"Bigger threat than ISIS?" blared the teaser headline on CNN.com's splash page shortly after noon Eastern today. "DHS warns of domestic right-wing terror threat," added the subhead, beneath a stock photo of a K-9 police unit looking into the trunk of an automobile.
Here's how Evan Perez and Wes Bruer opened their CNN.com story (emphasis mine):
They're carrying out sporadic terror attacks on police, have threatened attacks on government buildings and reject government authority.
A new intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security this month and reviewed by CNN, focuses on the domestic terror threat from right-wing sovereign citizen extremists and comes as the Obama administration holds a White House conference to focus efforts to fight violent extremism.
Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the domestic terror threat from sovereign citizen groups as equal to -- and in some cases greater than -- the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, that garner more public attention.
The Homeland Security report, produced in coordination with the FBI, counts 24 violent sovereign citizen-related attacks across the U.S. since 2010.
The government says these are extremists who believe that they can ignore laws and that their individual rights are under attack in routine daily instances such as a traffic stop or being required to obey a court order.
They've lashed out against authority in incidents such as one in 2012, in which a father and son were accused of engaging in a shootout with police in Louisiana, in a confrontation that began with an officer pulling them over for a traffic violation. Two officers were killed and several others wounded in the confrontation. The men were sovereign citizen extremists who claimed police had no authority over them.
Among the findings from the Homeland Security intelligence assessment: "(Sovereign citizen) violence during 2015 will occur most frequently during routine law enforcement encounters at a suspect's home, during enforcement stops and at government offices."
Let's back up a bit and process this a little. You'll notice that Perez and Bruer insist that "[s]ome federal and local law enforcement groups" consider right-wing "sovereign citizens" as equal to if not a greater danger than ISIS-inspired radicals. Yet they do not disclose what groups exactly? Is this the official position of law enforcement entities or rather that of politically-operative interest groups like say a fraternal order of police? Perez and Bruer don't say although the point to a survey from two years ago:
A survey last year of state and local law enforcement officers listed sovereign citizen terrorists, ahead of foreign Islamists, and domestic militia groups as the top domestic terror threat.
The survey was part of a study produced by the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
Of course, even there, it must be admitted such a survey reflects what those officers subjectively feel are their greatest terror threats. It's not necessarily an accurate objective ranking of threats using all the available intelligence and some defined rubric for assessing threat.
That being said, police officers are right to be wary of lone-wolf attacks regardless of the underlying motivation. All the same, however, it's worth noting that the recent wave of Islamist terror attacks in Europe shows individuals connected to or in some way inspired by Islamist radicals attacking not a lone cop or two on the beat but "soft" civilian targets like the Charlie Hebdo office and a kosher grocery store in Paris, a cafe in Sydney, and a coffee shop and later a synagogue in Copenhagen.
Radical Islamist violence may incidentally involve the wounding or killing of police officers, but that does not seem to the primary target of such attacks. Again, police are right to be concerned about all kinds of inspiration for lone-wolf terror attacks, but it seems more likely, for example, that a civilian would be taken hostage in a cafe or attacked in a synagogue by an jihadist inspired by ISIS than by a "sovereign citizen" who harbors his hatred primarily for cops and politicians.
