At a recently held hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, top officials in the U.S. intelligence community adeptly shut down a leading line of questioning from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).
Cotton was apparently mad about the characterization in a government report of racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists as the greatest threat to Americans, specifically in a context of terrorism and related violence. His outrage, which true to form for Republicans of his evident persuasion seemed overly theatrical, seems easily connected to what’s an apparently Republican idea that government officials are trying to unfairly target those who’d be lumped into this category, an approach that quickly gets close to just outright excusing the violence these people are committing, whether they’re the white supremacists in the deadly crowd at the Capitol or the shooters motivated by explicitly racist ideology who attacked a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas, and then a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
“But in the context of terrorism, your conclusion is that racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists are a more lethal threat to Americans than ISIS or al Qaeda or Hezbollah?” Cotton asked.
“What we say in the piece — it’s under the category essentially of global terrorism, right?” Avril Haines, who’s the director of national intelligence, began to explain. “So it goes through the different areas of global terrorism, including transnationally, racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism. The fact that it is the most lethal threat with respect to U.S. persons is something that we actually stated, I think, over two years ago in another report as well that similarly laid out these different issues. And it simply is a question of how many people, how many U.S. persons are killed or wounded as a consequence of attacks.” William Burns, the director of the CIA, agreed with Haines’s characterization when questioned by Cotton. The Senator replied he was astonished, apparently aghast at what in reality are just the facts.
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