we have long opposed the concept of “violent extremism.” Just the name of it, this idea that extremist beliefs are the problem rather than the violence itself, is a counterproductive way of looking at the problem. It is also a problem that you will never solve.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to kill ideas, even very bad ideas. It’s interesting, during the Bush administration when this sort of policy was being developed, officials would say “we defeated Fascism in World War II” but I was [posing as] a Nazi in the 1990s, under cover with the FBI, so the idea that Fascism – as an ideology – had been defeated was painfully mistaken.
This whole idea was bad framing from the beginning. When the Obama administration formalized the Countering Violent Extremism program, it focused almost exclusively on Muslim communities, and in places like Minnesota specifically on Somali-American communities. Thus, to a certain extent, if the Trump administration were to rebrand this program as specifically targeting Muslims it would just be a little more honest about what the original program was in the first place.
But it would also openly stigmatize Muslims as the terrorism problem, when we know that many different types of groups engage in political violence. White supremacists, for instance, have been a persistent problem in our country for decades. In fact, if you look at the average year, white supremacists will kill more people than any other type of terrorist group. Unfortunately, however, they tend not to be the people that the government cares about, so it’s easy to overlook that violence.
Still, I would argue that law enforcement actually treats white supremacist violence and hate crimes pretty well. I don’t think they understand the problem as well as they need to, but they don’t ignore it. They do tend to focus only on the violence and not the ideology. You don’t hear them complaining about white supremacist websites or Twitter accounts. If there is some kind of a hate crime in a community, it is typically addressed very seriously. These crimes are often solved very quickly, [Law enforcement officers] do understand the impact on the community.
I would hate to see the a turn toward the aggressive, over-broad counterterrorism responses that we’ve seen against Muslim communities in the United States. Instead, we need to realize that a narrower response against terrorism is much more effective.
In addition, it’s very important when we talk about any type of political violence that we have a picture of these problems, which is actually accurate. Even when you combine all types of terrorism in a typical year, we’re talking somewhere between 50 and 80 deaths a year [in the U.S.] compared to 15,000 homicides a year. Meanwhile, half of the violent crime doesn’t get solved. That includes more than a third of the murders and more than 60 percent of the rapes.
These are very serious crimes, which are happening far more regularly than terrorist violence, and yet the U.S. devotes a huge amount of time and resources to combatting terrorism. I would argue that if we put these resources into solving violent crimes, we’re far more likely to arrest people who later engage in terrorism than any kind of program that is designed to focus solely on extremist beliefs.
