Were the Sikh Temple Killings Preventable?
This past Monday, when FBI Special Agent Teresa Carlson briefed reporters on the shooting rampage at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that left six people dead, she said law enforcement had no prior indication that the shooter, Wade Michael Page, had been dangerous. “As far as I know, no law enforcement agency had any reason to believe that he was planning or plotting or capable of such violence,” she said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which maintains an archive of published material from white supremacists and other hate groups, says that Page, who played in white supremacist rock bands and was involved with a skinhead group called the Hammerskins, began showing up in their database as early as 10 years ago. “There are hundreds of people involved in neo-Nazi groups and skinhead bands, maybe thousands, who say and write the kind of violent things that this guy did,” notes Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “The ability to figure out who is going to actually do [violence] is not easy. This stuff is protected [speech] and most people don’t commit violence.”
It’s impossible to know for sure whether law enforcement could have detected Page’s plot in advance. But former Department of Homeland Security analyst Daryl Johnson thinks DHS may have bypassed the opportunity. “If he was on Stormfront or any of these other forums that cater to white supremacists and was talking about violent things, we might have been able to pick up on that and refer it over to the FBI,” says Johnson. Page also met several of the criteria, such as military training, that Johnson says appeal to recruiters for extreme right-wing groups.
DHS used to monitor those forums. Working under DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Johnson headed a team of analysts devoted to ferreting out domestic terrorism. Several of their referrals, he says, led to criminal cases. But conservatives went ballistic over his team’s 2009 report on the threat posed by right-wing extremists.
Concern that monitoring of “extremists” could result in spying on Americans engaged in lawful political activity is legitimate, since it’s certainly happened before. And while Johnson’s report was meant to focus on violent right-wing extremist groups—not your average Republican voter—conservative commentators still felt persecuted. They claimed Napolitano and President Barack Obama were targeting mainstream conservatives and Tea Party activists. Hot Air blogger Ed Morrisey wrote that the report was an attempt to “smear half of the country or more as kooks for criticizing the government’s handling of the economy.” Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin called it “a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”