[House Hearing, 114 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
THE RISE OF RADICALIZATION: IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT FAILING TO COUNTER
INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC TERRORISM?
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JULY 15, 2015
__________
Serial No. 114-27
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
Michael T. McCaul, Texas, Chairman
Lamar Smith, Texas Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi
Peter T. King, New York Loretta Sanchez, California
Mike Rogers, Alabama Sheila Jackson Lee, Texas
Candice S. Miller, Michigan, Vice James R. Langevin, Rhode Island
Chair Brian Higgins, New York
Jeff Duncan, South Carolina Cedric L. Richmond, Louisiana
Tom Marino, Pennsylvania William R. Keating, Massachusetts
Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania Donald M. Payne, Jr., New Jersey
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania Filemon Vela, Texas
Curt Clawson, Florida Bonnie Watson Coleman, New Jersey
John Katko, New York Kathleen M. Rice, New York
Will Hurd, Texas Norma J. Torres, California
Earl L. ``Buddy'' Carter, Georgia
Mark Walker, North Carolina
Barry Loudermilk, Georgia
Martha McSally, Arizona
John Ratcliffe, Texas
Daniel M. Donovan, Jr., New York
Brendan P. Shields, Staff Director
Joan V. O'Hara, General Counsel
Michael S. Twinchek, Chief Clerk
I. Lanier Avant, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Statements
The Honorable Michael T. McCaul, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Texas, and Chairman, Committee on Homeland
Security:
Oral Statement................................................. 1
Prepared Statement............................................. 3
The Honorable Bennie G. Thompson, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Mississippi, and Ranking Member, Committee on
Homeland Security.............................................. 4
Witnesses
Ms. Farah Pandith, Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign
Relations:
Oral Statement................................................. 7
Prepared Statement............................................. 9
Mr. Seamus Hughes, Deputy Director, Program on Extremism, Center
for Cyber and Homeland Security, George Washington University:
Oral Statement................................................. 14
Prepared Statement............................................. 16
Mr. J. Richard Cohen, President, Southern Poverty Law Center:
Oral Statement................................................. 18
Prepared Statement............................................. 19
THE RISE OF RADICALIZATION: IS THE U.S. GOVERNMENT FAILING TO COUNTER
INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC TERRORISM?
----------
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Homeland Security,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:18 a.m., in Room
311, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. Michael T. McCaul
[Chairman of the committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives McCaul, King, Rogers, Miller,
Duncan, Perry, Katko, Hurd, Carter, Walker, Loudermilk,
McSally, Donovan, Thompson, Sanchez, Jackson Lee, Langevin,
Higgins, Richmond, Keating, Payne, Vela, Watson Coleman, Rice,
and Torres.
Chairman McCaul. The committee is meeting today to examine
the efforts of the United States Government to counter
international domestic terrorism. I now recognize myself for an
opening statement.
Our Nation is grappling with a new wave of terror from the
suburbs of Massachusetts to the streets of South Carolina. We
have apprehended a string of assailants who, while living among
us, plotted to cause mass harm in the name of their hateful
ideology. Just days ago, U.S. authorities disrupted an ISIS-
linked plot to attack an American university with assault
rifles and improvised explosive devices. The suspect planned to
execute students and broadcast it live on the internet. Last
month our Nation reacted with horror as another extremist
launched an attack on Black worshippers at a Charleston church.
Whether inspired by Islamic terror or white supremacy these
assailants share one trait in common: They want to attack the
innocent, intimidate our population, and coerce us in order to
achieve their ideological and insidious goals. Both
international and domestic terrorism and extremist groups are
seeking to radicalize our citizens, and they have begun to
master social media as a recruitment tool, placing people on a
path of violence at an alarming speed. But we cannot bow down
in the face of terror, and we must refuse to live at the mercy
of fanatics. That is why we are here today: To confront the
dangers we face, identify gaps in our defenses, and counter the
viral spread of violent extremism.
Americans are worried about a heightened threat environment
and for good reason. The numbers are astounding. The number of
post-9/11 home-grown terror plots in the United States has
surged. In fact, there have been more U.S.-based terror plots
in the first half of 2015 than any full year since 9/11. In
particular, Islamist terror groups are on the march. The attack
disrupted this week marks the 50th ISIS-linked terror plot
against the Western world since early last year and the 12th
inside of America. There have been more than 60 ISIS arrests in
the last year. That is more than one ISIS arrest per week.
These fanatics have warped a peaceful religion into
deceitful propaganda designed to convince vulnerable young
people to embrace inhuman barbarism. Their success in
recruiting from within our own communities cannot be ignored.
Since the beginning of 2014, we have arrested, as I said, more
than 60 ISIS-inspired suspects in 19 States. The FBI, according
to the director, now says that it has opened ISIS-related
investigations in every single State. In just the past few
weeks, we have disrupted heinous plots to behead law
enforcement officials, to detonate explosives in New York City
before the Fourth of July, and to conduct mass shootings of
Americans. All the attack plotters were U.S. citizens.
Extremists have also lured hundreds of Americans to try to
join them on the battlefield in Syria, and at least one has
already returned to our country and was arrested earlier this
year while planning a terrorist attack on a United States
military base. I commend the FBI and Homeland Security
officials and State and locals for disrupting so many of these
cases, but we are nowhere near close to reducing the threat. We
are living in a new age of peer-to-peer terrorism: 80 percent
of the ISIS-inspired Americans who have been arrested were
recruited by the terrorist group over social media or gangs in
on-line communications sympathetic to it. This is how extremism
goes viral, on-line, and out of sight until it is almost too
late.
While we spend billions of dollars to detect and disrupt
terror attacks, we have dedicated few resources toward
combating the radicalization at the root of terror, and that is
what countering violent extremism, or CVE, is all about. It is
warning communities. It is about helping them spot signs of
radicalization, training State and local law enforcement,
combating extremist propaganda, and developing off-ramps to
radicalization so we have an alternative to simply arresting
young people who are preyed upon and recruited by terrorists.
This is a crucial prevention aspect of counterterrorism.
Sadly, while extremist recruiters are moving at broadband
speed, we are moving at bureaucratic speed. The administration
has not appointed a lead agency in charge of CVE and few
resources or full-time personnel are even allocated to it. Our
committee asked the top agencies responsible for CVE how much
money and how many people have been assigned to the problem.
They can only identify $15 million being spent and around 2
dozen people working full-time to combat domestic
radicalization. That is it. That means we have arrested twice
as many ISIS recruits in the United States this year than there
are full-time officials working to prevent ISIS from
radicalizing Americans in the first place. In the high-threat
environment we are in today, this is unacceptable. Following
this hearing today, our committee will take up a bill crafted
to elevate, accelerate, and streamline the Department of
Homeland Security's CVE efforts to tackle both international
and domestic terrorist recruitment and radicalization.
It is time for us to come together on this issue in a
bipartisan fashion. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue.
The terrorists don't check our partisan affiliation. Ranking
Member Thompson has agreed with me in the past that DHS has a
vital role to play in CVE and made a point I find compelling
when he said: Prevention is likely to be more cost-effective
than surveillance, trials, or wars. I agree.
So, with that, I want to thank the witnesses for joining
us. I hope they will illuminate the gaps in our defenses and
the importance of ramping up these efforts in this critical
time on such a critical issue.
[The statement of Chairman McCaul follows:]
Statement of Chairman Michael T. McCaul
Our Nation is grappling with a new wave of terror.
From the suburbs of Massachusetts to the streets of South Carolina,
we have apprehended a string of assailants who--while living among us--
plotted to cause mass harm in the name of their hateful ideology.
Just days ago U.S. authorities disrupted an ISIS-linked plot to
attack an American university with assault rifles and improvised
explosive devices. The suspect planned to execute students and
broadcast it live on the internet.
And last month our Nation reacted with horror as another extremist
launched an attack on black worshippers in a Charleston church.
Whether inspired by Islamist terror or white supremacy, these
assailants share one trait in common: They want to attack the innocent,
intimidate our population, and coerce us in order to achieve their
insidious goals.
Both international and domestic extremist groups are seeking to
radicalize our citizens. And they have begun to master social media as
a recruitment tool, placing people on a path to violence at alarming
speed.
But we cannot bow down in the face of terror, and we must refuse to
live at the mercy of fanatics. That is why we are here today: To
confront the dangers we face, identify gaps in our defenses, and
counter the viral spread of violent extremism.
Americans are worried about a heightened threat environment and for
good reason.
The number of post-9/11 home-grown terror plots in the United
States has surged. In fact, there have been more U.S.-based terror
plots in the first half of 2015 than any full year since 9/11.
In particular, Islamist terror groups are on the march. The attack
disrupted this week marks the 50th ISIS-linked terror plot against the
Western world since early last year--and the 12th inside America.
These fanatics have warped a peaceful religion into deceitful
propaganda, designed to convince vulnerable young people to embrace
inhuman barbarism.
Their success at recruiting from within our own communities cannot
be ignored. Since the beginning of 2014, we have arrested or charged
more than 60 ISIS-inspired suspects in 19 States, and the FBI says it
now has opened ISIS-related investigations in every single State.
In just the past few weeks, we have disrupted heinous plots to
behead law enforcement officers, to detonate explosives in New York
City, and to conduct mass shootings of Americans. All of the attack
plotters were U.S. citizens.
Extremists have also lured hundreds of Americans to try and join
them on the battlefield in Syria--and at least one has already returned
to our country and was arrested earlier this year while planning a
terrorist attack on a U.S. military base.
I commend the FBI, Homeland Security, and State and local law
enforcement for disrupting so many of these cases, but we are nowhere
near close to reducing the threat.
We are living in a new age of peer-to-peer terrorism.
Eighty percent of the ISIS-inspired Americans who have been
arrested were recruited by the terrorist group over social media or
engaged in on-line communications sympathetic to it.
This is how extremism goes viral: On-line and out-of-sight, until
it's almost too late.
But while we spend billions of dollars to detect and disrupt terror
attacks, we have dedicated few resources toward combating the
radicalization at the root of terror.
That is what countering violent extremism--or ``CVE''--is all
about. It is about warning communities, helping them spot signs of
radicalization, training State and local law enforcement, combating
extremist propaganda, and developing ``off-ramps'' to radicalization so
we have an alternative to simply arresting young people who are preyed
upon and recruited by terrorists.
This is the crucial ``prevention'' aspect of counterterrorism.
Sadly, while extremist recruiters are moving at broadband speed, we
are moving at bureaucratic speed. The administration has not appointed
a lead agency in charge of CVE, and few resources or full-time
personnel are even allocated to it.
Our committee asked the top agencies responsible for CVE how much
money and how many people they have assigned to the problem. They could
only identify around $15 million being spent and around 2 dozen people
working full-time to combating domestic radicalization. That's it.
That means we've arrested twice as many ISIS recruits in the United
States this year than there are full-time officials working to prevent
ISIS from radicalizing Americans in the first place. In a high-threat
environment, this is unacceptable.
Following this hearing today, our committee will take up a bill
crafted to elevate, accelerate, and streamline the Department of
Homeland Security's CVE efforts to tackle both international and
domestic terrorist recruitment and radicalization.
It is time for us to come together on this issue in bipartisan
fashion. Ranking Member Thompson has agreed with me in the past that
DHS ``has a vital role to play'' in CVE and made a point I find
compelling: ``Prevention is likely to be more cost-effective than
surveillance, trials, or wars.''
I thank our witnesses for joining us, and I hope they will
illuminate the gaps in our defenses and the importance of ramping up
our efforts to counter violent extremism.
Chairman McCaul. With that, the Chair now recognizes the
Ranking Member.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I thank our witnesses for appearing today.
Last month, in the wake of a domestic terrorist attack on 9
parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South
Carolina, I sent the Chairman of this committee a letter asking
that this committee hold hearings on the threat of domestic
terrorism. In that letter, I asked that Federal witnesses be
invited to appear before the committee to testify about the
threat from domestic terrorism and what the Federal Government
is doing to counter the threat of extremist violence.
I believe that this committee has a duty to conduct
oversight of the Department of Justice's and the Department of
Homeland Security's efforts and ask questions about how these
threats are identified, mitigated, responded to on domestic
terror threats. From my understanding, we invited, from my
side, a witness from the Department to come and offer that
testimony to us. To date, my understanding is a witness is not
forthcoming.
There are also overarching questions about the degree to
which Federal efforts to counter extremist violence are focused
on domestic terrorist threats. Unfortunately, today's hearing
will not bring us any closer to getting answers to these timely
questions, as I said, as none of the Federal Government
witnesses are here to testify.
That said, I appreciate the Chairman's willingness to
engage on the subject of domestic terrorism and hold this
hearing. I certainly hope that today's hearing will be the
first in a series of hearings on domestic terrorism.
Mr. Chairman, this committee has a history of holding
topical hearings. We held hearings in the wake of the Garland,
Texas, attack. Last Congress, we were holding hearings during
the summer on the humanitarian crisis along the Southwestern
Border. We also held hearings on the Ebola crisis. Therefore,
it is not surprising that in the wake of the South Carolina
shootings, the committee is now holding this hearing.
Given that, addressing domestic terrorist threats is a key
element of this committee's bipartisan oversight plan. We
should be working on a bipartisan basis to make it a priority.
The threat from domestic terrorism is real. According to West
Point's Countering Terrorism Center, in the decade following
the 9/11 attack, right-wing extremist violence resulted in the
deaths of 254 people in the United States. Not surprisingly, a
recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum and
Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that
State and local law enforcement personnel are almost twice as
worried about the risk of extremist violence by right-wing and
anti-Government groups as they are from foreign terrorist
organizations. So, for this Congress, every terrorism hearing
held at the full committee level has focused exclusively on
threats posed by foreign terrorist organizations. Foreign
terrorist organizations, such as ISIL and al-Qaeda pose a
significant danger to the United States. A number of domestic
terror groups also pose significant threats. Unless we get
serious about domestic terrorism, we run the risk of falling
victim to what the 9/11 Commissioners call a failure of
imagination.
Like foreign terrorist organizations, domestic terrorist
organizations vigorously recruit and spread propaganda through
social media and in on-line chat rooms. Every day foreign
terrorist organizations dispatch thousands of messages on-line
to promote their violent terrorist ideology, domestic terrorist
organizations do so as well. Over the past few years, sovereign
citizen group and other anti-Government groups have
successfully recruited new members through Facebook as well as
extremist websites NewSaxon and Stormfront. Interestingly, in
the past, whenever we have discussed overseas-based threats,
there has been an almost exclusive focus on propaganda
circulated by foreign terrorist organizations.
However, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,
Stormfront posts their forums in over a dozen languages, and
nearly half its traffic comes from outside the United States.
Mr. Chairman, I agree with your statement. We are facing an
enemy whose messages and calls to violence are posted and
promoted in real time. Last month, on U.S. soil, approximately
500 miles from the Capitol, we saw first-hand how chat rooms
and the internet can spur acts of extremist violence by
domestic terrorists when a man identified as 21-year-old Dylann
Roof massacred 9 Black Christians in the historic Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church. Three days after the
shooting, a racist manifesto, allegedly written by Roof
surfaced on-line. In this manifesto, Roof admitted to gathering
information from the Council of Conservative Citizens, a well-
known extremist group that has roots with the White Citizens'
Councils, an associated network of White supremacists.
Photographs of the alleged perpetrator with oppressive symbols
of the Confederacy and the South African apartheid regime also
surfaced on-line in the wake of the shooting.
Even though the deadly attack in South Carolina is at the
forefront of our minds, we cannot forget the fall of 2008
attempt to assassinate President Obama that was planned by two
white supremacists who were allegedly introduced on a social
networking website. It is important that we find ways to
counter violent extremism from both domestic and foreign
terrorist organizations. The administration has tried to pursue
this avenue, but unfortunately, we are still unclear on what is
being done, particularly at DHS.
DHS refuses to provide testimony to date, and without
hearing directly from the agency about its vision and needs, I
cannot support H.R. 2899, the legislation this committee is
poised to consider later today. I cannot embrace the
bureaucratic solution that Chairman McCaul is offering to the
Homeland Security's challenge of extremist violence. We all
have a responsibility to prevent terrorist attacks against
Americans and on American soil, and our actions should respond
to the current threat environment. Not doing so would be a
disservice to ourselves and the American public.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. I thank the Ranking Member.
Let me voice my disappointment that the Ranking Member is
not supportive. I held this hearing in response to your letter.
The Department witness, you are correct, is not here. But this
hearing is entitled both to counter international and domestic
terrorism--domestic terrorism. The bill that we are going to
mark up later today, I would argue, almost expands the scope
within the Department to not be faced solely on international
foreign terrorism but domestic in response to the shootings in
South Carolina.
So I am a little bit perplexed at the position of the
Minority side as to why they are not supportive of both the
hearing and the legislation that we are going to bring forward
later today.
So, with that, I would like to introduce our witnesses.
First, Ms. Farah Pandith, currently an adjunct senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations, senior fellow at Harvard
University's Future of Diplomacy Project at the Kennedy School
and, as of May 2015, a member of the Secretary of Homeland
Security Jeh Johnson's Homeland Security Advisory Council. She
previously served as a political appointee in the Bush
administration and also the Obama administration. She was
appointed the first-ever special representative to Muslim
communities in June 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Next, we have Mr. Seamus Hughes, serves as the deputy
director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington
University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. Previously,
Mr. Hughes worked as a lead countering violent extremism
staffer at the National Counterterrorism Center and as senior
adviser for the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Last, we have Mr. Richard Cohen, currently an attorney and
president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Prior to joining
the law center as president, he served as its vice president
for programs, which includes the Intelligence Project and
Teaching Tolerance, and practiced law in Washington for many
years.
So I want to thank all the witnesses for being here today.
The Chair now recognizes Ms. Pandith for her testimony.
STATEMENT OF FARAH PANDITH, ADJUNCT SENIOR FELLOW, COUNCIL ON
FOREIGN RELATIONS
Ms. Pandith. Good morning. Thank you to the House Committee
on Homeland Security for inviting me to testify today. Chairman
McCaul, and Members of the committee, it is my honor and
pleasure to be here for this important discussion.
My name is Farah Pandith, and I am an adjunct senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at
Harvard University. My opinions are my own.
My perspective is based on more than a decade directly
working on issues of countering violent extremism while I was
in Government serving at the National Security Council and at
the Department of State as a political appointee for Presidents
George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
In my roles, most recently as special representative to
Muslim communities, I focused on the impact of extremist
ideologies on Muslim millennials. I engaged with communities at
a grassroots level in more than 80 countries. In the Bush and
Obama administrations, I pioneered efforts to push back on
these ideologies on-line and off-line and saw the complex
processes by which extremists prey on young Muslims, tear apart
local communities, and threaten stability world-wide. Their
ideology was present in every country I visited, and the
domestic and international implications of this fact are
playing out as we speak.
Thus, I am pleased to be able to talk with you about what
the United States Government has done and what we need to do to
deal with the threat we face from extremist groups that use a
corrupt and vile narrative claiming religious credentials for
their political and ideological ends. In my submitted written
testimony, I have argued that while our Nation has been aware
that an ideological element is fueling the radicalization of
Muslim youth, we have not yet employed an all-in strategy of
hard and soft power.
When we do this, we will see positive results, including a
decrease in the number of recruits.
The title of the hearing today asks if the United States
Government is failing to counter terrorism. We know that
without recruits, terrorist organizations can't survive.
Therefore, is the American Government doing enough to stop the
recruitment of young Muslims in our country and abroad? At
worst, the answer is no. At best, the answer is, it depends. If
we assess progress in terms of how many other 9/11s have
happened on our soil, we have so far succeeded. If we assess
progress that the number of Americans doing harm in the
homeland in support of groups like ISIL compared to in support
of other causes, we have so far succeeded. If we assess the
progress as the number of American foreign fighters in Syria
and Iraq compared to other Western foreign fighters, we have so
far succeeded.
But these measurements of success do not go far enough
because we can't just look at the present. We must look at what
we are doing to prevent the rise of radicalization in youth for
years to come. This means the seeming success we have had will
prove illusory over the longer term because we know that the
ideology of the extremist is impacting kids as young as 10.
These children and young adults will continue the cycle of
violence and fear. The extremists are winning over youth from
Detroit to Dhaka. They have a sophisticated, well-funded
machine that is working 24/7 to persuade and provoke youth to
be part of their team.
The threat posed by extremists is comprised of the
construction of physical and virtual armies. This is a far more
worrisome threat than just a particular group because the
attractiveness of this ideology and the tactics of recruitment
have infiltrated a demographic the world over. We have not
created the kind of machinery inside and outside of Government
that can compete with the extremists at this moment. We have
failed to give the right resources, commitment, and personnel
to this century-changing phenomenon. Too little has happened to
address the seeding of the ecosystem that has allowed the
poisonous ideology to grow over several decades. Too little has
been done to deal with a post-9/11 generational identity crisis
that makes recruitment possible.
The fact is, based on the thousands of conversations I have
had with Muslim millennials globally, they are searching for
answers to questions about their identity. Extremist narratives
are filling the intellectual vacuum, and governments have been
ill-equipped to deal with it.
I know this might seem like gushy stuff. Government doesn't
do identity crises very well. Still, we must reposition
ourselves to confront the real issue facing us today, not the
issue we wish we were facing. At one time, just a few years
ago, al-Qaeda was the big threat. Today, that threat feels
manageable in comparison with ISIL.
What threat will we face tomorrow? What happens if there
are more than one ISIL at the same time? If we want to create a
new reality for our Nation and the world, we must go all in. We
must confront the ideological threat with a strategy that
reduces the number of recruits and prevents the virtual armies
from being formed. I want to conclude with five points that
should be part of our repositioning.
First, focus directly on the global millennial generation,
both men and women. Use digital natives to dramatically change
the patterns of discourse within the Muslim communities. No. 3,
invest significantly in soft power, not just hard power. The
strategy must be integrated together, and we must go all in.
No. 4, be concerned not just with individuals who leave home
countries to fight in the Middle East or elsewhere but with the
ideology that continues to spread among those left behind.
Finally, fight extremism with a well-resourced team, the right
personnel, a substantially-increased budget for soft power
funding, and an entity in charge of the ideological fight that
is accountable to Congress.
Thank you very much for the opportunity, and I look forward
to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Pandith follows:]
Prepared Statement of Farah Pandith
July 15, 2015
Mr. Chairman and distinguished Members of the committee: Thank you
for inviting me to share my perspective and experience. My name is
Farah Pandith, and for 11 years I served as a political appointee for
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama, most recently as our
Government's former first-ever special representative to Muslim
communities. I felt deeply honored to serve our Nation at the highest
levels in a post-9/11 environment and to work on an issue that is, in
my opinion, one of this century's most serious and misunderstood.
I left Government in January 2014 to continue my work on countering
violent extremism. I greatly respect both administrations in which I
have served, but given what I have seen in more than 80 countries as
special representative, as well as in 55 cities and 19 countries across
western Europe as senior advisor to the assistant secretary of state
for European and Eurasian affairs focusing specifically on countering
violent extremism (CVE), I felt it was important to re-join the non-
Government sector so as to speak openly, clearly, and pointedly about
the threat we are facing. I also wanted to help convince America and
the world to do more to confront extremist ideology. (Let me be clear:
Many kinds of extremist ideologies exist on our planet today. I'm
referring to extremists whose vile and corrupt narrative claims
religion for a specific political and ideological end.)
I come before you with neither a partisan agenda nor any purpose
other than to give my honest views on this vital issue. As of February
2014, I have been affiliated with Harvard University's Kennedy School
of Government where I maintain an affiliation. As of December 2014, I
have been at the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions I am
expressing in both my written and verbal testimony are my own. Thank
you for the opportunity to testify on the issue of the ``Rise of
Radicalization: Is the U.S. Government Failing to Counter International
and Domestic Terrorism?''
what threat do we face?
War of Ideas: the ideology of the extremists versus everyone else
Extremist ideology is an insidious and contagious virus that has
successfully moved across our planet, specifically targeting Muslim
millennials. Although extremism is not a new threat, it has infected
every region of the globe and continues to morph, taking on different
forms in different places. Yet the result is always the same: Massive
loss of life, destruction of modern cities and ancient sites, the
seizure of territory, the erasure of existing borders, the targeted
culling of minorities, the destabilization of entire regions, and the
eradication of human rights.
The War of Ideas today is far more deadly than it was in the years
after 9/11 because the recruits--mainly Muslim millennials under the
age of 30--are vulnerable to persuasion, purpose, and passion. More
youth are becoming radicalized globally, enticed to join both virtual
and physical armies. The extremists are outpacing and outmaneuvering us
in the ideological space. To stop them, we must take courageous and
intelligent action, applying known methods and deploying all of our
tools, both hard and soft power. Unless we act decisively, surpassing
what we've done since 9/11 to inoculate communities from Denver to
Dhaka, we will face an even more serious situation globally. We are
currently ``just'' primarily seeing the crisis the Middle East but one
can imagine a terrifying situation where this kind of war is being
fought in other theatres at the same time as well as an expanded and
more frequent series of attacks from Stockholm to Sidney.
Vulnerable Communities: Listening to what the grassroots have to say
The extremists--whether al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (ISIL), al-Shabaab, the Taliban, or Boko Haram--understand that
in order to gain recruits, they must cater to their target demographic.
The extremists are winning recruits because right now their narratives
are louder and reach more youth than any other. At the core, extremist
narratives are answering the key questions millennial Muslims are
asking about themselves and their purpose.
As special representative to Muslim communities, I met with
thousands of Muslims over 5 years. I engaged with communities from
Brazil to China, heard stories, and developed a new perspective on
trends relating to Muslim youth. I had done this in Europe for 2 years
right after the Danish Cartoon Crisis, talking with members of
communities from Norway to Sicily and thinking that what I heard was
unique to Muslims living as a minority (I was wrong). These two roles
gave me unprecedented grassroots access in places senior U.S.
Government rarely went. They provided me with an extraordinary ability
to make connections and spot trends across a demographic rather than
just a region, and to do so irrespective of who was in the Oval Office.
(Again, I did this in both the Bush and Obama administrations).
The realities I encountered flew in the face of all the theories
and seemingly logical explanations then circulating about extremism.
Experts cited the so-called Arab Spring, the lack of jobs and
education, our foreign policy, our domestic policies, our immigrant
narrative, our separation of church and state. Yet what young Muslim
men and women were confronting--and still are confronting--was
different and more unwieldy. Since 9/11, Muslim youth have experienced
a profound identity crisis unlike any in modern history. They have
craved answers, seeking purpose and belonging.
Nearly every day since September 12, 2001, Muslim Millennials have
seen the word ``Islam'' or ``Muslim'' on the front pages of papers on-
and off-line. They have grown up scrutinized because of their religion,
and much of this attention is not positive. As a result, they are
asking questions like: What does it mean to be modern and Muslim? What
is the difference between culture and religion? Who speaks for my
generation? While members of earlier generations might have turned to
close-knit families and communities for help answering such questions,
Millennials are tuning in to unsavory figures encountered on the
internet and in other venues. Extremists prey on young Muslims and
offer ready-made answers designed specifically to appeal to this
generation. They market their ideas with savvy and alarming expertise--
from magazines to apps, YouTube sermons to Hip-Hop and poetry.
That is by no means all that's going on. Some Muslim women are
becoming far more conservative across the planet, rejecting
established, local traditions of dress and society. They are
``veiling'' when their mothers and grandmothers did not. They are
listening to radical sermons on satellite TV beamed from Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia. They are downloading music, poetry, and blogs that
celebrate isolation and hatred of the ``other.'' They are keeping their
children away from people who are not ``like them.'' And most recently,
some are joining the armies of ISIL. Because a mother is a child's
first teacher, and because some women now wish join the fight, young
women are in a position to make or break their succeeding generation.
For the first time since 9/11, we are re-awakening emphatically to
the growing threat posed by extremists. At the moment, we are
rightfully concerned about the potential of radicalized youth returning
from battlefields to conduct terrorist actions. But in addition to the
short-term impacts on public safety, we should be concerned about the
long-term ability of battle-hardened extremists to build new terrorist
networks at home and extend existing ones by preying on youth. There is
a critical ideological battle to be waged here. Extremists remain
radicalized once they return. They are technologically savvy and
understand how to use emotions to attract recruits. They also might
command heightened and growing legitimacy in Muslim communities. Hard
power responses such as retrieving passports are a start, but we need
to do much more to prevent recruitment of new terrorists.
Fortunately for us, the extremists possess a hidden vulnerability.
Credible voices--those liked and trusted by Muslim youth--can win youth
over with narratives that counter extremist messages. Who are these
credible voices? They are not those of the United States Government. No
government on earth--ours or any other--is credible among Muslim youth.
Like any other kids on the planet, Muslim youth listen to their peers,
are persuaded by popular ideas, and are passionate about belonging to
something that seems real to them. To prevent recruitment of new
terrorists, we must find new, innovative ways of boosting credible
voices, helping them to drown out the extremists in the global
marketplace of ideas.
If we clamp down on recruitment, then before too long, ISIL and
others will not have armies. Given that the radicalization of an
individual takes place gradually, why haven't we done more to intercede
proactively during the initial stages of ideological persuasion? Why
are we only interceding much later by attempting to stop extremists as
they seek to cross national borders? Recruitment is a relatively new
phenomenon, but we certainly possess enough information 14 years after
9/11 to address the issue and scale up counter-measures at the local
level, both in our country and around the world. We must decide if our
goal is merely to stop an immediate threat, or to stop recruitment from
happening in the first place.
what have we done?
9/11 to Today: Setting up our defenses on soft power
The U.S. Government has struggled since 9/11 to wage a ``war of
ideas.'' After
9/11, we attempted to engage in such a war against al-Qaeda and the
Taliban. Seeking to thwart their recruitment efforts, we focused on
countering their narratives of ``us'' versus ``them.'' These efforts
took place under the umbrella of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), a
concept that has become fashionable as of late but that actually dates
from the Bush administration. Back then, it was an upward struggle to
get the inter-agency to buy into CVE. Most policy makers in our country
and abroad couldn't envision how we could develop organic voices on the
ground that could push back against al-Qaeda's ideology.
Still, several visionaries did understand that although the U.S.
Government did not have street cred with average Muslim youth, we did
have the power to build platforms to raise up voices and build
movements of credible voices. Thanks to the commitment and open-
mindedness of these visionaries, we seeded initiatives that allowed us
to launch new efforts on the ground and created a road map of what was
possible. We took risks and experimented. (During this time, very few
European governments felt comfortable getting into an ideological
battle, even though their communities were doing just that at micro
levels. European governments were trying to find voices that had
legitimacy and credibility, but as in our country, politics often
prevented risk taking at the grassroots.)
During the 2 years that I served as senior advisor in the EUR
Bureau (2007-2009), we helped start many soft power initiatives and
networks, demonstrating a proof of concept. Initiatives like Sisters
Against Violent Extremism (SAVE) were designed in the image of Mothers
Against Drunk Driving to be grassroots, local, and responsive.
Recognizing that European Muslim youth needed positive role models, we
created the first pan-European professional network that activated a
new narrative and inspired others. By partnering with individuals and
community groups across Europe, we managed to lift up voices of Muslims
who had both influence within local neighborhoods and communities,
establishing the basis for an empowering a grassroots countermovement
in opposition of extremist manifestations and counter-extremist
messages to share. We joined former extremists, victims of terrorism,
entrepreneurs, bloggers, and women into layered networks dedicated to
combatting the allure of the extremist narrative and ideology.
When Secretary Clinton learned of our accomplishments in Europe as
conveners, facilitators and intellectual partners, she asked me to take
our activities global. As special representative to Muslim communities
(2009-2014), I used the same approach I did in the Bush administration
to mobilize Muslim youth. I worked with our embassies to create first-
of-a-kind global networks like Generation Change, a network of Muslim
change makers who were committed to pushing back extremist ideology. I
listened to what youth were saying about the changing nature of
extremists' appeal and tactics and focused on helping connect social
entrepreneurs, activists, and other organic voices. We also launched
efforts like Viral Peace, a program to train credible voices to push
back against extremists on-line. Further, we identified ``black holes''
where we knew more work had to be done, including the increasing
phenomenon of the radicalization of women.
What I was asked to do at State during the Bush administration was
unique. At the time, forward-thinking policy-makers understood that
America had to proactively engage with Muslim communities in Europe.
You might remember the intense days after the Danish Cartoon Crisis
when everyone--our Nation, as well as our European allies---was caught
off-guard by the realization that something happening in Copenhagen
could affect lives in Kabul. Sadly, we have seen this phenomenon play
out all too often. A false rumor, a video, a preacher threatening to
burn the Quran can all unleash unrest as well as violence in faraway
places.
What I was asked to do at State in the Obama administration was
also unique and gave me a chance to work closely with my State
colleagues to build out micro-scaled prototypes. It cemented my belief
that the most innovative opportunities we have to defeat the spread of
this ideology involve partnering with those outside of Government.
We must now dramatically ``scale-up'' innovative, entrepreneurial
CVE programs if we are to prevail. I'm not talking about engaging in a
messaging war on Twitter. I'm talking about getting credible, local
voices to inoculate their communities against extremist techniques and
appeal. I'm talking about helping parents to understand extremist
tactics so that they can educate their children about this threat. I'm
talking about supporting the hundreds of grassroots ideas and
initiatives in our country and around the world that reject extremist
ideology. I'm talking about working closely with mental health
professionals to understand the adolescent mind and to develop programs
that can help stop radicalization. Ultimately, we need to monopolize
the marketplace of ideas on-line and off-line, spawning credible voices
that that give new agency and purpose to this generation.
One lesson I have learned is that these local ideas don't require
large budgets. They do, however, require support and a certain mindset
from those at the top. We must allow for creativity, understand that
not everything we try is going to bloom, and accept that we do not have
to put the American flag on everything we do. When it comes to
countering violent extremism, one size doesn't fit all. We have to
listen to what communities are saying is going to make a difference and
be flexible and inventive enough to help them do it. It is not ideas
from Washington that can make a difference in Tashkent or Toronto.
Make no mistake, CVE efforts are still very much in their infancy.
Though our Government has tried to counter extremist narratives through
formal channels, very, very little attention has been paid overall to
CVE. We haven't approached the ideological war with the same resources
or respect we did the physical war, devoting ourselves to an integrated
strategy of hard and soft power. We did not ask the kinds of questions
around the ideology that would have informed us of things to come and
the global appeal, and we did not restructure ourselves to get ahead of
the extremists. As a result, the extremist ideology has spread, leaving
us where we are today: Facing a virtual army of recruits not just from
other countries, but from our own.
what should be done?
ISIS and beyond: Going All In
This year began with the attack on Charlie Hebdo, and just recently
we watched the massacre in Tunisia. We have become all too familiar
with gruesome images of beheadings and other atrocities, the
destruction of human heritage, and the warnings of attacks on the
homeland. Yet still we remain locked into thinking that we can deal
with the extremist threat primarily through hard power alone. While we
have seen an increase in the interagency conversation around the
ideological war, and ``CVE'' is the currency everyone is floating, our
overall strategy to defeat the extremists does not contain a sufficient
soft power dimension.
We can't create an ideological countermovement on the backs of a
few isolated Government-funded programs. It requires much broader
commitment and focus. Our strategy must be a cohesive, integrated, and
comprehensive approach to the threat we face. We must wage a battle on
all fronts with money, accountability, and experienced personnel. We
must look at this like we would any other contagion, rooting out its
hosts globally and destroying its defenses. The extremists seem all
powerful, but they are not. We have yet to unleash the full power of
our skills in the soft power space. When we truly go ``all in,'' we'll
see how vulnerable the extremists really are.
Principles for future action should include the following:
Investing significantly in soft power the way we did during
the Cold War. We must give soft power as much credibility as we
do hard power.
Focusing on millennials globally, as this is the demographic
from which the extremists recruit.
Creating a comprehensive, coordinated strategy that does not
skirt the ideological threat and that mobilizes all available
levers of power (again, as we did during the Cold War). Such a
strategy should incorporate lessons we've learned from the
ground up, and it should invest in local answers.
Adopting helpful and appropriate goals. The point here is
not to win a popularity contest--to ``win hearts and minds.''
Rather, it's to get voices on-line and off-line to push back
against extremist messages. It's to flood the marketplace of
ideas with on-line and off-line counter-narratives articulated
by Muslims themselves. We need to act as convener, facilitator,
and intellectual partner to Muslim youth, bringing together
their great ideas and seeding them. This approach will hold far
more credibility in Muslim communities.
Publicly condemning countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and
others that are igniting extremist ideology in a variety of
ways--through textbooks, radical preachers, and mosques that
promote hate and reject the diversity of Muslims around the
world (not to speak of other faiths).
Attacking extremist recruiting proactively rather than
relying on reactive and exponentially costlier ``hard power''
interventions once military threats have already materialized.
Remember, without recruits, there are no troops.
Ramping up initiatives and knowledge about the
radicalization of women, and developing new approaches to
mobilize them against radicalism.
Creating awareness campaigns about radicalization the way we
do for diseases like AIDS or breast cancer.
Normalizing the conversation about extremism so that more
private-sector money flows into soft power initiatives.
Government can do this by sharing information about what we are
seeing and convening helpful players outside of Government.
Anticipating extremist ideological attacks, and keeping an
arsenal of strong counter-actions at the ready. In this field,
there are few real surprises. We can easily predict the kind of
tools extremists will use against us. We ought to be ready with
swift responses, not wait days and weeks to react.
Creating senior-level positions across Government at home
and abroad to focus on CVE, making the individuals in these
positions accountable to Congress.
Producing a strategy that not only has short-, medium-, and
long-term goals but identifies the layers of elements in the
ecosystem that allows the ideology to grow.
Including the mental heath components as well as millennial
data into our assessments and strategy.
The extremists are both evil and intelligent. They are doing
everything they can from all angles to re-make the world according to
their apocalyptic vision. We understand this, but we're not doing
enough to neutralize their methods. As a CVE pioneer, I took part in
policy conversations at the highest level, and I also engaged at the
grassroots with the most vulnerable of communities. I know first-hand
what we can and cannot do. As I watch this horrific era of ISIL, I am
convinced that we can and must do more.
In the years since 9/11, a great deal of politicking has taken
place around the issue of radicalization, and unfortunately this has
impeded an honest assessment of how to mobilize communities themselves
to prevent young Americans from being seduced. Critics of CVE bemoan a
lack of science supporting measures that might fight extremist
ideology. They want proof that counter-narratives work and they want
any approach to stemming the appeal to produce measurable results. But
are we supposed to do nothing and let the extremists blast the
marketplace on-line and off-line with their poison, waiting for a
crisis to respond? Efforts to mobilize credible voices on- and off-line
offer us hope. In the case of on-line recruitment, data exists that can
help us evaluate the effectiveness of counter-measures. To evaluate
off-line CVE measures, we can seek out anecdotes confirming whether
one-on-one interactions or specific programs have moved kids from
interest in extremism to rejection of it. The science may not be
perfect, but doing nothing is not an option and we need to be more
proactive, not less. We can take action without infringing on civil
rights and civil liberties, and we can partner with coalitions whose
members understand that the predators trying to win over our youth are
a problem for all of America, not a specific community.
Our efforts to deal with the ideological threat have of course
evolved since 9/11. The trajectory of U.S. Government thinking has gone
from ``winning hearts and minds'' and a Rapid Response Unit to hashtags
and a Global Strategic Communication Center. And yet, we continue to
come up short. Formerly many didn't accept CVE, but now they make the
mistake of calling everything CVE. We have tried to bracket the threat
around terrorist groups and regions, building out coordination in
artificial ways. We have never given real money, real strategic
importance, or real personnel a chance to do all we are capable of
doing to win this ideological war. In some ways, are having the same
conversations we did right after 9/11--they seem new to many because we
have not shared expertise and background, and new personnel insist
there is nothing to be learned from those who worked on this before
them. It is astounding that even in the aftermath of the President's
Summit on CVE, an important convening and re-energized moment, we are
still locked into an inter-agency that is uncoordinated and under-
resourced. Very little innovation exists around the ``how'' of building
initiatives or what those initiatives might be. Further, we are
insisting that this is a messaging war when it is much more than that.
We stand today at a crossroads. We possess a great deal of
information about how people get radicalized, why they get radicalized,
and what can prevent them from getting radicalized. We can either
continue to do CVE in an episodic way without accountability or
imagination, or we can put all the pieces together--the ecosystem, the
new counter-narratives and tools, and the specific demographic--into a
cohesive global strategy that mobilizes both hard and soft power.
what's coming?
The ideological threat from extremists will impact us in several
ways in the years ahead. First, we know that the extremists are already
recruiting among the 4 million refugees (including a large number of
youth) who have fled fighting in Syria and Iraq. We can not yet know
the numbers or the impact that such recruitment will have on that
region or other parts of the globe, but clearly this represents a
dangerous and compelling threat.
Second, while governments are still trying to understand the
extremists' recruitment of women, we are learning of children already
training to be ISIS warriors. Referred to as ``cubs,'' these children,
once grown, will comprise a massive untested demographic. What do we
know of adults that have been brainwashed to be violent when only 7 or
8 years old?
Third, the New York Times recently highlighted a story of a young
American girl from rural Washington State who was seduced by the
ideology of an ISIS recruiter. Her story shocked and alarmed many
Americans. Similarly, the parents of an American teen raised in the
suburbs of Chicago were shocked to learn that their son had been
recruited by ISIS. These stories are not isolated incidents. We are
seeing a more robust conversation from Massachusetts to California
around the radicalization of Americans, but importantly, we are also
seeing a more open conversation about how to stop it on the home front.
As we look at the next chapter of the extremist threat, we know home-
grown radicalization along with so called lone-wolf attacks on the
homeland will constitute a serious threat.
Fourth, as we have seen in the last couple of years, the extremists
are changing and combining allegiances. This may continue, and we may
also see new groups emerge as technology gets more sophisticated,
extremists get even smarter in their recruitment efforts, and their
target demographic grows larger. What will this mean for policy makers
as we build out our strategy and understand the threat we face?
Finally, there has been much discussion around foreign fighters
returning. We do not currently know what the impact will be on their
ability to recruit and the aftermath of their particular journeys.
This hearing seeks to determine whether the U.S. Government is
failing to counter the growing threat of the extremists. I believe we
have learned a lot since 9/11 and in both the Bush and Obama
administrations we have seen leadership on and commitment to this
issue. However, 14 years after 9/11, we should not feel content with
the pace of our efforts. At the same time, I leave you with a positive
message. We can destroy the extremists' ability to recruit young
Muslims. We can beat extremists at their own game, ending their
exploitation of the Muslim identity crisis. Doing so won't cost a
fraction of traditional hard power solutions, but it will require that
we take a more entrepreneurial and innovative approach to policymaking.
We must stop playing catch-up and get ahead of trends. We must take a
broader view and not look at specific conflicts or extremist groups as
if they are ``one-offs.'' As a Nation, we must move swiftly, like
nimbler start-ups. We defeated communist ideology during the Cold War
by mustering creativity and full-on dedication. We can and must do this
again. The time to act is now. So what are we waiting for?
Chairman McCaul. Thank you, Ms. Pandith.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Hughes.
STATEMENT OF SEAMUS HUGHES, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, PROGRAM ON
EXTREMISM, CENTER FOR CYBER AND HOMELAND SECURITY, GEORGE
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Hughes. Chairman McCaul, Ranking Member Thompson, and
Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to
appear before this committee. I am the deputy director of
Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
Prior to joining the program, I spent over 3 years in the
National Counterterrorism Center as a staffer leading the
countering violent extremism efforts. With my colleagues in
three other departments, we held dozens of engagement events
around the country and worked with community partners on
preventing individuals from joining groups like ISIS. My
testimony today is informed by these personal experiences on
the forefront of this new policy challenge.
Countering violent extremism is an inherently amorphous
term. The effort is fraught with civil rights and civil liberty
concerns. Yet CVE, if properly implemented, can help sway young
people from radicalizing, therefore saving lives and enabling
law enforcement to concentrate on those who made the leap to
violent militancy. On the other hand, if improperly
implemented, CVE can have an adverse effect on building
communities of trust around the country. It is a delicate
exercise but one that I believe the Government and communities
have a moral responsibility to attempt.
It is undeniable that there has been a rise in the number
of ISIS-related arrests this year. Even more disturbing, a
number of those arrests included minors. I have interviewed
some of those who have been charged. I have talked with the
families of missing children. I have met with religious leaders
and civic leaders around this country. The status quo of doing
nothing with radicalized individuals or putting them away for
25 years is untenable. We need a new approach. It is incumbent
on us to provide those concerned about their loved ones a
middle way. Properly implemented CVE programs could provide
that alternative while also alleviating law enforcement's
burden.
Over the last decade, governments throughout the world have
invested substantial resources to devise CVE programs. The U.S.
Government has lagged behind in creating a comprehensive CVE
approach. Instead, they focused on one-up events and isolated
programs. Though the United States has a domestic CVE strategy,
its efforts are disjointed and underfunded.
In the last year, the administration has had a renewed
focus on CVE. Nonetheless, the strategy faces key challenges:
First, there is a lack of funding. Resources devoted to CVE
have been highly inadequate. CVE units within each agency are
woefully understaffed.
No. 2, there is a lack of a lead agency. There needs to be
a single point of responsibility and a point of contact for
coordination, for public advocacy groups to know who they can
talk to, and for Congress to have some oversight on it.
No. 3, there has been a singular focus on one form of
extremism. The recent terrorist attack in Charleston is a
painful reminder, if there ever was a need to be reminded, that
Islamist extremism is hardly the only form of extremism that
poses a threat. CVE has to be expanded to address other forms
of extremism.
No. 4, there has been a resistance from Muslim communities
on this issue. Successful CVE efforts need support from a broad
community cross-section. Some American Muslim civic groups
embrace CVE efforts, while others decry it as a surveillance
ruse or effort that singles out American Muslims. In addressing
these concerns, the U.S. Government would do well to listen to
not just only the most vocal voices, but also the grassroots
organizations.
CVE trends and various Europe countries where authorities
have implemented ambitious CVE strategies over the last decade
offers some useful pointers. What we are seeing is European
authorities are considering individual interventions as a
crucial part in their counterterrorism efforts as they are
relatively cost-effective and easier to evaluate.
Let me close with a general observation: There are violent
extremists, who should be arrested and put away for a
considerable amount of time. Our intelligence officers and law
enforcement should be commended for that work. But there is
also a subsection of individuals that are still persuadable
before arrest, that are still reachable before they cross that
legal threshold. CVE should never be about criminalizing
beliefs. Instead, it is, at its core, about protecting our
communities and safeguarding the vulnerable individuals who are
still reachable.
In the course of my career, I have had the opportunity to
talk to fathers, mothers, friends of young men and women who
have left this country to go to conflict zones. Professionally,
as a Government official, and personally, as a father, this was
an intense sense of sorrow and regret that I wasn't able to
help them before they got on that plane. Many of these kids are
barely old enough for a driver's license. They were reachable
before they crossed that legal threshold. We have a
responsibility to address this shortfall. We also have a
responsibility, and I would say a moral responsibility, to
prevent more families from going through that same tragedy.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I welcome any
questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hughes follows:]
Prepared Statement of Seamus Hughes
July 15, 2015
Chairman McCaul, Ranking Member Thompson, and Members of the
committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. I
am the deputy director of George Washington University's Program on
Extremism, a new academic initiative inside the university's Center for
Cyber and Homeland Security. Our mandate is to explore complex issues
such as terrorism, radicalization, and countering violent extremism
through a non-partisan and empirical approach.
Prior to joining the program, I spent over 3 years as a lead
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) staffer on countering violent
extremism issues. With my colleagues in three other departments, we
held dozens of engagement events around the country and worked with
community partners on preventing individuals from joining groups such
as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). My testimony today is
informed by these personal experiences on the forefront of this new
policy challenge.
Countering Violent Extremism, commonly referred to as CVE, is an
inherently amorphous term. It can be described as measures aimed at
preventing individuals from radicalizing and reversing the process of
those who have already radicalized. The effort is fraught with civil
rights and civil liberties concerns.
Yet CVE, if properly implemented, can help sway young people from
radicalizing, thereby saving lives and enabling law enforcement to
concentrate on those who have made the leap into violent militancy. On
the other hand, if improperly implemented, CVE can have an adverse
effect on building trust with communities. It is a delicate exercise
but one that I believe Government and communities have a moral
responsibility to attempt.
At least 200 U.S. persons have travelled or attempted to travel to
Syria to participate in the conflict. This year, nearly 50 were
arrested and charged with various terrorism-related offenses. Even more
disturbing, a number of those who have attempted to travel to Syria or
Iraq are minors. I interviewed some of those who have been charged,
talked with families of ``missing'' children, and met with religious
and civic leaders throughout this country. The status quo of either
doing nothing with radicalized individuals or locking them away for 25
years is untenable. It is incumbent on us to provide those concerned
about their loved ones a middle way. Properly implemented CVE programs
could provide that alternative while simultaneously alleviating the
burden of cases law enforcement has to address.
Over the last decade, governments throughout the world have
invested substantial resources in devising CVE strategies. The United
States has somewhat lagged behind in creating a comprehensive CVE
approach, instead focusing on a series of isolated programs and
episodic outreach efforts. Though the United States has a domestic CVE
strategy, its efforts are disjointed and underfunded. Several
overlapping reasons account for this deficiency, including:
the limited number of terrorism cases in the United States;
the confusion generated by the overlap of several agencies
dealing with radicalization-related issues in various
jurisdictions;
a National culture, reinforced by core constitutional values
protecting freedom of conscience, that does not believe law
enforcement should grapple with ideological and even indirectly
religiously-related issues.
The Boston Marathon bombing, and later the rise of ISIS, triggered
a renewed focus on CVE, culminating in the February 2015 high-profile
White House summit. Part of the revamped effort includes pilot programs
in three cities, each with a distinct approach: Minneapolis-St. Paul's
focused on societal-level concerns, Los Angeles' on community
engagement, and Boston's on interventions with radicalized individuals.
The administration's well-meaning CVE strategy faces key
challenges:
Lack of funding.--Resources devoted to CVE have been highly
inadequate, and CVE units within each relevant agency remain
understaffed.
Lack of lead agency.--Current CVE efforts appropriately
involve an array of agencies at the National and local levels.
Yet there needs to be a single responsible point of contact for
coordination, public advocacy matters, and Congressional
oversight.
A singular focus on one form of extremism.--The recent
terrorist attack in Charleston, South Carolina was a painful
reminder, if there was ever a need, that Islamist extremism is
hardly the only form of extremism that poses a threat. This
should not be an either/or proposition. CVE has to be expanded
to address other forms of extremism.
Resistance from Muslim communities.--Successful CVE efforts
need support from a broad community cross-section. Some
American Muslim civic groups embrace CVE efforts, while others
decry it as a surveillance ruse or an effort that singles out
American Muslims. In addressing these concerns, the U.S.
Government would do well to listen not just to the most vocal
voices but also grassroots organizations at the local level.
CVE trends in various European countries, where authorities have
implemented ambitious strategies for over a decade, offer useful
pointers to U.S. officials.\1\ European authorities consider individual
interventions a crucial part of their counterterrorism efforts, as they
are relatively cost-effective and easier to evaluate. For example, in
the Danish city of Aarhus an innovative program to rehabilitate dozens
of returning foreign fighters seems to have shown encouraging
preliminary successes, with only a few going back to militancy.
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\1\ Lorenzo Vidino and Seamus Hughes, Countering Violent Extremism
in America, June 16, 2015. Available at: https://cchs.gwu.edu/sites/
cchs.gwu.edu/files/downloads/CVE%20in%20- America%20.pdf.
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Because the radicalization process is complex and highly variable,
European de-radicalization efforts seek to tailor interventions to each
situation. This complicates efforts to develop broad National programs
with easily replicable best practices. It also requires investing time
to set up a network of community leaders with appropriate competencies.
The United States does not need to replicate Europe's most
ambitious CVE efforts, as it faces a significantly smaller
radicalization challenge. General preventive measures, particularly
those promoting socio-economic development, should be implemented only
in limited cases, as communities generally enjoy high levels of
integration. Engagement and other trust-building initiatives are useful
and should be continued. Officials increasingly see the importance of
expanding CVE's focus on community engagement to include targeted
interventions with individuals who have become radicalized but have not
mobilized to violence. Nonetheless, these targeted interventions so far
have been deployed at the whim of local authorities, rather than via an
articulated and tested methodology.
At this stage, the most pressing need is for the administration to
build a carefully crafted system for interventions as a potential
alternative to prosecution. Working with civil rights advocates and
experts in alternatives to incarceration, the Government should create
legal and policy guidance on minimum standards for intervention efforts
that address the specific roles of Government and communities, as well
as the legal parameters of interveners who currently place themselves
at risk of liability if interventions go awry. While interventions are
best implemented at the local level, they require a high-level
framework and clear guidance from Federal officials.
Let me close with a general observation. There are violent
extremists who should be arrested and put away for a considerable time.
Our intelligence and law enforcement community does a great job at that
and should be commended for it. But there is also a subset of
individuals that are still persuadable and who can be reached before
they make a choice that will irrevocably alter the Government's ability
to take any action other than arrest.
CVE should never be about criminalizing beliefs. Instead, it is, at
its core, about protecting our communities and safeguarding vulnerable
individuals who are still reachable. In the course of my career, I have
had the opportunity to talk with the fathers, mothers, and friends of
young men and women who left this country to go to conflict zones.
Professionally, as a Government official, and personally, as a father,
there was an intense sense of both sorrow and regret that we couldn't
reach those kids--many of them barely old enough for a driver's
license--before they got on the plane. We need to address this
shortfall in our counterterrorism approach. We have a responsibility to
prevent more families from going through the same tragedy.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. I
welcome any questions.
Chairman McCaul. Thank you, Mr. Hughes.
The Chair recognizes Mr. Cohen.
STATEMENT OF J. RICHARD COHEN, PRESIDENT, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW
CENTER
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. September 11 was the
Pearl Harbor of our time. The devastating attacks led to the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security and focused the
Nation's attention on the threat of Islamic extremism. Yet,
because the horror of 9/11, the focus on other threats was put
aside. Let me give the committee an example. After the Oklahoma
City bombing, Attorney General Reno formed a special task force
to coordinate the country's response to the threat of domestic
terrorism. The task force was scheduled to hold one of its
monthly meetings on 9/11. Of course, it didn't for obvious
reasons. The problem wasn't that the task force didn't meet
that day. The problem was that it simply stopped meeting
altogether as the country's focus shifted to the threat of
Islamic extremism. At the same time, though, a different kind
of threat, the threat from the radical right, was growing. My
colleagues and I have documented a tremendous increase in the
time since 9/11 on the number of white supremacist and other
hate groups operating in our country. During this same period,
there was also a marked increase in radical right violence.
After President Obama was first elected, we detected
another alarming trend, a tremendous increase in the number of
conspiracy-minded radical anti-Government groups, the same kind
of groups that were prevalent during the period of the Oklahoma
City bombing and the same kind of groups that have killed a
number of law enforcement officials since 9/11. In the years
before President Obama's election, DHS maintained a modest
commitment to monitoring non-Islamic domestic extremism, but
that commitment waned after a controversy erupted over a report
that the Department issued in 2009. As the Washington Post
reported, DHS cut the number of personnel studying domestic
extremism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous State and local
law enforcement briefings, and held up nearly a dozen reports
on its extremist groups in the wake of the controversy. In the
last 2 years, I would like to point out, we have actually seen
a decrease in the number of anti-Government and hate groups
operating in the country.
But this decrease has not been matched by a decrease in the
level of radical right activity. We have seen, instead, an
increase in the number of persons associated with white
supremacist activity and an uptick in the level of violence. In
the last 5 years, for example, the number of registered users
on Stormfront, the leading neo-Nazi forum, has increased by
over 50 percent to over 300,000. I am not talking about 300,000
visitors. I am talking about 300,000 people who have registered
to spew their venom on-line. Other white supremacist websites
have also seen increases.
These sites are echo chambers where people, like Dylann
Roof, the confessed Charleston shooter, have their racist views
validated and encouraged. We issued a report last year that
documented that Stormfront users had killed numerous people in
the previous 5 years. Glenn Frazier Cross, a frequent poster on
another racist website, killed 3 people last year at Jewish
facilities in Overland Park, Kansas. We knew Cross well. His
followers once plotted to blow up our building. His killings in
Overland Park, Kansas, led the Justice Department to revive the
task force that had originally been established after the
Oklahoma City bombing.
We have also seen in the last year increased interests from
DHS in the threat of non-Islamic extremism. At the same time,
we have seen indications that it is still on the back burner.
As the Charleston massacre, of course, makes clear, that threat
is very real. As Mr. Thompson indicated, a recent survey
documented that law enforcement agencies consider anti-
Government extremists the most severe threat that they face,
and as has been widely reported, more persons have been killed
since 9/11 by radical right terrorists than by Islamic
extremists.
I don't want to make too much, though, of these last
points. Many law enforcement officers have been killed in
recent years by radical right fanatics, so it is not surprising
that law enforcement community itself is very much on edge. If
we started the count of deaths the day before 9/11 rather than
the day after, the figures would tell us an entirely different
story. We need not contend that the threat of non-Islamic
terrorism is comparable to the kind of threat that brought down
the Twin Towers to make the point that it is a serious threat
that deserves the full measure of the Government's attention.
The Charleston shootings make that point for us. I would urge
the committee to ensure that the fight against Islamic
extremism does not take the Government's attention away from
other threats that endanger our great country.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cohen follows:]
Prepared Statement of J. Richard Cohen
July 15, 2015
My name is Richard Cohen. I am an attorney and the president of the
Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization founded in
1971 and headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama. For more than three
decades, we have been monitoring, issuing reports about, and training
law enforcement officials on far-right extremist activity in the United
States.\1\ Because of that work, I was invited in 2010 to serve on the
Department of Homeland Security's Countering Violent Extremism Working
Group. I am honored to appear before the committee today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ We publish our investigative findings on-line and in the
Intelligence Report, a journal distributed to more than 50,000 law
enforcement officers; we maintain an extensive database, conduct an
annual census of hate and anti-Government groups, and assist law
enforcement officials by providing information about these groups'
activities; and, each year we train thousands of officers, including
many who work for Federal agencies, on the dangers of domestic
terrorism and hate crimes. We also have won a number of multi-million-
dollar court verdicts on behalf of victims of violence committed by
hate group members. These suits have financially crippled some of the
country's most notorious white supremacist groups, including Klan
networks that terrorized the African-American community during and
after the civil rights movement.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In my testimony, I'd like to make two basic points. First, as the
killings at Charleston's ``Mother Emanuel'' AME Church vividly
illustrate, the threat of radical-right terrorism in our country is a
serious one. Second, it is critical that the Federal Government devote
sufficient attention to countering that threat and not allow its
resources to be inappropriately skewed toward the fight against
terrorism from Islamic extremists.
the threat of non-islamic domestic terrorism is extremely serious
In the first few years of the 21st Century, we began to detect a
significant increase in radical-right activity in the United States.
The number of hate groups--organizations that vilify entire groups of
people based on their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or
some other characteristic--nearly doubled during a 10-year span--from
457 in 1999 to 926 in 2008. This growth continued during the first 2
years of the Obama administration, to a record 1,018 groups in 2011. In
our view, the most important factor driving this increase was a
backlash to our country's changing demographics. For many on the
radical right, President Obama's election symbolized the kind of
``change'' they fear.
Although the growth in the number of hate groups began before
President Obama took office, his election did coincide with another
phenomenon: The dramatic resurgence of a far-right movement that
includes armed militias and other organizations that view the Federal
Government as their enemy and generally believe that U.S. political and
economic elites are part of international conspiracy aimed at creating
a one-world, totalitarian government. Originally rooted in the racist
ideology that animated Posse Comitatus in the 1970s, the anti-
Government ``Patriot'' movement first appeared in its current form
during the 1990s in response to Federal gun control measures and the
incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco. It saw a steep decline in activity in
the years following the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building
by movement sympathizer Timothy McVeigh and remained largely moribund
until the election of President Obama. In 2008, we documented 149
groups. By 2012, there were 1,360--an increase of more than 800
percent.
The surge in radical-right group activity peaked during the 2011-
2012 period. Since then, we have seen a significant decline in the
number of both hate groups (now at 784) as well as anti-Government
``Patriot'' groups (now at 874). Several political and economic factors
account for this decline: A strengthening economy, crackdowns by law
enforcement and the accelerated movement of radicals out of groups and
into cyber space. Also, movements naturally tend to lose momentum over
time; in addition, President Obama's reelection may have had a
demoralizing effect on the radical right.
Despite this drop in the number of radical-right organizations,
white supremacist activity has not declined. Much of it, in fact, has
simply migrated to the internet, where extremists can disseminate and
absorb propaganda, and connect with other extremists in relative
anonymity. Since the year President Obama was inaugurated, for example,
the number of people registered on Stormfront, perhaps the most
important neo-Nazi web forum, has doubled--to 300,000. About two-thirds
of the site's registered users are from this country.
Violence committed by non-Islamic domestic extremists also has
continued at alarming levels. A July 2014 intelligence assessment by
the DHS warned of a ``spike within the past year in violence committed
by militia extremists and lone offenders who hold violent anti-
government beliefs.''\2\ In February 2015, the DHS released a report
warning of attacks by ``sovereign citizens''--extremists who do not
recognize the authority of the Government--citing 24 acts of ideology-
based violence, threats, or plots (mostly against law enforcement
targets) since 2010.\3\ The data we've collected reflects an uptick in
racist crimes and terrorist plots in recent years.\4\ The backdrop to
this increase is important. A 2013 study by West Point's Combating
Terrorism Center found that right-wing violence in the 2000-2011 period
surpassed that of the 1990s by a factor of four.\5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Domestic Violent Extremists Pose Increased Threat to Government
Officials and Law Enforcement, Office of Intelligence and Analysis,
Department of Homeland Security, July 22, 2014.
\3\ Sovereign Citizen Extremist Ideology Will Drive Violence at
Home, During Travel, and at Government Facilities, Office of
Intelligence and Analysis, Department of Homeland Security, Feb. 5,
2015.
\4\ Terror from the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages
since Oklahoma City, Southern Poverty Law Center, at http://
www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/terror-from-the-right.
\5\ Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America's Violent
Far-Right, Arie Perliger, Combating Terrorism Center, Jan. 15, 2013.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In some ways, the suspect in the Charleston massacre, Dylann Roof,
represents the new face of domestic terrorism: The extremist who acts
alone after being radicalized and inspired on-line by an extremist
ideology. The Charleston attack came 14 months after a neo-Nazi and
former Klan leader named Frazier Glenn Cross (also known as Frazier
Glenn Miller) murdered three people at a community center and a
retirement facility, both with Jewish affiliations, in Overland Park,
Kansas. It came nearly 3 years after another white supremacist, Wade
Michael Page, walked into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin near Milwaukee
and opened fire with a 9 mm pistol, killing six worshipers, including
the temple's president and three priests, and wounding four other
people. The wounded included the first police officer to respond; he
was shot multiple times.
In each case, the attacker was an avowed white supremacist. And in
each case, the shooter targeted members of a minority group (though in
Kansas, the victims were not actually Jewish). But, unlike the
attackers in Wisconsin and Kansas, Roof apparently had not been a
member of a racist hate group. From what we now know, he had only
recently been radicalized and indoctrinated into the world of white
nationalism. And his radicalization, according to a manifesto published
on a website registered to him and that authorities believe he wrote,
occurred on-line.
Roof left many clues about his motivations and the process that led
him to commit an act of terror. He was seen in a Facebook photo wearing
a jacket adorned with patches representing the flags of former regimes
in South Africa and Rhodesia that brutally enforced white minority
rule. In his approximately 2,400-word manifesto, he described becoming
``racially aware'' in the echo chamber of white supremacist websites
following the controversy over the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012. On
the site of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, he found
``pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.'' He ``saw
the same things happening in England and France, and in all the other
Western European countries,'' then ``found out about the Jewish
problem.'' Roof wrote further that ``by no means should we wait any
longer to take drastic action.'' As he was murdering his victims, Roof
told them that black people were ``taking over our country'' and
``rap[ing] our women.''
Roof's words and the symbols he used are instructive. They show
that he was thoroughly indoctrinated into a transnational white
nationalist movement that is emerging as the world grows more connected
by technology. The days are gone when white supremacists fought to
maintain Jim Crow segregation or white hegemony in the South.\6\ Today,
they promote a narrative of an on-going ``white genocide''--the idea
that white people are being displaced by people of color across the
globe. This message has been distilled into what is known in white
nationalist circles as ``the mantra,'' a 221-word attack on
multiculturalism that reads in part: ``Anti-racist is a code word for
anti-white.'' Its author, Robert Whitaker of Columbia, South Carolina,
is now the 2016 vice presidential candidate for the white nationalist
American Freedom Party.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ ``White Supremacists Without Borders,'' Morris Dees and J.
Richard Cohen, The New York Times, June 22, 2015, http://
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/opinion/white-supremacists-without-
borders.html?_r=0.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Behring Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people in 2011 because
he thought they were enabling Muslim immigration, expressed sentiments
remarkably similar to those encapsulated by the white nationalist
mantra and cited by Roof. Breivik was also, at one time, a registered
user of Stormfront. Our 2014 report on Stormfront--which provides a
window into the on-line radicalization process--showed that its users
have committed nearly 100 murders, including Breivik's, since 2009.\7\
Almost all of the killers had regularly posted comments on Stormfront
and other racist sites in the 18 months prior to their attacks. The
forum appears to have helped nurture and rationalize their racial
hatred.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ White Homicide Worldwide, Southern Poverty Law Center, April
16, 2014, at http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/White-
Homicide-Worldwide.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stormfront is merely one example of web forums that promote racial
hatred. Frazier Glenn Cross regularly posted comments on Vanguard News
Network, a neo-Nazi forum with the slogan ``No Jews. Just Right.''
Racist and anti-Semitic threads can be found on many other sites,
including mainstream forums like Reddit, which now has a community of
crudely anti-black sites known as ``the Chimpire.'' In addition, hate
music used to recruit young people can be purchased from even some of
the largest on-line music retailers, though several--including iTunes
and Spotify--have taken steps in recent months to remove such music, at
our urging.
As further evidence of this globalization of white nationalism, we
have documented more than 30 instances in the past 2 years of movement
leaders traveling abroad to strengthen their international ties. After
one such trip to England and France, Jared Taylor of American
Renaissance, a group that publishes material purporting to show the
inferiority of black people, wrote that: ``The fight in Europe is
exactly the same as ours.''\8\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ American Renaissance website, at http://www.amren.com/features/
2013/04/report-from-france-and-britain/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This message is used to recruit and radicalize young men like Roof,
who absorb propaganda on-line and then may act alone or in small
groups. Earlier this year, we issued a study--The Age of the Wolf--
finding that 46 of 63 domestic terror incidents (74%) culled from
academic databases and the SPLC's own files over the previous 6 years
were the work of a ``lone wolf,'' a single person. Ninety percent were
the work of no more than 2 people. These are the kinds of attacks that
are the most difficult for law enforcement to detect in advance and the
most likely to succeed. Our report also found that a domestic terrorism
incident, either an attack or foiled plot, occurred on average every 34
days during the period examined, from 2009 to 2014.\9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ The Age of the Wolf, Southern Poverty Law Center, Feb. 12,
2015, at http://www.splcenter.org/lone-wolf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
government must ensure resources devoted to non-islamic domestic
terrorism are commensurate with the threat
After the deadly Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, then-
Attorney General Reno formed a special task force to coordinate the
country's response to the threat of domestic terrorism. The task force
was scheduled to hold one of its monthly meetings on September 11,
2001, but did not do so for obvious reasons. But the task force did not
miss just one meeting. As the country's focus shifted to the new and
devastating threat of Islamic terrorism, the task force did not meet
again for 13 years. Only after Miller killed three people at Jewish
facilities in Overland Park, Kansas, in April 2014 and public pressure
mounted did the Justice Department reestablish the task force.
The shift in focus to the threat of terrorism from Islamic
extremists in the aftermath in 9/11 was not surprising. That event was
the Pearl Harbor of our time. It led to the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security, over which this committee exercises oversight, as
well as to our country's involvement in 2 wars. But as the history of
the Justice Department's task force reflects, the pendulum swung too
far in the direction of Islamic terrorism, at the expense of other
threats, after 9/11.
The shadow of 9/11 has not been the only factor leading to a
reduction in the resources and attention paid to non-Islamic terrorism
in our country. Partisan politics also appear to have played a role. In
April 2009, DHS released an Unclassified intelligence assessment to law
enforcement officials entitled Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic
and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and
Recruitment.\10\ Yet, despite the report's accuracy, then-DHS Secretary
Janet Napolitano withdrew it following an outcry by those who claimed,
falsely, that the report tarred conservatives as potential domestic
terrorists. More significantly, the DHS unit responsible for the report
was allowed to wither. In the wake of the controversy over the report,
the Washington Post reported that DHS ``cut the number of personnel
studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous State
and local law enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of
nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups.''\11\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ PDF on Southern Poverty Law Center website, at http://
www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/resource/
DOJ_rwextremism2009.pdf.
\11\ ``Homeland Security Department curtails home-grown terror
analysis,'' Washington Post, June 7, 2011, at http://
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/homeland-security-department-curtails-
home-grown-terror-analysis/2011/06/02/AGQEaDLH_story.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Daryl Johnson, the former DHS senior domestic terrorism analyst who
was the principal author of the 2009 DHS report, wrote on The New York
Times website on June 24, 2015, that ``through reckless neglect at
nearly all levels of government, domestic terrorism not tied to Islam
has become a cancer with no diagnosis or plan to address it.'' There
are, he wrote, hundreds of Government analysts looking for Islamist
threats but ``mere dozens'' monitoring non-Islamic threats.\12\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ ``For Domestic Hate, Apply the Vigor and Strategy Used for
Muslim Terror,'' Daryl Johnson, The New York Times, June 24, 2015, at
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/24/charleston-and-the-
threat-of-homegrown-hate-groups/for-domestic-hate-apply-the-vigor-and-
strategy-used-for-muslim-terror.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the last 18 months, my colleagues and I have seen renewed
attention to the threat of non-Islamic terrorism at both the Justice
Department and DHS. Still, there are indications that radical-right
terrorism continues to take a back seat to Islamic terrorism. In
February, for example, when President Obama addressed the White House
Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, which I attended, the first
terrorist incident he mentioned was the Oklahoma City bombing. But the
discussion at the summit itself focused almost exclusively on the
threat of Islamic terrorism. In this committee's Terror Threat Snapshot
released on July 2, 2015--2 weeks after the Charleston massacre--there
was no mention of the threat of terror from the radical right.\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\13\ http://homeland.house.gov/sites/homeland.house.gov/files/
documents/July%20Terror%- 20Threat%20Snapshot%20_0.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As I indicated in the previous section, however, the threat from
the radical right is very real. In fact, in a study released in June
2015, the Triangle Center for Terrorism and Homeland Security found
that ``law enforcement agencies in the United States consider anti-
government violent extremists, not radicalized Muslims, to be the most
severe threat of political violence that they face.''\14\ And,
according to a widely-cited report by the New America Foundation, far
more people have been killed in this country since 9/11 by right-wing
terrorists than by Islamic extremists.\15\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\14\ ``Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism
Threat,'' Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer, Triangle Center for
Terrorism and Homeland Security, June 25, 2015, at http://
sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/
Kurzman_Schanzer_Law_enforcement_Assess-
ment_of_the_Violent_Extremist_Threat_final.pdf.
\15\ http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/analysis.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, had the New America Foundation report started its count
of deadly attacks a day earlier, the figures would be much different.
Just as it would be a mistake to discount the threat of radical-right
terrorism, so it would be a terrible mistake to minimize the threat of
terrorism from Islamic extremists in any way. As a country, we have
made that mistake before. What is required--what is critical--is that
we take all forms of terrorism seriously and that we never allow
anything to skew the resources that we devote to fighting that which
threatens our great country.
Thank you.
Chairman McCaul. Thank you, Mr. Cohen.
The Chair now recognizes himself for questions.
I want to read a couple of quotes from some key
administration officials. President Obama said: We have to
confront the warped ideologies espoused by terrorists like al-
Qaeda and ISIS, especially their attempt to use Islam to
justify their violence.
James Comey, just recently said: I have home-grown violent
extremist investigations in every single State, and the terror
threat has metastasized.
Just recently Jeh Johnson testified this week and said in
response to questions: My priority has been focusing on the
communities that I believe are most vulnerable, at least some
members of the community, to appeals from ISIS, al-Qaeda, and
other terrorist groups overseas who are actively targeting
individuals in these communities. They can strike at any
moment. We are definitely in a new environment because ISIS is
effective using social media and the internet to inspire others
and possibly reach into the homeland.
Eric Holder said: Horrific terrorist instances, like the
tragic shootings at Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon bombing,
demonstrate the dangers we face from the home-grown threats.
The threat is real. The threat is different. The threat is
constant.
As I have said in my opening statement, we spend billions
of dollars on trying to prevent and--trying to disrupt these
threats, billions to try to stop them, but very little on
prevention.
I heard the testimony from Ms. Pandith and Mr. Hughes that
you would support putting more attention, more resources, more
focus on combating and countering violent extremism. So I want
to ask each of the witnesses, do you agree that the
administration needs to do more? My bill basically just
formalizes, streamlines, and make it a priority within the
Department, both international and domestic.
So let me go with each of the witnesses. Do you agree that
the administration should make combating violent extremism a
higher priority?
Ms. Pandith.
Ms. Pandith. Thank you, sir. Well, I would say a couple of
things. One is, from my perspective, this line that we are
drawing between domestic and international around the issues
specifically related to an AQ or an ISIL or an al-Shabaab,
those kinds of extremists, in what I have seen because we are
dealing with digital natives, because we are dealing with
millennials, this isn't about what is happening in Ohio versus
what is happening in Norway. This generation is connected to
each other. So that is one thing I definitely wanted to say as
we think about this.
It leads to the second piece of this. What is the money
that we need? How do we think about this? What we absolutely
know in the preventive space--and Seamus has talked a little
bit about this--in terms of the communities themselves, is that
it cannot come from the top down. The thing that actually work
organically are from the ground up. But where the Government
can make a difference is to be the convenor and the facilitator
and the intellectual partner with ideas that we hear on the
ground.
What does that mean in terms of resources? It means that we
have proto-tested this. We have seen that this works. Small
seed grants from Government can work if we are not putting the
American flag over everything, if we find partners on the
ground. Frankly, the pools of money that we have both at the
Department of State, and I would say probably DHS as well, are
not large enough to be able to give that innovation on the
ground.
The best ideas to fight this, sir, are not from the U.S.
Government. They come from millennials themselves that know
what needs to be done. So on the first part of funding, we need
that kind of--we need that kind of money. The second in the
terms of resources is people. You said it yourself, sir. We
don't have enough people thinking about this all day every day
and resourced in ways that aren't just, you know, the most
significant title out there.
I am talking about specific people in embassies around the
world that are thinking about this, are interfacing with the
grassroots, as well as people within the Department of State in
the regional bureaus that are looking at this. Right now,
everybody has a spliced set of things that they are working on,
so no one can think about it fully. So long way of answering
your question, yes, we do need to do more on the funding side,
both in terms of the money and in terms of the actual
personnel.
Chairman McCaul. Yes. Thanks to the great work of Mr.
Katko, the grants are in this legislation. I think you are
absolutely right. When I was a Federal prosecutor, walking into
the Muslim community with the FBI had a chilling effect. I
don't think that is the best outreach. So I completely agree
with your statement.
Mr. Hughes.
Mr. Hughes. Farah had a very good point on the
international side. Let me touch a little bit on the domestic
side. So, in 2011, the administration released their CVE
strategy preventing violent extremism in the United States. At
that point, they argued that you should use existing resources
to address this issue. But I think I would argue that the
threat has changed from the last 4 years. I think that you need
to--if you are going to be serious about CVE, you need to put
serious money behind it. I think more Americans have died in
Syria and Iraq fighting for groups like ISIS and al-Nusrah than
have been tasked by this administration to work on CVE issues.
I think that is unacceptable. I think that needs to be shifted
a little bit.
I think CVE budget is woefully inadequate to address this
issue. I don't think it is fair to ask two people at the
Department of Justice to coordinate 94 U.S. attorney's offices
on a National strategy.
Chairman McCaul. That is well put.
Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Cohen. Mr. Chairman, I don't have any doubt that the
Government's efforts to combat extremism are inadequate, no
doubt. The question is, how ought they to be deployed? In terms
of the bill that I know that the Chair has offered and
considered, I am a little bit reluctant to offer an opinion, of
course, on how DHS ought to be organized.
I want to hear on the first instance, as Mr. Thompson
indicated, what they think. I also share the concerns that Mr.
Hughes and others have expressed about the civil liberty
implications of it. I am also a bit skeptical about the ability
of the Government to craft credible messages that will persuade
people not to become radicalized. I think that is a job, of
course, for our churches, a job for our schools, a job, really,
for everyone. I think it is important that the Government
coordinate the gathering of intelligence. I think it is
important that the Government be involved in training efforts
at the State and local levels to help State and local law
enforcement officials protect themselves and protect the public
from extremism.
Chairman McCaul. We definitely need a counternarrative. I
haven't seen a counternarrative come out. Whether it is--it has
to be led from somebody. I think the administration needs to
make this a priority and have a counternarrative to this
propaganda out there, and of course, coming at a grassroots
level would be ideal. Coming from within the communities
themselves would be most effective, led by the efforts within
the administration.
So, with that, the Chair now recognizes the Ranking Member.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Again, I think it is unfortunate that we don't have anybody
from the administration here to give its side on this issue and
impending legislation. I think it is important for us to hear
what they are doing, but it is also important for us to hear
what they think should be doing. So I hope, at some point, we
can get the Department here to say something.
I invited the Department personally on July 9 to be my
witness before this committee. Obviously, I have not heard from
them up to this point.
So one of the issues that I am concerned about is strategy.
If we are going to create a department, what is our strategy?
What matrix are we going to use to evaluate the strategy?
Whether or not we are tying that to some risk. I think while
the issues associated with the Muslim community is just one set
of risk in this narrative, I think we need to have a broader
message so that if, in fact, the risk analysis says that there
is a growing domestic terrorism threat in this country from the
right wing, then that department should be nimble enough to go
in that direction.
I think, Mr. Chairman, the reason I asked for the hearing
is that I have seen the evolution of Garland, Texas, and
Charleston, South Carolina, and other places, that I am really
concerned about. I just want us to do it right. I don't want us
just to set another bureaucracy up and give some money. Let's
put some matrix there. Let's put some strategy there, and let's
hear from the Department. You know, I think we really ought to
have the Department. But since they are not here--and I will
ask this to all three of our witnesses: Does it make sense for
us to look at strategy for this Department as well as a matrix
to evaluate how good we are doing as well as tying risks to
whatever harm that might happen here on the homeland?
Ms. Pandith. Well, I think in terms of the strategy
question, sir, one of the things I would say is that,
obviously, we do need a strategy that is integrated. As I said
in my both written and verbal statement, that for me, as I look
at what we have seen and how you can succeed, you used the word
``nimble,'' and it is a great word to use because you need that
kind of flexibility because not one size fits all in what is
happening in terms of counternarratives, in terms of what you
do to prevent no matter what kind of extremism we are talking
about.
I do want to say something about the point you raised in
terms of other things that are happening in our country. What
we know about people who get radicalized is that nothing
happens in a vacuum. So, for example, in Europe, when you are
seeing the increase of anti-Semitism that is happening all
across Europe, it absolutely plays in. That is what I meant by
the ecosystem in terms of what the narratives are and how they
grow. Similarly, in our country, all of this is connected. What
happens here in America, how we speak, the rhetoric, the
lexicon that we use, feeds into different communities. So as we
think about a strategy, coming from the grassroots, as we think
about being nimble, we need to understand that there has to be
flexibility, that things are connected. So it is important that
we are not just looking at groups like ISIS and what the
aftermath is but, actually, the connectivity across different
kinds of extremist groups because, indeed, they are learning
from each other, and there is a lot of evidence to that as
well.
So if you are asking do we need a strategy, yes, sir, we
need a very strong and very nimble strategy. But to go back to
what we were saying earlier, you have to prioritize this, not
just in Government but to the American people, that there is a
change that is happening in our country, and we need to do more
to stem the radicalization that is taking place.
Mr. Thompson. Mr. Hughes.
Mr. Hughes. Thank you, Mr. Thompson.
I argued there was a strategy released by the
administration in 2011 called Empowering Local Partners to
Prevent Violent Extremism, and then they have shifted in recent
years to do essentially pilot programs in three cities--Boston,
Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. So I think they are trying to
figure out this kind of broad-based strategy, and I think it is
important to have an overarching objective to how you want to
do this. But I don't think time is necessarily on our side. I
think we have seen, you know, 60 people arrested in the last 6
months just for ISIS. You look at domestic terrorism, you know,
sovereign citizen threat is real. The Dylann Roofs of the world
are concerning.
I don't think that we can wait for--as a former Government
person understanding how bureaucrats work--for a strategy we
coordinated through 10 different departments and released. I
think you can do in dual-track. You can have a strategy at the
same time you are also trying to work your way through these
issues because they are complex issues.
On the question of effectiveness and radicalization
factors, humans are complex. There is not a--radicalization
isn't a linear process. It isn't a step-by-step thing. You
know, if you do this, then you become this and this and this.
It is just not that way. I wish it was as a policy maker
because it would make life easier. But these are complex
issues, and we need to be willing to adjust. Your point about
nimbleness is important.
Mr. Cohen. Just a few things that I would add. First, I
think the critical fact is--the critical issue is exactly as
you have identified it, Mr. Thompson, and that is the
allocation of resources across the different threat of--threats
that we face. I think too often we have swung one way or the
other in response to the latest news. I think it is important
that we, as a country, not do that. We have an unfortunate
history of doing that in this context.
The other point I would make to elaborate on something that
Ms. Pandith said is that not only do we need to take the threat
of non-jihadi or non-Islamic extremism as seriously, we need to
recognize that the two are connected. If you look at the
history of the Boston bombers, for example, they were
tremendous consumers of conspiracy theories promoted by right-
wing groups, the idea, for example, that 9/11 was an inside
job. So I think that it is important not just to address both
kinds of threats but to understand the degree to which they are
integrated.
The other thing I would mention is that, you know, I know,
Mr. Thompson, you mentioned that there are a lot of users on
the Stormfront, the leading neo-Nazi website from foreign
countries, it is also the case, that you know, the white
nationalist movement is not really like the Klan, ``Let's
return to Jim Crow.'' It is really a world-wide, you know,
ethnic or white nationalism conference or phenomenon. At the
time of the Charleston shootings, three of my colleagues were
in Budapest at an international conference on white
nationalism. What is happening in this country on the--on the
domestic terrorism front is very similar to what is happening
throughout Western Europe and Greece.
Mr. Thompson. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. Thank you, Ranking Member.
I just would like to state for the record, the committee
did hear from the director of the CVE program at DHS last week
in a Classified setting. The Minority did invite him to
testify, and, unfortunately, the Department did decline.
I did talk to the Secretary about our efforts and this
legislation. He was supportive. You know, and I think, Mr.
Hughes, your point is well taken. Time is not on our side. We
can't wait to just come up with a study here. We need to move
forward. Time is not on our side, and we don't create a
bureaucracy. We form one, streamline, and make it a priority.
With that, the Chair now recognizes----
Mr. Thompson. Will the gentleman yield?
Chairman McCaul. Of course.
Mr. Thompson. You know, I was at that same Classified
hearing, and, obviously, we heard two different things. So, you
know, I beg to differ.
Now, I talked to the Secretary, and he told me that he had
not seen the legislation. Now, I sent him the draft that we
had. Now, I don't know if the final draft has gone to him, but
at the time I spoke with him, he had not seen it. So I just
hope that has been worked out.
Chairman McCaul. Well, you know, we have been working with
the Department on this legislation. As I mentioned, they are
supportive of making it a priority. I think--I don't understand
how anybody in this room cannot be supportive of making
countering violent extremism a priority.
The Chair now recognizes----
Mr. Richmond. Mr. Chairman, I just want to--just trying to
clarify something. You said that they are supportive, and I try
to be as helpful to the administration as I can. So I am trying
to say, are they supporting this legislation, or are they
supportive of the idea?
Chairman McCaul. Well, that is a fair question. He says he
is generally supportive.
Mr. Richmond. Okay.
Chairman McCaul. In that sense and particularly, making it
a priority.
Ms. Sanchez. Supportive of this legislation or supportive
of----
Chairman McCaul. He said he is generally supportive of our
efforts in this legislation.
Ms. Sanchez. In this piece of legislation?
Chairman McCaul. Which we have conferred with the
administration on.
The Chair recognizes Mr. King.
Mr. King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I thank all the witnesses for their testimony.
I would like to discuss directly with Mr. Cohen. I know you
and I can have differences which can go on forever. But I would
like to try to maybe reach some common ground here today if I
would.
First of all, I want to thank you for putting the numbers
in context. If you had gone back to prior to 9/11, there would
be no comparison in the numbers. But also I think we are
leaving out the fact that, for instance, in 2009, there was a
subway attack reported by Islamic radicals against New York
City, which would have probably resulted in another 400 or 500
people being killed. That was the subway bombing. Just in the
last several months, there have been two major raids I am aware
of where explosives were taken in New York from Islamic
radicals which could have resulted in the deaths of hundreds
more. So if we are getting into numbers, I think it is really
important to keep a context there.
Also, when you say that twice as many police officers are
twice as concerned about domestic terrorists as they are about
Islamist terrorists, again, I don't think you will find that in
New York City, or Boston, or Los Angeles. In New York City
alone, there is 1,000 police officers every day focused on
terrorism. Over the Fourth of July, there was 7,000 police
officers assigned to threats. Again, I know what Commissioner
Bratton did also in Los Angeles and what Commissioner Davis has
done in Boston.
Now, having said that, what you are talking about,
obviously, domestic threats are real. My concern on this and
how we balance this, is the Department of Homeland Security was
set up after
9/11 because of the Islamist threats. That is I think the
overriding threat as far as numbers, as far as the fact there
is internationally directed; it is both overseas, and it is
here. Not to minimize any other attacks that are carried out by
any other group. So if we do shift emphasis or add an emphasis
to white supremacist, the Klan, American Nazi Party, any of
these horrible murdering groups, do we, in doing that, by
shifting any emphasis at all away from Islamic radicalism,
aren't we putting the country more at risk? Should we have more
money allocated for what you are talking about?
I am not opposed to focusing the way you want to, but I
don't want in any way to be shifting away the emphasis from
Islamic terrorism, which is real. Now, the Chairman said that
Islamist terrorism is just one set of risks. I don't think
there is an equivalency. Again, we are talking about possible
nuclear attacks. We are talking about ISIS. We are talking
about al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula. We can go
Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and the fact that there is, I think,
the Chairman has said, over 200,000 social media hits every day
coming.
So let me ask you, and I am really giving you the
opportunity, which I never thought I would be doing, but giving
you the opportunity as to how we would balance this by not in
any way shifting away from the real threat of Islamic
terrorism, which is why the Department of Homeland Security was
created, and how we then give extra emphasis to the very real
concern that you have.
Mr. Cohen, this is something that I maybe regret doing, but
I will give you the opportunity.
Mr. Cohen. Well, thank you. First, you and I have always
been on the same side. We may have had a slightly different
perspective. So I appreciate--it is good to see you again. I
have tried to be very careful in my use of the figures. I think
that you are right. If we count--if we start the day before 9/
11, we have a different story. I tried to acknowledge that
point.
I would also point out that there have been a number of
plots that have been fortunately broken up by the FBI on
white--by white supremacists that would have resulted in the
deaths of thousands of people, plots, for example, to spread
ricin, plots to poison water supplies. So I don't--I know
neither you nor I want to minimize that threat. I hope there is
a--or maybe there is an assumption underlying your question to
me, and that is that we are in a zero-sum game. That we can't
focus on one unless--we can't add resources in one direction
unless we take them from another. I am not sure--well, that's
not an assumption that I would necessarily make. That is your
assumption.
Mr. King. No, no. That is why I am giving you the
opportunity. I say, how do we do it? I am asking you.
Mr. Cohen. You are asking me what? I am sorry.
Mr. King. What I am saying is that I would not be opposed
to adding extra resources to the threats you are concerned
about----
Mr. Cohen. I second that.
Mr. King [continuing]. No way should we be minimizing. In
fact, we should probably even be increasing the threat of
Islamic--countering the threat of Islamic terrorism. That is
all I am saying.
Mr. Cohen. Yeah. No. I understand. I don't think I disagree
kind-of with that in principle. I do think it is obvious,
though, that the Government's focus went away from the threat
of non-Islamic extremism after 9/11.
Mr. King. If I could just interrupt you. I am not trying to
be rude on this, but----
Mr. Cohen. I am sorry. What?
Mr. King. I said I am not trying to be rude by interrupting
you, but my time is running out. When you say the Government
emphasis shifted, the Department of Homeland Security didn't
exist before 9/11. So if the Government emphasis--that was
within the Justice Department. That is not the fault of the
Department of Homeland Security that the Justice Department may
have shifted its emphasis. We have jurisdiction over the
Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Cohen. My remarks I was speaking about, you know, all
Government agencies, quite frankly, not simply the Department
of Homeland Security. I did not realize that its mandate was
limited solely to protecting the homeland against non-Islamic--
against Islamic extremists. That was not my understanding. I
thought it had a broader mandate, and I think at one point, of
course, it took that other threat a little bit more seriously
than it has in the recent years.
Mr. King. Well, yeah, that is because it was set up in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Mr. Cohen. I acknowledge that point, sir. But it wasn't the
exclusive threat that the enabling legislation asked them to
focus on. Again, we know that that office that was focusing on
non-Islamic extremism at the Department was basically
dismantled after 2009. I think that was a mistake. I think
they--again, I don't want to tell them how they ought to
organize themselves, but I think you and I both agree that they
ought to devote sufficient resources in light of the reality of
the threat.
Mr. King. I would just say so long as nothing is taken away
from the Islamist threat. So maybe we did find some rough
agreement, which is what we usually do.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, sir.
Mr. King. I yield back. Thank you.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes Mr. Richmond.
Mr. Richmond. Mr. Chairman, and former Chairman, and I am
glad to see the discourse that you had with Mr. Cohen because I
think it shows some common ground. But I think today is just a
generally sad day and why our approval rating in Congress is so
bad. This is not an issue that we disagree on. We have a panel
here today who I think is providing expert testimony. We can
find common ground. We can make the American people safer, and
we have a mark-up scheduled right afterwards. Where is the time
for collaboration? Where is the time to digest their testimony,
digest what they are saying, figure out how to put it in a
bill, and come to common ground?
Since I have been in Congress, and it is 5 years now, we
talk about Sovereign Citizen, who has 100,000 active members,
300,000 dabblers. Well, Sovereign Citizen in my district, they
shot up a trailer park, killed two deputies, one a father of a
2-year-old. The other was 32 years old that had five kids.
Wounded three other deputies. In the last Congress, we had a
million hearings on Islamic terrorism. We begged and we asked,
can we just broaden it a little bit so we can deal with other
home-grown terrorists----
Chairman McCaul. Will the gentleman yield on that point?
Mr. Richmond. Absolutely.
Chairman McCaul. This hearing was in response to the letter
from Mr. Thompson to address both international and domestic
terrorism. That is the title of the hearing. The bill itself
talks about extremism in all forms. It does not say just
``Islamist.''
Mr. Richmond. Well, and I will reclaim my time. But I
started mentioning it last Congress, but I think to date--and I
am not trying to cast blame because that is Monday morning
quarterback.
What I am saying is, where we are right now we can do big
things, and we can do it together. But the only way to do it
together, I think, is to listen to what they say, listen to
both sides, and come with a very carefully crafted bill. My
colleague from New York, Mr. King, I think has made a good
point, which is they are both important. Home-grown, whether it
is radical right or whether it is Islamic terrorism, they both
deserve a bunch of attention. We shouldn't just shuffle the
cards on the deck to pull resources from one to go to the
other. If we are serious about this, it may require finding new
resources.
When I hear Mr. Cohen and Mr. King almost agree that if
this--if we are serious about this, and I think Mr. Hughes
specifically said CVE is woefully inadequately underfunded, Ms.
Pandith said that we had to focus on grass-roots, bottom-up,
and watch our language. Well, when we listen to them, we don't
have time to incorporate that into what we are about to mark up
in 30 minutes. So I am just saying if we want to be serious
about this, I just don't think that----
Chairman McCaul. Will the gentleman--I have just a little
bit of time if the gentleman will yield. We have been working
for 6 months----
Mr. Richmond. I didn't yield.
Chairman McCaul [continuing]. With the staff on this bill,
for 6 months.
Mr. Richmond. Well, let me go back to saying I didn't
yield.
Chairman McCaul. You said where----
Mr. Richmond. Okay. Let's try this one more time. Let's try
this one more time. I did not yield.
Chairman McCaul. I yield back.
Mr. Richmond. You are the Chairman, and as soon as I
finish, you will have time because you are the Chairman.
So all I am saying is I think there is a process that we
could do this.
Mr. King and Mr. Cohen went back and forth. In New York,
all the police officers wake up--or a thousand wake up every
day thinking about Islamic terrorism and others as their major
concern. In police departments all over and probably in the
South where I am from, they think about a different form of
home-grown terrorism. All I am saying is that for us to do this
in this manner this day is the part that saddens me. It may not
sadden you, and I am not asking you to agree with me.
But I am just saying today I sit here in agreement with Mr.
King that this issue is so important that we may have to find
new money so that if we are going to do it, we do it right. I
agree with Mr. Hughes. I agree with Mr. Cohen. I agree with Ms.
Pandith that we have to treat this like the issue it is because
lives are at stake. As we look at Charleston and we look at all
of the plots that were prevented, the frustration that I have
is that we put so much emphasis on Islamic terrorism, home-
grown Islamic terrorism--and the FBI is doing a really good job
with it because they are scouring the internet, and they are
doing all the things that Mr. King pushed them to do. But if
you look at the case of Charleston, he was on the internet. Why
couldn't we devote the resources to finding him before he did
his dastardly deed and maybe we would be in a different place?
So, Mr. Chairman, I didn't ask any questions.
Now is your time, but thank you for the time, and I yield
back.
Chairman McCaul. Thank you.
The Chair recognizes Mrs. Miller.
Mrs. Miller. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I
certainly appreciate you calling this hearing and expanding it
to the scope of not just ISIS and Islamic extremists but
domestic terrorism as well. I think, certainly in light of what
happened in South Carolina, we were reminded of all of that
again.
But I do want to--you know, in May ISIS actually issued a
warning that they were planning more attacks in the United
States by training soldiers in 15 different States. They
actually mentioned my State of Michigan. I come from southeast
Michigan. So my question, and, you know, because of the
demographics in our area, I am very, very well aware of how
important it is that the community has trust with the law
enforcement, various Federal agencies, or all of the--whether
it is local law enforcement or what have you as you reach out
into communities and think about how we can get in early. I was
listening to Mr. Hughes' testimony about, you know, it is too
bad we couldn't have reached some of these youths before they
got on that plane, and so I guess can you both, Ms. Pandith and
Mr. Hughes in particular, really sort of flesh out for me a
little bit about how we can reach out perhaps a little bit
better from the community standpoint to these various groups.
Also, perhaps, what is the best--not only just the tools in the
outreach, but the agency best suited to do so and how our
committee and the Congress needs to think about improving the
model for that.
Mr. Hughes. Sure. I will go first. In terms of engagement,
I don't think the U.S. Government needs to replicate the
European model of broad-based engagement. I think the Europeans
are shifting away towards more of an intervention approach
because then you can kind of measure, okay, if this kid changed
his mind, if he decided not to cross that legal threshold, it
is manageable numbers. Now, that is fraught with a number of
civil rights and civil liberties issues, legal ramifications.
The reason why, and you touched on this a little bit, the
reason why this is important, and the debate between domestic
and Islamist-inspired terrorism is an important one. Look, I
think we are losing fact of something. Countering violent
extremism is at it core about that kid. So I spent a number of
years going around the country talking to families. I sat in a
seat of Riverside Towers basement apartment with 5 mothers of
kids that have absconded and went to Somalia, joined al-
Shabaab. They are crying, and they are telling me their story
about how they wished they could have stopped them. At the end
of the day, CVE should be about reaching those kids because
this number of 200 that have gone to joint ISIS, I think it is
significant in terms of 200 families whose lives have been
ruined by that. Two hundred fathers without daughters and
mothers without sons. I think we lose sight of that when we
discuss CVE on this. It becomes a very polarized issue. But I
want us to kind of focus back on those 200 kids. Right? Those
families I have talked to.
Ms. Pandith. So I would say a couple of things. The first
is, you know, you make a very important point about trust. At
base, we have to have trust between communities and law
enforcement for a whole host of reasons. But in 14 years since
9/11, we have a lot of data. We know a lot about how people get
radicalized. We know the impact of families. We know what has
to happen in the Government space, and we know what needs to
happen at the grassroots space.
I can't believe I am saying this to you in 2015 because
when I was asked to engage on countering violent extremism
right after the Danish cartoon crisis in Europe and I was asked
to leave the National Security Council to go to the State
Department to do this on behalf of our country, we were at a
point in 2007 where people were just beginning in Europe to
understand the preventing component to this. Everybody was
wringing their hands trying to figure out what we were going to
do, and each government in Europe was trying to figure out
things a different. We were pretty cocky here in America
because we thought: Wow. We have the American narrative. It
can't happen here.
Where we are today in 2015 is, as Seamus just said, we are
looking at the European models going: What has worked? What
happened? What can we do over here? I would want to say it is
not just about the things that we have learned in Europe
compared to where we are in the United States. Every community
is unbelievable different. The stories that Seamus was talking
about I heard all over the world from parents who are terrified
that their kid was going to move in a direction, not because
there is something wrong with their kid but because the bad
guys had a machinery that its poison was going in off-line and
on-line.
Mrs. Miller. Okay. I don't mean to be rude, but I have,
like, 5 seconds left. So I am going to have to interrupt you as
well. I would only say I am sorry I don't have time to ask Mr.
Cohen the same question because when I saw that picture of that
murderer in South Carolina, I thought that kid could be at our
local mall. What in the world ever happened to--where did he
come from? What kind of family was he involved with? How does
this even happen in America?
I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. Thank you.
The Chairman recognizes Mr. Payne.
Mr. Payne. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I was given a copy of the letter that we have been
discussing. It appears that there might be some
misunderstanding in what the response was to Mr. Thompson's
letter, but it looks like they have only asked for $1.8 million
to be reprogrammed. But I will move on to my questions.
You know, as we talk about this issue in terms of Islamic
radicalism and home-grown, we understand why this committee was
and Department was created after 9/11. But I never forget, and
I keep in my mind constantly Oklahoma, which was before 9/11.
So we have to look at all aspects of terrorism, home-grown
radicalism, radical Islam. But we should never forget, in the
same breath as we mention 9/11, we should mention Oklahoma and
Timothy McVeigh.
Let's see. Mr. Cohen, currently the concept of countering
violent terrorism is designed to focus on all violent extremist
activities. However, Muslim or Islamic groups are exclusively
targeted. In the aftermath of the shooting at Emanuel AME
Baptist--AME Church in South Carolina, shouldn't the concept of
countering violent terrorism be applied more broadly, including
domestic, which is why I bring up Oklahoma?
Mr. Cohen. I certainly think that the Government's
attention, the law enforcement officials, ought to focus or not
lose sight of the type of terror that we saw at Mother Emanuel
Church in Charleston. I am not sure, though, that the same
investigative techniques or that the investigative techniques
that are of questionable value in countering Islamic extremism
should necessarily be imported into a different sphere. So I
would agree that we need to focus our attention. The question,
of course, is, how?
Mr. Payne. Okay. Let's see.
To follow up, Mr. Cohen, Government leaders and the media
can be very dismissive of domestic terrorism activities and
commonly try to categorize incidents such as what happened in
Charleston, South Carolina, or 3 years ago in the Sikh Temple
in Wisconsin as hate crimes or acts of mentally disturbed. You
know, why is it important to label these actions as domestic
terrorism, and why do you think there is so much hesitancy to
label incidents as domestic terrorism?
Mr. Cohen. Well, again, I think we are living in the shadow
of 9/11, and when it is from non-Islamic sources, we don't
necessarily--we don't think of it as terrorism. It is odd to me
that Director Comey does not call this terrorism. It is
obvious, under 18 U.S.C. 2331, Section 5, that it was a
terrorist incident at the church. That doesn't necessarily mean
that it can be prosecuted as a terrorist incident because there
wasn't a weapon of mass destruction used as there was in the
Boston bombing. But it does fit the clear definition of
terrorism.
The one other point that I would make, and I think Attorney
General Lynch made this point, and that is that, by their
nature, hate crimes tend to be terroristic. They send shock
waves through the entire community that shares the
characteristic by which the victim was selected. We do have a
different attitude toward, you know, what we think of as home-
grown domestic extremists. Just one small point, I know that
Senator Graham on the Senate floor said that Mr. Roof was
like--it was like Mideast, Middle Eastern hate, and I am not
criticizing him for saying that. I am just saying that it
reflected kind of this mindset. We think of it in kind of
Islamic terms, and we have a difficult time recognizing it when
it comes from people, as Mrs. Miller said, someone who looked
like they might show up at a mall.
Mr. Payne. My time is up, but as we hear radical Islamists
talk about jihad, when what this young man talked about
creating--starting race war, would that similarly fall into a
jihad?
Mr. Cohen. Well, I mean, he saw himself as a racial
warrior. He had this notion of a white genocide going on. It is
a common theme in white supremacist circles, not simply in this
country but world-wide. So he saw himself as a racial warrior
perhaps much as people motivated by distorted notions of Islam
see themselves that way.
Mr. Payne. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. The Chairman recognizes Mr. Duncan.
Mr. Duncan. I want to thank the Chairman for the hearing.
You know, to sit here and hear your home State talked about so
much because of the tragedy that was there is difficult.
So let me take this opportunity to thank all the Members of
the committee and Congress in general for the ones that made
the effort to come to South Carolina and attend the funeral
services for the Charleston 9. I knew Clem Pinckney. Served
with him in the State capital. So, you know, it is personal.
I am willing to acknowledge that the gentleman who--I am
not going to mention his name because the shooter isn't worthy
of us mentioning his name. He is a murderer. I am willing to
acknowledge he was radicalized in some way.
But there are people radicalized in this country through
Islamic theology, through right-wing theology, or left-wing
theology. There is a lot of examples. I wonder even why we are
having this hearing because the President said on May 20: ``So
I am here today,'' this is to the Coast Guard, ``So I am here
today to say that the climate change constitutes a serious
threat to global security and an immediate risk to our National
security.''
If we want to pay for this CVE side of DHS, how about end
their involvement in climate change and National security
threats and focus on the threats that are real after 9/11? You
know, we hear a lot about right-wing extremists, but we never
hear of left-wing extremists. But they are there. We hear the
name of the shooter in Charleston, but we never hear the name
of the shooter here in Washington, DC, the shooter that was
unsuccessful, and thank God that he was unsuccessful. But in
the fall of 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins, armed with a semi-
automatic pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, entered the offices of
the Family Research Council here in Washington, intent on
murdering--murdering--11 people there. Stopped by a security
guard--there wasn't a security guard at Mother Emanuel--
stopped, fortunately. He had with him 15 Chick-fil-A
sandwiches. In his own confession, he said he wanted to murder
those 11 people and then smear the Chick-fil-A sandwiches on
their faces.
The gentleman was radicalized. He was radicalized by a
group that is represented on the panel today. I started to
object to the witness, but the Southern Poverty Law Center has
a hate map. On that hate map, they list the Family Research
Council because the Family Research Council supports
traditional marriage. The Southern Poverty Law Center disagrees
with their political position.
This gentleman in his own confession pointed to that hate
map and the Southern Poverty Law Center as the reason for him
going to the Family Research Council to commit that crime. You
don't know his name because he was unsuccessful. But he was
just as intent as the Charleston shooter to murder 11 people.
Do you want to talk about radicalization? Let's talk about
both sides because the fact that they even have a hate map
using those terminology flies in the face of what I saw in
Charleston, South Carolina, where hate wasn't talked about by
Mother Emanuel. Hate wasn't talked about by Charleston. Hate
wasn't talked about by South Carolina. South Carolina is the
epitome of what we should show in this country. When you saw
the families of the victims look the perpetrator in the eye and
say, ``We love you, and we forgive you for your act,'' the word
``hate'' wasn't used.
But a hate map pointing to the Family Research Council
radicalized a left-wing extremist. I am using that term because
we are hearing a lot about right-wing extremists. If you read
Mr. Cohen's comments, it is all about right-wing extremism, but
his group radicalized a left-wing extremist who wanted to
commit murder just the same as the gentleman in Charleston.
So let's be balanced in this, and let's try, as Members of
Congress who represent our States, to follow the example of the
folks in Charleston that I am proud of because I love every one
of you. If we talk about love and forgiveness and following
God's path, and we understand that we need to take the log out
of our own eye before we try to take the speck out of somebody
else's eye, that is a lesson that Christ taught us.
So I don't have any further questions. I appreciate the
leniency, Mr. Chairman. I think let's focus on keep America
safe from both radicals within our country, regardless of their
flavor, and radicals outside this country that want to behead
not--they want to behead every one of us as well as the Statute
of Liberty because they hate freedom, and they hate America. If
we keep our eye focused on the ball in keeping America safe, I
think that is the important part of this committee. I think
that is why it was formed.
With that, I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. The gentleman's time is expired.
The Ranking Member would like to be recognized.
Mr. Thompson. Well, our witness has been referenced in Mr.
Duncan's statements, and I think, as a courtesy, we should
allow Mr. Cohen an opportunity to respond.
Chairman McCaul. Mr. Cohen is recognized.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you. The Southern Poverty Law Center
compiles data every year on groups that we call hate groups.
These are groups that vilify persons because of their race,
religion, their sexual orientation, or whatnot. We list the
Family Research Council not because it supports traditional
marriage. That is not the reason at all.
Mr. Duncan. Excuse me, but I can go to the website on my
iPad, and I can read your words.
Mr. Cohen. If you would let me finish.
Mr. Duncan. Yes, sir.
Mr. Cohen. We list the Family Research Council because it
routinely vilifies the gay and lesbian community with known
falsehoods. It perpetrates false propaganda. Groups like Focus
on the Family that support traditional marriage, we----
Mr. Duncan. Let me ask you a question. Was Ben Carson not
listed at one time on that map?
Mr. Cohen. He was certainly not listed as a hatemonger. You
know, we list----
Mr. Duncan. He was targeted by your group. Right?
Mr. Cohen. I am sorry. What?
Mr. Duncan. He was targeted by your group as a hatemonger?
Mr. Cohen. That is incorrect. That is incorrect.
Chairman McCaul. The Ranking Member reclaims his time.
Mr. Thompson. Mr. Cohen, if you would, just respond to what
was said.
Chairman McCaul. If you could, briefly.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you. The statement that we listed the
Family Research Council because it is opposed to traditional
marriage is incorrect. I would say the--and I would say the
Southern Poverty Law Center is no more responsible for what Mr.
Corkins did than Martin Scorsese is for the actions of Mr.
Hinckley. I think the charges that have been made against us
are absurd, quite frankly.
Chairman McCaul. Okay.
The Chair recognizes Mrs. Watson Coleman.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to the panel for being here today. I wanted to
just put it on the record, Mr. Chairman, that the information
that has been shared by our panelists is really important and
is very illuminating to me.
But I really would have wished we had the opportunity to
separate these hearings and concentrate on the domestic issues
with regard to those individuals who don't represent any
relationship to ISIL or al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab or anyone else
but who are grown here out the sense of hate and wreak terror
on communities because off their religion or their race. I
think that we still need that opportunity to do that.
Mr. Cohen, I apologize for that exchange that just took
place.
So I am going to ask a few general questions. I think this
is very interesting. This is a prelude to what was going to be
a mark-up of the bill that I think is a little bit premature
here.
Ms. Pandith, you mentioned that this is really important
that we counter this violence by working from the bottom up. So
you therefore said that it is a good idea to have grants in the
community to create opportunities so that youth can be engaged
and others can be engaged. I wonder if those are the same kinds
of things that I think help communities become healthier like
the former PAL leagues, the academic recreational character-
building opportunities where kids get to do something, not be
on the streets, kind of focus on what life could be. Is that
the kind of thing that you are talking about?
Ms. Pandith. Thank you. There are two components. One is
there are Government grants. Most organizations on the ground
don't want to touch the Government with a 10-foot pole. Right?
You need to partner with 501(c)(3)s, nonprofit organizations,
things that are credible on the ground that make sense for the
communities around them right.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. But the money comes from some place,
though.
Ms. Pandith. Right. So that is my second point. What you
are seeing right now in terms of the most innovative kind of
things are coming from communities themselves. Again, I am
speaking from my perspective on these things. We don't have
enough money. So there is something--there is a whole problem
around fatigue about communities that don't have enough money
to be able to do things that we need outside of Government
money to do it. But Government can push outside entities to
give money toward their things.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. Okay. So you are not suggesting that
this consolidated CVE effort use any of its $10 million to----
Ms. Pandith. No. I am saying both. I am saying both.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. For that purpose, though.
Ms. Pandith. Because the American Government can--yes.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. So do you think that, and, Mr. Cohen,
you might want to respond to this too. Do you think that that
same kind of activity in the local communities, bringing
together groups, being the, you know, engagements, being
educational, recreational, and job training, do you think those
kinds of things work in both situations, both with the
individuals that you are talking about that are most vulnerable
and with the individuals that we see creating the terror
domestically and are domestic grown and are, you know, directed
at people based on their race, creed, color, and national
origin and ancestry, et cetera? I ask that of both of you.
Mr. Cohen. I think the answer is yes. I mean, you know, you
look at someone like the Charleston shooter, and we have an
alienated young man, a high school dropout, and so, you know,
kind-of, what happened there? You know, what I wonder, though,
is what is the role of the Government versus the role of our
schools, the role of our churches? You know, at Southern
Poverty Law Center, we try to provide free classroom materials
to every school in the Nation to try to give teachers tools
they can use to reach every kid in their classroom. So and
there is no question that it is a job not just for the
Government but a job for all of us.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. So can you tell me something about the
socioeconomic status of the young man who created that
terrorist act at Mother Bethel? Do you know?
Mr. Cohen. Well, a little bit. I understand that he was
from, your know, the product of a divorced home, that he was
very much a loner. He spent a lot of time by himself, that he
dropped out of high school. The one thing I would say, though,
it is obvious from reading his manifesto is that we are not
talking about a stupid kid. He was obviously highly
intelligent.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. So he is another illustration of what
might work if we could create jobs programs and community
programs, part of healing communities, apprenticeship
programs----
Mr. Cohen. If there is some way to reach young people like
that, it would be great. Absolutely.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. I am very concerned about the
radicalization of these very young people. Very concerned about
it. But I am also concerned about the 20-year-old, the 20- or
21-year-old, and it seems to me that we are not doing enough to
put programs and opportunities in our community to make our
communities healthier, whether or not it is recreation,
academics, education, character building, community relations,
we need to be focusing on putting our efforts there. I am
sorry.
Ms. Pandith. That is absolutely right. But there is no
profile with socioeconomic or education levels around the kind
of radicalization we are talking about.
But the other thing is, beyond what you just said, beyond
those kinds of programs, there have to be very specific
programs that are dealing with a young person along the
conveyor belt of radicalization, which doesn't have to do with
leadership training or other things that you have described.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. So we really need to examine evidence-
based approaches in programs. We recognize that the European
model PReVENT, or whatever it is called, isn't necessarily
working. We recognize that the pilot programs in Los Angeles
and Boston and someplace else aren't necessarily the approach
that we should--because we are getting a lot of feedback that
these are not fair applications and these are not particularly
yielding what we need in order to make our homeland safer. Is
that a fair assessment? That is a yes or no.
Ms. Pandith. No. It is not a fair assessment, but I know
you are running out of time. I would just simply say one-off
programs are not going to do enough. There has to be far more
that is going on----
Mrs. Watson Coleman. So my question, I guess, is shouldn't
we be prepared to listen to an array of programs and approaches
that are evidence-based and work in collaboration with the
Department of Homeland Security before we move forward and
present legislation that reorganizes an effort around what we
think is needed as opposed to what we know?
Ms. Pandith. We have 14 years of evidence and experience,
and we know what to do. It is possible to do a lot more than we
are doing. I don't think we need to sit around figuring out
what might work. We have lots of evidence from around the world
and----
Mrs. Watson Coleman. Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Hughes.
Mr. Hughes. I would echo her thoughts on this.
I would also say that I don't think that Europe ends at the
United Kingdom. I think there is a lot of examples from Denmark
and Germany and Sweden where you can take CVE programs that
work.
Ms. Watson Coleman. Thank you.
Mr. Hughes. We also have the benefit of PReVENT's 10-year
track record----
Mrs. Watson Coleman. Thank you.
My last question, I know I am really over here, but I thank
you for the Chairman's indulgence.
Mr. Cohen, does this proposal do what it needs to do as it
relates to our concerns about those who are radicalized
differently and are directed towards hate crimes of minorities
and religious minorities?
Mr. Cohen. I don't have the same experience that Ms.
Pandith or Mr. Hughes has. I am a little skeptical, and I do
think that it is important that we have evidence-based
programs.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. Thank you, Mr. Cohen.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your indulgence.
Chairman McCaul. Thank you. I just want to make a point. I
think we agree on the same premise.
You asked me in a prior hearing: Mr. Chairman, I would like
to explore what more can be proactively done in identifying and
intervening at an earlier stage. That is all I am trying to do
with respect to this hearing and with respect to this
legislation.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. Mr. Chairman, if I just might----
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes----
Mrs. Watson Coleman [continuing]. Respond.
Chairman McCaul. Sure.
Mrs. Watson Coleman. I appreciate that. I am just thinking
that we are moving a bit prematurely and that the pathway that
are you are discussing is absolutely on track. The fact that we
are moving so quickly from this to that, I think, is what gives
me tremendous pause. I think that we have an opportunity to do
it better. Thank you very much for hearing me.
Chairman McCaul. Well, and I respect your opinion.
Again, we have been working for 6 months on the bill.
But, with that, Mr. Perry is recognized.
Mr. Perry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Cohen, I was heartened by a portion of your testimony
where you talked about families and religious institutions
kind-of taking the lead and being a part of the solution. I
couldn't agree with you more, at least as far as being part of
the solution. But I do think that there is a role for the
Department of Homeland Security to play in leading. I think
that this hearing is to discuss that very fact.
Now, just to kind of give you a vignette to have a colloquy
with you, if you were having some work done on your home on
your roof, and your roof was open. You left for the evening or
something for dinner. You came back. You saw storm clouds
brewing on the way home. But as you got home, you notice your
house is on fire. So do you call your roofer, or do you call
the fire department?
Mr. Cohen. I would call the fire department.
Mr. Perry. I agree with you completely. So we are on the
same page. So let me talk to you about one other thing before I
get into some statistics.
This I am reading from a website: ``Today Don Black,''
which I think you said you are aware of, ``Don Black struggles
with a continuing decline in site visitors, chronic financial
problems, and his own health issues.'' That is Don Black from
Stormfront. Right?
Mr. Cohen. Yes.
Mr. Perry. That is on your website.
Mr. Cohen. I am sure you are right.
Mr. Perry. Yeah. But you just sat here and said in your
testimony that their visitors to the website is increasing, but
your website says they are decreasing.
Mr. Cohen. That is not what I said. What I said was the
number of registered users of Stormfront had increased by 50
percent over the last 5 years from below 150,000----
Mr. Perry. So it is increasing.
Mr. Cohen [continuing]. To over 300,000.
Mr. Perry. So it is increasing.
Mr. Cohen. The number of registered users. That is what I
said.
Mr. Perry. But it says here ``decline in site visitors.''
Okay. Anyhow, look, we are talking about an issue of
violent extremism, period. There is a prioritization, and there
is a matter of scale. We already agree today that with the
house fire burning scenario. Right? We kind-of agreed that
there is a concept of scale here. So, in that, you, I am sure,
know that ISIS-linked plots against Western targets has tripled
in 2015. Home-grown jihadi terror plots in the United States
has tripled in the past 5 years. Foreign fighters in Syria and
Iraq has gone up 80 percent. Arrests of ISIS supporters in
America is up five-fold. I continue. More than 4,000 Westerns
and 200 Americans have traveled or attempted to travel to join
Islamist terrorists in Syria. It has doubled in the last year.
We have got 18 countries or territories, including a long list
of the 18 which have ISIS-linked or al-Qaeda-linked operations
in their country.
I think what we are trying to say here is, is that we see a
problem that is growing, and it is incumbent upon us to do
something about it. In a hearing that I had last week on
homeland security, they listed one of the major threats as
climate change. It might be a threat. The question is, is it
the business of this Department of Homeland Security when they
ask for funding for climate change but don't ask for funding--
or haven't asked for funding--for countering violent extremism,
and is that the right thing to do? This legislation seeks to
clarify and remedy that.
Now, also in the remaining time that I have, I agree with
you when you were flummoxed, when you were vexed by the fact
that it was not listed as terror in South Carolina. But I want
to just make sure we broaden the conversation and add the scale
to it. It was also not listed as terror at Fort Hood. Also not
listed as terror when a gentleman, I don't know if I will call
him that, when a terrorist in Oklahoma beheaded a women and was
on his way to beheading another one. That is why we are having
the hearing, sir. That is why this is an issue. So we can focus
the efforts of the taxpayer, of the Federal Government,
appropriately.
Finally, and with the time remaining, sir, with all due
respect, the Family Research Council has an opinion that I
imagine you disagree with, and that is the beauty of America.
We can disagree. But do they advocate for violence associated
with their opinion?
Mr. Cohen. Are you asking me now?
Mr. Perry. Yes. I am.
Mr. Cohen. I have never said otherwise. That is correct. We
have never said they advocate violence.
Mr. Perry. Okay. So they don't advocate for violence. So we
understand there are differences of opinion. That is the great
thing about America. But when we are talking about opinions
that are linked to violence, and so there is a credibility
issue when the Family Research Council is listed as a terrorist
organization----
Mr. Cohen. Well, we didn't list them as a terrorist
organization.
Mr. Perry. Well, as a hate organization.
Mr. Cohen. You know, there are lots of organizations that
we list as hate organizations because they vilify people for
immutable characteristics. The one thing I would point out is
that when you constantly vilify kind-of the LGBT community, is
it really a surprise that that is the community that is most
likely to be victimized by hate crimes in our country? I don't
think so.
Now, does Tony Perkins say we ought to go out and beat gay
people? Of course not. But when you describe gay people as
vile, as disgusting, when you put out false propaganda about
them, you know, I think it doesn't help.
Mr. Perry. Well, again----
Mr. Cohen. If I could say one last thing.
Mr. Perry. Absolutely, sir.
Mr. Cohen. We have never, as I explained, as Mr. King
pointed out, and I appreciate it, we have never tried to
minimize the threat of Islamic extremism ever. You know, so I
think much of what--I am not sure--I felt like there was a
straw man that you were attacking and that wasn't me.
Mr. Perry. No. I am not here to attack you. I just want to
make sure the record is clear and that the intent and the
motivation for this hearing, for this mark-up, for this bill is
clear, is that we want to deal with violent extremism wherever
it comes from.
Mr. Cohen. I think you should----
Mr. Perry. To also acknowledge that there is a matter of
scale. There is a prioritization. In the military, we have a
50-meter target, you have got a 300-meter target, you have got
1,000-meter target. The 50-meter target with the weapon that is
firing at you is a little more important than 1,000-meter
target is what we are saying. The stats that I gave you show
that we have a 50-meter target that we need to address. That is
the point.
With that, I thank you, and I yield back.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes Mr. Keating.
Mr. Keating. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to thank the witnesses. It is always great to
see Ms. Pandith, whose uncle, deceased uncle, was a dear friend
of mine. He said the--we worked together when he was setting up
the Islamic Center of New England. Thank you for your continued
work in particular.
We have also had you as a witness in our subcommittee on
Foreign Affairs, and there is an overlap of many issues here. I
must say, because I am not going to miss an opportunity, when
anyone dismisses climate change and the fact that it is not
important to violence in the world and wars, I think we should
all take cognizance that that is not true. It is one of our
major issues, but the same with scale of issues.
As a former prosecutor, we can talk about scale all we
want, but if you are the victim or your family is the victim or
your community is a victim of any kind-of, this kind-of violent
action, scale doesn't matter too much.
But I do want to touch base on an approach that we can take
that I think is clear to deal with all these issues, and that
is how much work should we be doing--should the Government be
doing on trying to give resources and information to family
members. You know, the first educator and the primary educator
of any child is their mother. I think there is--we have much
more to do, although we are doing some things in this regard,
to train mothers and parents, family members, to spot signs of
extremism, however that extremism is manifested or that
radicalization. So I would like to ask Ms. Pandith, what could
we be doing more in that particular area?
Ms. Pandith. Thank you, Mr. Keating. It is a pleasure to
see you again.
Very quickly, I would say two things on the issue of women,
and that is why I included it in my testimony. We have not--
that has been a black hole for our Government. We haven't seen
how women get radicalized, and we are just catching up to that
right now, frankly, and it is very, very dangerous when all of
a sudden we see three young girls in Denver try to make their
way to Syria, and everybody in America is surprised that this
is happening. Their bad guys are trying to recruit boys and
girls. We need to understand that, and that is happening
globally.
But you said something very important, and that is a mother
is a child's first teacher. Toward that end, women can be used
in two ways: No. 1, we need to understand how they are getting
radicalized. Therefore, the kind of counternarratives that are
going to work specifically for them. But we also need to
mobilize them into a movement to push back against the ideology
of the extremists because they see what is happening to their
children first. What is happening inside of a home matters.
The State Department actually partnered with me and the
Institute for Strategic Dialogue on an initiative called Women
and Extremism for specifically that reason. You will remember
that our Government also helped seed Sisters Against Violent
Extremism, SAVE, the SAVE network, for the same reasons. But I
do think, sir, we need to do a whole lot more to understand
specifically what is happening with women, not just in our
country but around the world.
Mr. Keating. Yeah.
Yes, Mr. Hughes.
Mr. Hughes. I just want to react a little bit on that. You
brought up Denver. This time last year I was in Denver at the
invitation of the imam of Abu Bakr mosque and the U.S. Attorney
and the FBI because three of their girls had jumped on a plane
and ended up in Frankfurt and got turned around. Well, their
father had called, you know, every phone number in the Denver
phone book until he finally got a council member who then knew
an FBI agent who could then call Frankfurt authorities.
So we went out to Denver, and we sat at the mosque with a
room full of about 150 fathers and mothers and delivered what
we called the Community Awareness Briefing. The Community
Awareness Briefing was essentially an information awareness
briefing. You explain to people how ISIS and related groups use
the internet to radicalize and recruit kids. Because at the end
of the day, that 15-year-old girl, that 16-year-old girl, and
that 17-year-old girl, they were learning what they wanted to
learn on-line. The only echo chamber they had was those people
on-line. They had no other avenue of people that were saying:
This doesn't sound right. You should come pull it back.
We also put it in context too. So our Community Awareness
Briefing was part of a larger presentation. So we had a school
official give an internet safety workshop because, let's be
honest here, a parent doesn't really understand what ask.fm is
or Kik or any of those type of things. Let's put that in
context of cyberbullying or sexting, and ISIS as another range
of threats that you have to be worried about as a parent on-
line. Put it in context like that.
I would also say that the Community Awareness Briefing,
though, is, again, going back to those one-off events. So we
have to figure out a way to scale that up a little bit. Train
State and locals, train trusted community partners to deliver
that kind of information. The Federal Government can play a
role of updating that information for communities.
Mr. Keating. Yeah. I also believe that--associate with Ms.
Pandith's remarks, that much of this isn't new. A group of us
were in the Hollings Center in Europe looking at, you know, the
root causes. The idea that we are getting pretty good--or at
least in Boston recently, we are fortunate that two other
incidents were thwarted by good law enforcement. But we have
had some success swatting mosquitoes. We have to dry that swamp
up. That is going to be done through education and the kind of
things we are talking about here. I would just say that the
same things I studied years ago on juveniles and juvenile
delinquency and getting involved with crimes, where this is not
a loss of a father figure in a household and all those other
issues were being addressed at the Hollings Center when we were
talking about some of the real root causes of this.
I think we have a lot of work to do, but we can build on
it. I agree, as a final statement, that there while we are
digging in on these issues more and more, we should be moving
forward at the same time because we do know enough where we can
be effective and deal with these issues.
I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes Mr. Katko.
Mr. Katko. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate the
testimony of all the panelists here today.
Mr. Cohen, I have a couple of questions for you, and you
don't have to worry because we are not going to get into an
argument. I promise you there.
The first question.
Mr. Cohen. Nothing about the fire department either.
Mr. Katko. No, no fire department.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you.
Mr. Katko. Quickly, just from a basic premise, you would
agree that trying to do something to counter violent extremism
either from the Islamic side or the domestic side is a good
idea overall.
Mr. Cohen. Of course.
Mr. Katko. Okay. So and, of course, the next step is your
concern is that there might be too much of a focus on the
Islamic side to the detriment of domestic terrorism. Is that
correct?
Mr. Cohen. That is among my concerns, yes.
Mr. Katko. Okay. So that is something we got to work out
going forward. Right? But if we could somehow balance that all
out, do you think this is a good idea?
Mr. Cohen. Do I think what is a good idea?
Mr. Katko. Countering violent extremism, developing a
program for both domestic and Islamic violent extremism.
Mr. Cohen. If we can do that successfully without violating
people's civil rights and have a program that is effective, of
course.
Mr. Katko. Okay. Now, yeah, you mentioned civil rights.
That is a good thing. It is a good segue for what I want to
talk about next. I am proposing an amendment to this bill which
would provide a grant program at DHS. The grant program would
allow community leaders such as yourself or others from all
over the country, whether it be a domestic- or Islamic-based
program, to apply to the Department of Homeland Security to get
grants to have CVE-type activities in their home towns. As a
general premise, I take it all you panelists would agree that
is a good idea.
Mr. Cohen. I wouldn't have any problem with that as an
experiment, of course.
Mr. Katko. Right. Exactly. Now, informing the program, we
have individuals in my amendment proposed to be involved in
formulating this program, Department of Homeland Security and
the new office that the Chairman's bill establishes as well as
the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. So I take it
having the input from the Civil rights and Civil Liberties is a
good idea as well. Right?
Mr. Cohen. Yes. I think also, of course, before I would do
any of these things, I would ask the Department of Homeland
Security what they think about it. You are asking me, just a
private citizen from the Southern Poverty Law Center. I have
given you my opinion. I would want to know what the Department
of Homeland Security thinks, of course, as well.
Mr. Katko. Right. Of course. Of course, so you want to get
the input of everybody, but having the input of civil rights is
a good idea.
Mr. Cohen. Of course.
Mr. Katko. Okay. All right. I appreciate that.
I just want to address one other concern about you that you
voiced earlier about perhaps disparity with respect to how we
treat domestic terrorism versus Islamic terrorism at post-9/11.
Are you familiar with what is called the Joint Terrorism Task
Forces across this country?
Mr. Cohen. Yes. Somewhat, yes.
Mr. Katko. Isn't it fair to say that they were formed after
9/11?
Mr. Cohen. Yes.
Mr. Katko. Isn't it fair to say that part of their marching
orders included not just investigating Islamic-based threats
but also to investigate and indeed prosecute domestic terrorism
as well?
Mr. Cohen. There have been prosecutions, of course.
Mr. Katko. So there have been new things put in place after
9/11 to focus on a domestic terrorism front as well.
Mr. Cohen. Yes. But there is also, I think, a degree to
which it is undeniable that the Government has taken its eye
off that threat after 9/11. I don't think there is any dispute
about that either.
Mr. Katko. Well, I can look at it from the prism from which
I operated over the last 20 years in my career as a Federal
prosecutor, and I help stand up Joint Terrorism Task Forces,
you know, in my district, and assisted them on occasion. I know
that if a case came to me for domestic terrorism, it was never
ever ignored, ever. In fact, people were prosecuted on a
regular basis for domestic terror acts, not just that had
nothing to do with Islamic radicalization. That has happened
across this country on a regular basis. Hasn't it?
Mr. Cohen. Of course.
Mr. Katko. Okay. So this whole dialogue that somehow we are
not paying attention to domestic terrorism, it is a matter of
semantics or a matter of degree, but at the same token, we are
not ignoring it.
Mr. Cohen. I don't think we are ignoring it completely,
but, you know, I think the history at the Department of Justice
is pretty clear. You know, they had a task force after Oklahoma
City, and it simply stopped meeting after 9/11. It stopped
meeting for 13 years. I would say that is proof that the
Department took its eye off that ball. A group of U.S.
attorneys, Conner Eldridge, the attorney from the Western
District of Arkansas, was instrumental in getting that back on
track. But we had a 13-year hiatus, and that seems problematic
to me.
Mr. Katko. It is fair to say, though, that some of that
slack had been picked up by the Joint Terrorism Task Forces,
which didn't exist before 9/11?
Mr. Cohen. I suppose some of it had to.
Mr. Katko. Sure. Okay. All right. Well, I appreciate that.
I yield my time back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you.
Mr. Katko. Thank you.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes Mrs. Torres.
Mrs. Torres. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank the three of you for being here today.
Ms. Pandith, I had an opportunity to hear you at a training
that we had for new Members of Congress. I think it was back in
November. I have asked the FBI to join my law enforcement
community in my district to talk about, you know, this specific
issue. I am a little bit disappointed that we continue to only
talk about Islamic issues when the biggest threats that we have
in my community and more urgent in my community are the drug
cartels, are the gangs that are recruiting our very, very young
kids and ordering them to shoot at police officers as a way to
join a gang.
So, you know, from your perspective, I think that I heard
you say that there is no profile; there is no social/economic
link. I think because we have seen the diversity of local home-
grown terrorists, but there is a common denominator. That
common denominator is hate, whether it is racial, religious,
political, that is a common denominator that these have. What
is your advice in putting together this type of community
engagement, this type of community training, for our law
enforcement, understanding that, you know, I spent, by the way,
17 years as a 9-1-1 dispatcher? People call because they have
issues with their children that they feel are at risk. There is
nothing that we can do for them because they haven't committed
a crime.
So there is a lot of frustration there in the community
that, why should we wait until someone commits a crime, you
know, to engage them in a dialogue? I would like to hear a
perspective from the three of you if it is possible.
Ms. Pandith. It is nice to see you again. I would agree.
Obviously, there is an ``us and them'' narrative that has taken
hold of our country that has actually gotten more acute in the
last few years, and we are seeing it play out in all kinds of
ways. So this is by no means saying you need to focus only on
what is happening from AQ or ISIL or al-Shabaab.
But I want to put things in perspective, and everything--we
all come to the table with our own thing. There are 1.6 billion
Muslims in the world. That is one-fourth of our planet. Sixty-
two percent of that number is under the age of 30. That is
almost a billion people. That is the pool from which the bad
buys are recruiting. Because they are digital natives, for all
the things that we have talked about in the last, you know,
hour-and-a-half, it makes it really present to me.
I see things happening--you know, Mr. Keating was talking--
I mean, I am from Massachusetts. I was--I had been on Boylston
Street. That was very personal to me what happened at the
Boston Marathon. But I also am a world citizen in the sense of
I can see the connectivity with this millennial generation
around the world. So it is a very real threat to me. I think
that this us/them hatred if you want to call it, the narrative,
manifests in a whole lot of ways. I think America can and
should do better in decreasing the hate as you defined it.
But I think to put a really direct response to you, you
can't just do it from Government. It has to be communities
themselves that are actually doing a whole host of things to
decrease that sort-of high-pitch shrill.
Mrs. Torres. So are we putting the cart before the pony
here by not waiting for the reports to be published on helping
us identify these common factors?
Mr. Hughes. I don't think you can wait. I think that last
point you made about the space between before an illegal act is
important because I don't think it is fair to ask a family
member or a Government official to watch a train wreck happen
in slow motion and know you can't do anything in between. Two
weeks ago, I was in Dulles. I met a father whose daughter----
Mrs. Torres. I am going to stop you there because my
experience is very different in the community.
The real-life experience is around budgets, and we do not
have enough personnel to go chase these types of calls.
Mr. Cohen, what can you say about--a response from you,
please?
Mr. Cohen. I am not sure I have a lot to add. You know, we
are talking about extraordinarily complex problems. I think,
you know, it is important, having studied them very, very
carefully, I do think that, you know, there are a lot of common
problems that you talked about with gangs and people drifting
into white supremacy and who are maybe drifting into radical
Islam. We need to wrap sometimes services around folks who are
at risk of going down that path.
Mrs. Torres. Thank you. I just don't want to lose this
conversation around--only around Islamic or white supremacists
because there is a lot more happening in our communities. Thank
you.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes Mr. Walker.
Mr. Walker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Pandith, I have been very impressed looking through
your testimony and the amount of years and research you have
put into this. I think you have done a great job in sharing
this. I would like to ask you, in fact, in your testimony you
discuss, ``credible voices'' needed to carry out the counter-
messaging efforts into these extremists and these terror
groups, whether they be domestic terrorism or whether they be
those of international, radicalized, whatever it might be.
Would you be able to expound maybe in your opinion, when you
talk about credible voices, what is that profile that we are
looking for when it comes to those people that can get that
message back?
Ms. Pandith. Thank you for your kind words. Credible
voices, they come in all shapes and sizes, and there is no
profile for them either. What is really important is we go
really, really local, and we don't take Government saying, we
think we know what a credible voice is. You have to ask
communities themselves.
As a result, you are seeing all kinds of voices that, at
first glance, people think: Are you kidding me? A hip-hop
artist, an athlete, a graffiti artist, they are going to make a
difference to some kid not moving along the conveyer belt of
radicalization? In fact, that is true. If you go to the
neighborhoods, if you go to the communities and you ask them,
what are the voices? Who are the people that make sense? Those
are the voices that we need to lift up.
The mistakes we made right after 9/11, sir, or that we
thought that the guy with the longest beard and the highest hat
was the one that was the person that was going to be able to
tell that young kid they shouldn't be bad. It doesn't work like
that. These are digital natives. These are young kids who learn
from each other. So a credible voice is someone local, organic,
and makes sense for that neighborhood. What may make sense here
in Washington, DC, may not make sense in McLean, Virginia.
Mr. Walker. Do you feel the United States should find a way
to maybe help support, even if it is not necessarily funding,
but maybe an awareness for those that are nonprofits, religious
organizations, at building some of those bridges?
Ms. Pandith. I couldn't agree more. That is the biggest
mistake we have made. There are all kinds of efforts, thousands
in fact, around the world of people who are doing exactly that.
There is no money, and there is also fatigue, sir. There is a
great deal of fatigue because those people who have been trying
to raise money to do it on their own, they don't have enough
money, and they keep hitting their head against the wall
saying: This is a really good program. It is going to work
organically, but they have no funds to support it.
Mr. Walker. I can speak only to my experiences, and we have
worked in the inner cities of Cleveland, New York, Baltimore,
places like that, trying to talk about hope and opportunity.
What--under this topic of credible voices, I would like to
circle back just a little bit in the time that I have remaining
and talk about some unfair practices that discredit some good
voices. In fact, I believe Mr. Cohen, under oath today, that
you said Tony Perkins said gays were vile and disgusting. I am
concerned about those kind of comments, which only increase the
amount of tension between the different groups.
But also something earlier that was mentioned, and I just
want to make sure that we are clear on this record because I
think from a philanthropist and someone who has brought a lot
of good things to our medical community is Dr. Ben Carson. I
believe you said earlier that you did not list him as an
extremist in an organization. But let me read your words, if I
could, from earlier this year or from a statement released by
your organization. It says: In October 2014, we posted an
extremist file of Dr. Ben Carson. This week as we have come
under intense criticism for doing so, we have reviewed our
profile and have concluded that it did not meet our standards,
so we have taken it down and apologized to Dr. Carson for
having posted it. We have also come to the conclusion that the
question of whether a better research profile of Dr. Carson
should or should not be included in our, ``extremist files,''
is taking attention from the fact that Dr. Carson has made a
number of statements that we believe most people would conclude
as extreme.
My concern is, is that when you guys put these kinds of
labels on people as the Member Duncan talked about earlier,
sometimes these groups that are reading this, they are inspired
by this stuff. As we have talked with Ms. Pandith about
credible voices, I think we all have responsibility making sure
that we are not overshooting a runway when listing those as
extreme when if we were to look a little closer, they are not
in the extreme.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. I thank the gentleman.
The Chair recognizes Ms. Jackson Lee.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Let me also add my appreciation to the
witnesses that are here, and let me thank both Mr. Thompson and
Chairman McCaul. Mr. Thompson for calling this hearing, and Mr.
McCaul joining in and for the addition.
Mr. Cohen, we have interacted certainly over the years.
Ms. Pandith, we have certainly interacted by your service
in the administration and most recently your participation in
this effort by the administration of countering violent
extremism.
I happen to believe that there is a pathway of commonality.
Just as, if I might deviate, as we begin to look at criminal
justice reform and raise the question of issues dealing with
law enforcement, someone might take the viewpoint the Nation is
against law enforcement or groups are against law enforcement,
and that is not true. They are the finest men and women in this
Nation who put their lives on the line every day, but all of us
can be subject to being better and finding a pathway to being
better.
I think the effort by my Ranking Member is to make our
approach to countering violent extremism one that is worldly
and that is responsive to a myriad of issues that may come
before us.
So let me start with a question to you. I think your
testimony indicated that the youth that are engaged around the
world and those who may be radicalized here, there is a sense
of trying to be validated. Maybe you can expand on that
because, how do we pierce that particular veil? How do we get
in front of them being validated in some other way? The other
is that I am concerned, is that in my course of representing
constituents, I have dealt with a lot of groups that range from
the array of communities from Pakistani community to the Arab
community and then subsets. When I say that, people are from
Egypt, people are from Kuwait, Palestinians, and others, and
they all are worthy of recognizing efforts that are being made.
For example, there is CAIR. I ask the question, and my concern
is, do you read in this legislation any exclusion? Is there
going to be some litmus test to leave groups out because
someone has a disagreement or someone accused a group of some
activity? When I say that, the group, somebody that had their
name in the group, and they were individual actors. So if you
can answer that. Let me jump to Mr. Cohen just so that the bell
doesn't ring on me for my questions.
But let me say that the moment in history always seems to
suggest that we are taking a moment in history, and we are
imploding it, or we are blowing it up. I think it is important
to note that Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, and
different religious groups, people of Jewish faith have had a
constant attack over a period of history. When I say that,
not--when I say that some will take it out of context and say--
and I am saying people have been attacked every day. No. I am
saying it has been an underbelly of this country. It is only
when moments like Mother Emanuel come, that there is a forum to
be able to speak. For if we spoke of every discriminatory act
against us, most of our colleagues and people and
constituencies, would say, what? They live in complete horror
and fear or complaints.
So I think it is important to note that this is a moment,
but you have documented over the period of time. I have been
studying Jeff Davis--Jefferson Davis, who is the President of
the Confederacy, and he, in his era, continues, that generally
born, the slaves are barbarian masters. These are kinds of
names that have been in America's psyche or fabric, and they
have lived on. The flag has lived on, the rebel flag, and the
three boys in Mississippi.
But we, as Americans and happen to be African Americans,
have gone on to live. We have taken the moment, and then you
have seen us go on to live. What we are saying now and what I
believe my Ranking Member is saying, that if you are going to
look at the issues of terrorism, I think Mrs. Torres was
talking about gang activities, if I heard her correctly, or
other instances of terrorism, we are just saying, open it up.
Just as someone said this is a moment for a discussion on race.
It is not just a moment; it is that a horrific incident
occurred, and we are now saying that all of those who mourn
that didn't look like me, what a celebration, now we can come
together and talk about what we have experienced over our
wonderful life here past slavery in this country.
So my question to you is as the New York Times has said,
and I just want to read this: Non-Muslim extremists have
carried out--a New York Times article dated June 24--have
carried out 19 such attacks since September 11, terrorist
attacks, in the latest count compiled by Mr. Sterman a New
America program associate. But by comparison, by comparison--
and let me correct that. Non-Muslim extremists carried out 19
such attacks since September 11. By comparison, 7 lethal
attacks are carried out by Islamic militants in the same
period. No one would ever have paid attention to this
statistic, but it is real. Obviously, people died at the hands
of non-Muslim extremists.
Mr. Cohen, I am not asking you to be the Department of
Homeland Security. You have done this work valiantly. Is it
worthy of expanding the concept of countering violent extremism
to a myriad of groups that you have covered over the years of
your work? If I could get--be indulged for Ms. Pandith and Mr.
Cohen to answer those questions.
Mr. Cohen. I think it is essential, Ms. Jackson Lee.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Ms. Pandith, we will come to you next on
the question I asked.
Mr. Cohen. I think it is essential. I think that these are
teachable moments, and before complacency, until we all fall
back--until we would have to worry about going back and
becoming complacent, we have to take advantage of these moments
and examine ourselves. I think that all forms of extremism
ought to be taken seriously. I have never said that one is more
important than the other. I have never said that one is
comparable to the other. I think it is really critical, though,
that we don't ignore any of them.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Ms. Pandith.
I thank the Chairman and Ranking Member, for indulging.
Ms. Pandith. You asked about, your words, validating youth.
I would just tweak that slightly. It is really about an
identity crisis that's happening to these young people under
the age of 30.
So the bad guys are filling the vacuum when they are asking
questions about who they are. So what we have to do is to flood
the marketplace with counternarratives to the narratives of the
extremists in a multitude of ways so that these young youth
have a place to go. This isn't just Government doing this. This
is what we were talking about in terms of communities
themselves finding ways to be able to tap into what is
happening to these young youth.
Furthermore, you asked about leaving different groups out.
You know that I worked in Government traveling around the world
engaging in Muslims. What is critical and very, very important
is that we don't make a hierarchy of who the most Muslim
Muslims are. That means in our country too, that you open up
the diversity of Muslims across America, you listen to all
voices, and finally, you don't just listen to a couple of
groups in America that try to speak for the most diverse group
of Muslims anywhere in the world, and they live here in
America.
Ms. Jackson Lee. Just a quick, but it means that if these
advocacy groups are there, you don't exclude them either?
Ms. Pandith. No.
Ms. Jackson Lee. They have a place at the table?
Ms. Pandith. They do.
Ms. Jackson Lee. But you just want it to be expanded. I
assume you are not against the domestic terrorism concept
dealing with right-wing extremists being expanded as well?
Ms. Pandith. Absolutely not.
Ms. Jackson Lee. I thank the Ranking Member and Chairman
for their indulgence.
I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. I thank the gentlelady. Let me just say, I
completely agree. That is why we scheduled the hearing to
focus, not just on foreign terrorism, international, but
domestic. That is precisely why this legislation--and you and I
have talked about the bill itself before, it expands the role
of the Department to all forms of extremism, and I think that
is an important point to make.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Donovan.
Mr. Donovan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate you holding this hearing to address the need
to counter the growth of violent extremists in the United
States. I think everyone here, my colleagues and the witnesses
agree that the approach so far has failed to stem the instances
of violent terror plots both domestic and internationally.
I have a few quick questions I just want to ask--because I
know we are going to vote in a little bit--to the entire panel.
I heard you say, Ms. Pandith, about the credible voices.
That, to me, sounds general. You get someone, a hip-hop artist
or something. I don't know if this monster that created this
horrific event in Charleston would have listened to anybody.
But closer to home, and I don't know what his parental
situation was, but first of all, how does Government help to
identify these people? Second, once they are identified, what
do we do?
Kathleen Rice and I were prosecutors before this. John
Katko was. Many times families come to us and say: My kid
hasn't done anything yet, but my kid is on the verge of
something. I think on a parochial level and a lower level, as
you said before, is where we can intervene. So, No. 1, how
could Government help identify possible people before they
commit a horrific event? Second, what is this best intervention
that we could help people to prevent another horrific event,
either what happened in Boston or what happened in Charleston?
Ms. Pandith. The most credible voices on the planet are
former extremists of all kinds who can tell their stories and
explain how they get radicalized. There is only one network in
the world on the planet today that has all of the former
extremists from right wing all the way to former al-Qaeda.
Those voices make a difference to people.
If you look here in our own country, we haven't told the
story of the Tsarnaev brothers. We haven't actually explained
to the communities what happened along the way. They are the
most credible example of what can happen to them. So when we
look at who our credible voices, they are former extremists,
which are the No. 1 best credible voices, but then you have to
ask questions in the community.
What is working for your youth? If they will listen. Who
has value in your community? Then, to your second point, what
do you do with that information? So you have identified these
credible voices, so what? If the American Government takes
these people and puts them on a pedestal, and says, ``Go, go
listen to them,'' it is not going to do anything. You know that
and I know that. But if you go to the communities and you say:
Wow, okay, these are the credible voices--how would we use
them? What would make sense for your community? They often have
really great ideas on-line and off-line to use the voices and
the experience of these credible voices. What they don't have
is the money to jump-start these initiatives to go forward, and
we don't have the things that are already existing now to scale
up massively. That is where the question about granting and
money comes in. Some of that is American Government money,
let's say, but a lot of it has to be outside of Government
money, and we have failed in our country to make the case to
Americans, in general the most philanthropic group of any
country in the world, that extremism is your problem too, and
you can actually help deal with this. The way we looked at HIV/
AIDS, the way we looked at other global threats, philantropic
money can make a difference on the ground to Americans
themselves.
Mr. Donovan. Mr. Hughes, just to follow up. When you went
to Denver and spoke to those parents, if those parents had
identified their children before they got on that plane, what
could we do to help them? What intervention works before those
three young girls get on that plane?
Mr. Hughes. Sure. So there is no systematic intervention
program in the United States. You have pockets of things. When
you look at something like Montgomery County, Maryland, has a
small program there. There are other organizations that have
booklets and kinds of things that look at this, but no
systematic way.
So if I am a parent that is worried about my kid, my only
option is to do nothing or, you know, call as many people as I
possibly can until I get somebody that is going to understand
this thing. I don't think it is tenable to ask parents to
either do nothing or have their kids spend 15 years in jail.
I think there is a way to figure out the middle area. You
bring social workers. You bring mental health professionals
because a lot of these kids have mental health issues. You
bring trusted mentors, soccer coaches, things like that.
Religious leaders if you need to, but maybe you don't.
You set up a system with checks and balances that
understand there is Privacy Act concerns on this. There is
legal liability on this. You know, if a kid, if you are
concerned about it, are you legally liable to tell law
enforcement about this? These are difficult issues to tackle,
and we haven't had that conversation. So, in light of that, we
are either doing nothing or arresting. I don't think that is an
acceptable answer.
Mr. Donovan. I yield back my time, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair now recognizes Ms. Sanchez.
Ms. Sanchez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you to our witnesses today. Mr. Chairman, as you
know, I have been a Member of this committee since its
inception after we created it in the Congress after the 9/11
incident. I am very troubled today by several things that this
committee is doing.
I think it is great that we are having a hearing on this
issue, but I do have a problem with the fact that at 11, which,
of course, we have now gone through this, and I am assume that
we are probably going to continue and do the mark-up on H.R.
2899, that we would have a hearing, the only hearing on it,
really, to go right into a mark-up. From a procedural
standpoint, I think that is, as has been noted by other
Members, makes it very difficult for Members to really get a
good feel for where we should be.
Chairman McCaul. Will the gentlelady----
Ms. Sanchez. I am going to have several points.
Chairman McCaul. Well, that is incorrect. We had a full
committee hearing in February on this issue countering violent
extremism. It has come up at multiple hearings.
I yield back.
Ms. Sanchez. I am told that it was a threat, as I recall.
Chairman McCaul. That hearing notice itself, countering
violent extremism.
Ms. Sanchez. But the witnesses were about threats. Anyway,
Mr. Chairman, please.
Chairman McCaul. I am correcting you.
Ms. Sanchez. Well, we have a difference of opinion.
Second, you said earlier when I asked you about where the
Department was with respect to supporting 2899, and I asked you
specifically, are they for that bill? Are they supportive of
that bill, or are they just supportive about obviously, trying
to get to this terrorism, whether it is international or
domestic? With all due respect, Mr. Chairman, you said it was
with respect to the bill. I am looking at the letter that was
sent to you by Secretary Johnson where nowhere in that does he
mention in any way H.R. 2899.
Third, I am always concerned when we are thinking about
making new bureaucracy, especially in a Department where we
have some of the lowest morale, where we have had issues with
respect to headquarters and where everybody is in different
places with a whole array of having put 22 agencies into one
Department at the start and now creating more agencies and more
pieces of the bureaucracy. I didn't vote for the Homeland
Security creation Department bill, but here we go adding on to
the whole problem.
By the way, in the letter from the Secretary, he mentions
that research on this is done in the Science and Technology
Directorate; engagement is done by the Office of Civil Rights
and Civil Liberties; and the Office of Infrastructure
Protection within the National Protection and Programs
Directorate; threat analysis is done by the Office of
Intelligence and Analysis; training for Federal, State, local,
Tribal, and territorial law enforcement by the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center; grant support by the Federal
Interagency Management Agency. I mean, he lists all of the
different types of pieces within the existing framework that
are actually working on this.
Last, let me tell you that I have a problem with a bill
like 2899 when it goes after a particular group. The reason I
say this is, remember, that I come from the district where the
FBI put in undercover agents to go into our mosques and
infiltrate our Muslim youth in my district and initiate and
tried to entrap, in a sense, these youth to do terrorism or to
radicalize. Guess what? We caught it. We caught it. The
interesting thing was that my imams, my people heading those
mosques, when they found out that this was going on with their
youth, actually turned in the perpetrators of doing this to the
FBI, unknowingly turning in the people the FBI had put in those
mosques.
So I do have a problem when we are singling out just one
group.
Chairman McCaul. Will the gentlelady point out in the bill
where it singles out a single group?
Ms. Sanchez. You know, we can----
Chairman McCaul. Because that doesn't exist. It says all
forms of extremism. It does not point out a specific group.
Ms. Sanchez. You know, Mr. Chairman, if we are going to
mark up the bill----
Chairman McCaul. If you are going to make an allegation, be
correct in your allegation.
Ms. Sanchez. If we are going to mark up the bill, I will
have a lot to say during the mark-up.
Chairman McCaul. We are not in the bill.
Ms. Sanchez. When we get to that bill----
Chairman McCaul. These attacks, I have to respond. Be
correct in your allegations.
Ms. Sanchez. Mr. Chairman, when we are at the mark-up, I
will definitely talk about where and how that happens because I
will have several discussions on that.
Anyway--and I yield back. I just wanted to voice my
concerns with respect to not having a process, I think, that
is--with all due respect, Mr. Chairman, because you and I have
worked on many things before. I just find it rushed from my
perspective.
Thank you, and I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. I do have to respond briefly.
We had a committee--a full committee hearing on February
11, countering violent extremism. We have had many hearings to
talk about the issue. The bill says all forms of extremism. It
does not single out a single group. Now, we streamline it--to
your point about it being so diverse and so many different
departments, that is exactly what the bill does. We streamlined
it and prioritized.
Finally, in my conversations with Mr. Johnson, he expressed
his general support for legislation that deals with this issue.
With that, the Chair now recognizes Ms. McSally.
Ms. McSally. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate your leadership on this issue, and I will just
comment to say, although we are hearing a lot about not wanting
to rush anything today, I think the situation is urgent. I
thank our witnesses for highlighting the urgency of the
situation. We have certainly seen the uptick going on for the
last few years and then more recently in the last 6 months.
If we continue to work at the speed of Government and
bureaucracy, as we are watching this threat metastasize and
grow in a very sophisticated way, then they are moving at the
speed of broadband, as we said earlier, then we are going to
continually be behind. So I really appreciate the testimony
today and the leadership on this issue because we have to
address it.
You know, we talk about the number of people that are
working on it. I appreciate the discussion on resources.
Previously, Government officials said there was a total of 16
people across the Government that were working on countering
violent extremism, which included 6 from DHS, plus NCTC, DOJ,
and others. Recently those officials have not given us some
great, and I am being sarcastic, news that the number in DHS is
up to potentially 15 people, which would--I am sorry. From 6,
up to 15, which would then put the number at 24, 24 total
people across the Government that are focusing on this issue
with 20,000 IRS agents running around to make sure you don't
take an improper home office deduction.
So we know what the number--we don't know exactly what the
number is, but we know what it is not, and it is not somewhere
between 16 and 24. So I appreciate the testimony today to talk
about that.
I know a lot of issues have been discussed already. I am
uniquely wanting to hear, Ms. Pandith, from your perspective as
a woman. You said you have been to 80 countries addressing this
issue. I have been deployed to many Middle Eastern countries,
many predominantly Muslim countries myself in the military. I
am interested to see, especially as a woman, especially when
you are dealing with some of this fundamentalist views of the
role of women and the challenges that we have there, just if
you have had any challenges, even with access and how you have
been treated as you have been doing this research as a woman.
I also am interested specifically about whether we need to
engage differently with girls and young women being recruited
versus men? It has been noted that of the 600 or so Western
girls that have traveled to be, you know, recruited to Iraq and
Syria, only 2 have made it out, where other reports show that
up to 30 percent of the male foreign fighters are actually
flowing out. So, you know, while men may thinking they are
signing up to fight, women are signing up to be raped and
sexual slavery. So is there a different element of how we are
going to address this related to the recruitment of girls
versus boys?
Ms. Pandith. So thank you for the question. It is a very
personal one, but I will answer it for you. A lot of people
asked me when I was special representative, why did the United
States Government pick a female, a Muslim, an American to do
this job? I feel very honored to have had the chance to serve
my country in this way, and it was a remarkable experience.
Obviously, traveling to 80 countries, you see a lot, and my
life will never be the same. Again, I will never see the world
this way again.
But on your specific question about being a woman, I tell
you what, as a senior Government American official, I was given
access anywhere I needed. But I got to do something that a man
couldn't do. I was able to go into very conservative
environments with women and talk with them candidly about what
is taking place. I would argue that had a man been in this job
when I was doing what I was doing, they could not have had the
access.
Ms. McSally. But were you also able to talk to the men?
Ms. Pandith. Yes.
Ms. McSally. Okay.
Ms. Pandith. There was no issue. I mean, of course, as you
well know, there are certain countries in the world in which
there are cultural components. I couldn't always shake the
hands of the people that I was dealing with. But everybody was
interested in making sure that they heard--that the American
Government heard what they were experiencing. They wanted to
make sure that I could take that back to the Secretary of
State, and I was able to do that.
There was never a case--I do remember I was in Sudan at one
point, and there was a university visit I was going to go to.
The men and women were going to be in two different rooms, and
they didn't want to do this. But because I came in, they
allowed both boys and girls to come together. The Embassy was
very, very surprised; how did this happen? But there are more
opportunities like that that did happen that afforded me the
opportunity--the chance to actually see things in a new way.
I do want to talk to you about the girls and the women and
the radicalization and sort-of what they are signing up for. I
spoke to someone earlier today, Mr. Keating, about this effort
on how women get radicalized and what particularly is happening
there. There is far more work to be done, not just about the
research. Seamus and I agreed. We have done a lot of the work.
We do know a lot after 14 years. We don't know enough about
what is happening with the females. You are seeing younger and
younger girls interested in going to Syria and, in fact, you
know, radicalizing in different ways, which means that the way
in which the bad guys are luring those kids in on-line and off-
line is very specific. So we do need to do more around that and
understand those counternarratives.
The final point I will say is this: We don't have enough
female voices globally that can talk to girls about what it is
that is happening. We are hearing the human rights groups speak
about the rape, speak about using their wombs as weapons of
mass destruction, frankly. You are hearing all these
conversations in ISIS land about what this means for girls, but
we haven't been able to move those narratives to a place where
young girls are hearing it and makes a difference for them, and
we have to do more.
Ms. McSally. Great. Thank you.
My time has expired. I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. I thank the gentlelady.
The Chair now recognizes Miss Rice.
Miss Rice. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Hughes, I want to go back to something that was raised
by my colleague, Mr. Donovan, in terms of what happened in
Denver and your going there to do that community awareness
briefing.
You know, Mr. Donovan asked you about those people who are
recognizing in their children a radicalization process, and to
whom do they go to get help? My concern is the parents who are
not as in tune with their kids and are totally missing the
signs, and they truly are the first line of defense. These
community awareness briefings, the one you did in Denver
obviously came after the fact. I am sure it was well-attended
because all of a sudden, people are going: Oh, my God, this
could be my kid.
But how do you get--Dan and I have tried to do--you know,
we do community briefings like this, I can't tell you on the
subject--and 5 or 6 people will show up because it hasn't
affected them yet personally. So how do we, as part of the CVE
effort, how do we proactively get people--and Ms. Pandith--I
have a second question for you, but you were mentioning this as
well. How do you get a community involved to believe that it
could be your child or your loved one or your friend or your
neighbor?
Mr. Hughes. Stories. Stories matter. I have done about 2
dozen community awareness briefings around mid-level to large
cities around the country. I used to do it, and it was just
attack statistics. So X number of plots of attack military
bases and X number of cases involve men and things like that.
People's eyes would glaze over, and no one would listen to me.
When I started relating this back into a human aspect of it,
the first American suicide bomber in Syria was a guy named Mo
at some point in Tampa whose mother helped him get his GED at
the kitchen table every night. Fast forward a year later, he is
blowing himself up and killed 19 soldiers in Syria. When you
make it a human story, people start listening, and you have to
make it relatable.
They may not think that it is going to be their kid, but
they may think it might be their neighbor's kid, something like
that. You have to figure out a way to make people understand
that there is an ownership here.
In terms of how do you get people in the room, it really
comes down to trust. So if I wanted to go to Pittsburgh, but I
had no contacts in there, I would call, you know, my community
friends in Sacramento, who would then call their community
friends in Houston, who would then call Pittsburgh, they would
vouch for me. I would go out, and there would be 10 people
there, but I would pass the test. The next time I would go,
there would be 100 people because everyone has said: Okay, this
Government guy, he gets it. He is not going to vilify the
community on these issues. He is going to talk in a very
nuanced way about the threat and ways that Government and
communities can partner on that. Because if you don't do that,
you have lost your partners in that.
Miss Rice. Thank you, Mr. Hughes.
Ms. Pandith, I just have to say that I, as my colleague,
Mrs. Torres, saw you earlier--actually, late last year in
Boston, I am sure I speak for--I hope I speak for everyone on
this committee, massively impressed with you. I think you are a
voice that has been loud but unheard by most people in this
country.
You said that we know--you said in your written testimony
that we know exactly what needs to be done to counter violent
extremism. My question to you is: Will another level of
bureaucracy help do that? You said one of the biggest mistakes
is not--well, going to communities as the credible voices. But
you said one of the biggest mistakes is not funding the local
groups that are within the communities with either Governmental
money or philanthropic money. But you also give a laundry of
list of things that you say we can do. So how do we implement
it? How do we say finally say, yes, you are heard. Someone who
has traveled, as Ms. McSally pointed out, to 80 countries, you
have such a wealth of knowledge about exactly what needs to be
done. How do we implement that?
Ms. Pandith. That is very kind of you, and I appreciate
your words. I have really great--we have all worked together.
There are many of us who have understood from the grass roots--
--
Miss Rice. I wasn't just pointing out Ms. Pandith because
she is a woman.
No offense to you.
Ms. Pandith. Really great stuff. We did a briefing in
Boston. But what I was going to say, it is not rocket science.
That is what I was trying to say in my written testimony. I
think right after
9/11, we were alarmed, and we didn't know what to do, and we
were sort of grasping at different things. But this idea of
ideology began to take some form. We called it the war of ideas
at that time. What we did is we pulled back from that, and we
weren't creative. So we were going at things from a very, as
you said, a bureaucratic way, and it was really stovepiped,
people weren't talking to each other.
You asked a critical question: If you do something in
Government, where you build a bigger bureaucracy, will it not
allow the creative juices to flow? That is key. I think you can
do it right. I actually believe very strongly that because we
haven't had the kind of leadership in Government where there is
one-stop shop, really, where does the buck stop? Who is
accountable to Congress? How do we look at this? It has
actually become really complicated to do this.
So in terms of malleability, the things that we can do on
the ground with money that is not necessarily U.S. Government
tainted money, how do you actually do it? I think that those
partnerships that we are building through both trust and
ingenuity means that we have to open up the gates a little bit
more.
We hear a lot about letting a thousand flowers bloom. You
hear that from people, but at the end of the day, people keep
bugging me: Well, so can you prove that if you did that for 6
months, you are going to see change? One of the things that
Hillary Clinton said to me when I was special representative
is, I know everything isn't going to bloom, but I want you to
try. That is what our embassies were able to do. We need to
flip this. We need our embassies to be able to know that they
can try experimentally a lot of different things on the ground,
and we need to give them money to be creative and do it. In
that way, we can partner in new ways; we can seed new things;
and you are going to see changes.
The bad guys are moving unbelievably fast, and Government
goes unbelievably slowly. So you need that kind of--that gear
that can move a little bit fast in a very, very nimble way, as
the gentleman was talking about earlier. It is possible. We
have seen small-scale answers to this. The problem is
everything hasn't been hyper-charged to see what it would be
like to have a momentum consistently 24/7 in that way.
Miss Rice. Well, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean,
the other side is very hyper-charged, and we see how effective
they have been. We have been woefully lacking in counteracting
that. Thank you all very much.
I yield back my time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman McCaul. The Chair recognizes Mr. Carter.
Mr. Carter. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have got--I am going
to do this a little bit different from the way I normally do
it. I am going to actually give you the opportunity, Ms.
Pandith and Mr. Hughes, to talk and to respond.
I have got just a couple of questions, first of all.
Mr. Hughes, following up on my colleagues' questions about
Denver, I am still concerned about that because it seems like
it is after the fact. We got lucky there. Wouldn't you agree?
Mr. Hughes. Yes.
Mr. Carter. So why aren't we doing more of that now? Why is
it that we were there after the fact, after they had already
been on the plane, and after we got them back? I mean, that
seems like the logical thing of what we should be doing.
Mr. Hughes. There is an easy answer to that. Like the
gentlewoman said, there is a handful of people in the Federal
Government working on CVE, and there is a shoestring budget
without a shoe or a string. You literally couldn't be able to
cover the number of places you want to go to, which is why the
White House did a pilot program, which they did trial-and-
error, and they have done enough error and enough trial to make
sure what makes sense in the next type of wave on it.
Mr. Carter. Before I get to Ms. Pandith, I want to ask you
one more thing. It is my understanding that specifically, with
one of the many violent groups that we have out there, when we
talk about ISIS, that one of the things that we have been doing
to counteract them as far as the social media is concerned is
we have had kind of a tit-for-tat approach with the tweets. Is
that working?
Mr. Hughes. I would defer to my colleague from the State
Department on the international side. On the domestic side, I
think there is a lot more we can be doing. So, right now, you
have a State Department CSCC program that is doing kind of
``think again, turn away'' counternarrative programs. They have
had their ebbs and flows on success on that.
On the domestic context, when we talk about Americans who
are watching the stuff on-line, there is at least two things
the U.S. Government can do tomorrow to figure this out. First
thing is they need to give community partners the left and
right latitude of what they can do on-line. So if you are an
imam from Pittsburgh, and you want to do countermessaging on-
line to a bunch of kids on ISIS, you are not going to because
you are terrified you are going to end up on a watch list. So
we need to tell them what the right and left latitudes are,
what is acceptable to do on-line that you won't run against
your local FBI office. That is the first kind-of easy thing you
can do, a 2- to 3-page type of legal guidance from the
community on that.
The second thing we can do, and Farah will talk about this,
I think, is about that convening power. The White House,
departments and agencies have an amazing ability to bring
people together. So you can bring social media providers with
those credible voices that Farah talked about and hope that
there is something good to come out of this. So credible voices
know what the message is; social media knows how to get the
message out.
I was in Sacramento 8 months ago, and an imam, after we
talked for a while, he raised his hand and said: Seamus, I am
going to counter ISIL messaging.
I said: That is great. How are you going to do it?
He goes: I am going to hold a phone, and I am going to
record a video and I am going to explain to them why they are
wrong.
I said: That is great, sir. I really appreciate that you
are interested on this issue, but no one is going to watch it.
No one is going to watch you with your video camera there.
But if I can connect you with social media providers who
know how to use the space, who know how to connect your video
with--that if type in ``Anwar al-Awlaki,'' you are going to get
that video that pops up there. There are small little pockets
of things that we could do tomorrow to solve this problem that
wouldn't cost a dime.
Mr. Carter. That is exactly what I am looking for because
all I have heard today is: We need to throw more money on it.
I am telling you, I am not going to be in favor of that
unless I see results.
Ms. Pandith, you plan to be--to travel to 80 different
countries. I am so impressed. I have been to two myself. That
is one too many because I like the one that I have spent most
of this time in. Nevertheless, I want to hear in the minute and
10 seconds left that I have here, which for a committee like
this, that is an eternity, but nevertheless, I want to hear
specific, specific succinct programs that you have experienced
overseas that you feel like could work here.
Ms. Pandith. So I am going to be very biased and tell you
that we have seeded several programs at the Department of State
that have promise. When I left the Department of State, I gave
all my programs to outside entities so that they could bloom.
One of them is at the U.S. Institute of Peace. It is called
Generation Change. It has 30 chapters around the world of more
than 600 young Muslims under the age of 30 who want to push
back against extremist ideology. Why aren't we scaling that up?
Another program that we seeded is called Viral Peace. It is
teaching young kids on-line how to push back in their own
voices and in their own ways. It is what Seamus said: You can't
do it in a very hard way. You need to do it from peer to peer.
It has to be attractive to them. It needs to make sense. So
Viral Peace is a program that learns how--that teaches kids how
to push back on-line. It is now living at Harvard University. I
could go on, sir.
There are things that we seeded in the United States
Government with U.S. taxpayer dollars that are living outside
of Government right now that can be scaled up.
On the question you asked about efforts in other parts of
the world, there are hotlines for parents that they can call to
learn about things. This piece about mental health is
critically important. We can copy those kinds of things here.
There are narratives that have to do with culture, and the
pushback against a monolith of Islam that can come back to our
country as well because the bad guys want to eradicate the
diversity of Islam.
Finally, I would be wrong not to say this to all of you.
The ecosystem that has been growing for more--for 20 decades--
20 years, 2 decades--is the ecosystem that has allowed this
stuff to grow. As Americans, we have to be clear about what is
happening in mosques around the world and with textbooks that
are being sent by our allies to citizens all over the world
that is influencing the way these young kids think. That is
part of it as well, sir.
Mr. Carter. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for your
work.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this bill because I believe
our intent is exactly what she is describing here.
I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. I thank the gentleman.
The Chair recognizes Mr. Langevin.
Mr. Langevin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to thank our panel for the discussion today, the
testimony. This has been very informative, and it is a
significant challenge that we face. You know, it is hard to
prove what you have prevented. But, clearly, we have to invest
in these types of efforts because if we are silent, then the
only message they hear is the radical ones, the ones that
encourage. We have to have something on the other side to
counter that, the violent extremist message. The more effective
we can do that, the better off we are all going to be.
Mr. Cohen, let me start with you, and then Ms. Pandith,
maybe you would want to comment as well. But in your testimony,
you mentioned that the number of hate groups have been dropping
in the last couple of years, and you posit that it is partly as
a result of individuals moving out of groups and into
cyberspace. As more and more radicalization takes place on the
web, of course, it may be more difficult for DHS and other
agencies to engage with communities in a traditional manner,
what advice do you give the administration on countering
radicalization on-line, particularly among communities with no
desire to engage with Government at all?
Mr. Cohen. Well, I think it is very important for the
Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, to
monitor the chatter that is on the net, not just simply the
chatter that comes from Muslim extremists, but really from
other forms of extremism. I think it is important to train law
enforcement officers and so they understand the nature of those
threats.
I am a little skeptical about the ability to put in kind-of
counternarratives on-line aimed at non-jihadi or non-Islamic
domestic extremists. I think they are kind of a counterculture.
I think Ms. Pandith is right, sometimes hearing from former
extremists will help them. I do think that it is a larger
problem, again, with our educational programs, our churches. I
think there is a tremendous backlash that is going on in this
country to our changing demographics. Going through--we are
going through big changes, and a lot of people are, you know,
reacting to that. I think in the long run, the answers are, you
know, going to be found in our churches and in our schools,
quite frankly.
Mr. Langevin. Thank you.
Mr. Hughes. I would just jump in. I interviewed a kid, a
22-year-old kid, from Virginia named Zack Chester, who is
currently spending 25 years at Supermax for trying to join a
terrorist group, al-Shabaab, in Somalia. I said Zack, normal
kid, nice family, good upbringing.
I asked him, I said: Zack, how did you get here? How did
you become radicalized? Did someone try to pull you out of it?
His quote was something along the lines of: You know, one
person briefly pulled me away, but the pull of the internet was
too strong.
So he had this echo chamber, right. He had people telling
him, what you are thinking is right, what you're thinking is
right, what you're thinking is right, and nobody else was
coming in to throw in another view. You walked yourself off to
only agree with people that agree with you. So I think we need
to figure out a way to kind-of pierce that circle, or we are
going to have more kids like Zack Chester.
Ms. Pandith. The only other thing I would say is that the
greatest strength of America is the ability for us to pull
coalitions together. We do that really, really well. There are
very few countries in the world that are able to match our
skill at doing that. So when you ask the question, what advice
do we have, and how does the Government bring people together
that may not want to talk with us? There are different layers
of that. So when you think about the coalitions that could be
built that can actually interface with communities that may not
want a direct contact with the United States Government but do
have trust with other parts of that community through the
coalitions, it is a start, and it opens up the conversation.
Things don't happen overnight, sir, and you know that as
well as I do. But what we have seen around the world and which
groups and in our country too that are nervous about their own
Government, that are nervous about why people are wanting to
talk to them, they might be more willing to have some quiet
conversations with people that they are comfortable with before
they get in front of sort of a larger audience.
Mr. Langevin. Thank you.
You know, in all of your testimony, you make reference to
the use of technology, both as an avenue for radicalization and
a tool for countermessaging. Do you believe that current CVE
efforts make adequate use of technology? How can we better
leverage technology in attempting to identify and counter
extremist messages?
Ms. Pandith. Our ideas are stale. They are uneven, and
Government is not equipped to keep up with the millennials that
are using technology, and things are changing at a very fast
pace. So when I think about sort-of the right personnel and how
we do things, we were talking about the messaging center. You
know, it would be ridiculous for the American Government not to
try to do something. But you cannot keep up with the pace of
the kind of machinery, the social media machinery, that is out
there, which means that you need surrogates to be able to do
this in a more real way without the seal of the United States
State Department at the end of every video.
Mr. Langevin. Anyone else?
Mr. Hughes. For the domestic context, I don't think there
has been much movement on social media efforts on that. You
have had ebbs and flows when it comes to bringing in social
media providers to help do trainings for communities that
interested in this.
On the other hand, there is other ways to do technology. So
that community awareness briefing right now is a PowerPoint
presentation. There is no reason why it can't be an app, it
can't be interactive, and things like that. We can scale up on
those types of things very easily.
Mr. Langevin. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. Mr. Loudermilk is recognized.
Mr. Loudermilk. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thanks to the panel.
I have just got a couple of real quick questions, coming in
at the end of this thing.
First of all, let me say, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate you
bringing this bill forward. In response to some of the
criticism that I have heard just in the brief time I have been
here, I have attended numerous, numerous, numerous briefings
inside the SCIF, inside of this room, and inside of other rooms
that I know every Member has been invited to, and quite often,
there is only a handful of Members in there. Whether it was
specifically about CVE, whether it was about countering
terrorism, CVE became an issue that we have been dealing with
since I have been in this Congress. This is nothing new. It is
something that we have talked about over and over and over
again. When you look at the number of arrests, the number of
terrorist attacks, the number of investigations, the number of
those that are traveling to join extremist organizations, this
is a very dangerous time that we are taxing our law
enforcement. Our counterterrorism officials are being taxed.
They are doing a tremendous job. I can't believe how well a job
that they are doing to protect us in the way that they have.
But we are seeing more and more incidents because of the
recruiting because of the extremism that we are seeing, the
converging of youth. We must do something, and we must do it
now. So the idea that this is all of a sudden something that
has popped up with one hearing is just unbelievable.
So, my question to Ms. Pandith, Mr. Hughes, if we pass this
legislation, and we start moving in this direction to actually
have a viable, workable, CVE effort in this Nation, how long
would it take for us to get everything up and running and
actually begin to start hopefully seeing results? I know it is
hard to measure this, but we have got to provide some relief to
our law enforcement by stopping the radicalization process,
which would take away at least the inventory of some of those
who would perpetrate these.
Ms. Pandith. So, obviously, it is super-hard to answer that
question in terms of time frame. Appointing a one-stop shop in
the Government to do this doesn't mean that we are turning the
switch and everything is going to be okay, obviously.
But I will say to you, that it will help us to look at the
full map of all the things that we have done. We have not done
a mapping exercise. We have not assessed everything the United
States has done on that conveyer belt toward the recruitment
and how to stop it from happening. So getting eyes around that,
the way you have a general looking at a physical plan in terms
of a battle, we need that kind of rigor and respect in that
space around the ideological piece. So how long will it take? I
can't answer that question, but I know that having that kind of
uniform approach, getting our ducks in a row, and making people
accountable is going to go a long way to get us to where we
need to be.
Mr. Loudermilk. Without this, in your opinion, we would not
get any closer to actually putting together a viable CVE
effort, which is basically nonexistent at this point?
Ms. Pandith. I think you have to have direction and a real,
real strategy on what we are doing around this and understand
what it is we have done, and really understand, as I said, the
mapping exercise of what is it that we have done, where are the
black holes, and what is it we need to do and somebody
accountable for all of that--all of those pieces.
Mr. Loudermilk. Mr. Hughes, do you have anything to add?
Mr. Hughes. I would agree with every point that Farah made.
I would also say that from the domestic context, you know,
right now, we have the departments and agencies beg, borrowing,
and stealing wherever they could in order to get personnel and
ideas from it. You have a coalition of folks who deeply care
about this issue and don't want the only example only way to
solve an issue about terrorism to be the hard tactics, but it
is just that small group of people that are desperately trying
to do that. So we need to figure out a way to empower them to
be able to have these type of conversations so we can move away
from--you know, hard tactics are going to always be there,
always going to be bad guys that we are going to have to do
what we do on that. But there is a whole spectrum of activity
before that where we could do something if given the right
direction and budget.
Mr. Loudermilk. Yes, ma'am.
Ms. Pandith. Just one other thing. One element here we
haven't talked about is the forward thinking. It is not just
what is happening now and that person who is looking at what we
are doing right now, but understanding what the threats are
going to be and how they are going to change. We haven't been
able to keep up with that. So that is part of this as well.
Mr. Loudermilk. Mr. Cohen, any reason why we shouldn't?
Mr. Cohen. Well, the only thing that I would add is the
idea of a mapping, the idea of taking an inventory of our
resources, it is obviously a good idea. I just think it ought
to be extended to the resources that we are devoting to a non-
Islamic extremism.
Mr. Loudermilk. But you are not opposed to what this bill
and what we are trying to attempt with it?
Mr. Cohen. I am not sure I can speak to that completely. I
do think it is important to hear from the Department of
Homeland Security about its views about this. I think it is
important to deal with the privacy concerns as well.
Mr. Loudermilk. Okay. Thank you.
I yield back.
Chairman McCaul. Let me thank the witnesses. It has been a
very healthy and informative discussion, and I appreciate your
patience with some of the in-fighting, which we normally don't
have on this committee, but unfortunately, today we did. But it
is a very important issue. It needs to be a priority. I don't
think, as Mr. Hughes says, we can afford to wait any longer,
which is why we are moving forward today with this.
I just can't thank you all enough for being here. The
Members may have questions in writing, and I would ask that you
respond to those. The record will be open for 10 days.
Just to note for the Members, we are going to take a break
now because we will be voting in about 10 minutes, and then,
after the votes series, we will return for the mark-up.
Thank you again. This hearing stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:10 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
[all]