Don’t rush terror work
New York’s Domestic Terrorism Task Force was supposed to start its work in November 2020. It hasn’t even met. Now, it faces a Sept. 1 deadline to issue a final report.
This is like one of those bad dreams where you realize you haven’t attended a class all semester and now the term paper is due, except the stakes are real, and a whole lot higher. It’s bad enough the task force has taken as long as it has to conduct a meeting; it would be far worse to try to cram two years’ worth of work into three months on an issue that is this complex as well as politically and constitutionally fraught.
The task force is now scheduled to hold its first meeting June 15. There is no good excuse for the delay in its startup: Plenty of government work went on through the pandemic and the upheaval in state government prompted by the resignation of Gov. Andrew Cuomo in August. The panel seems to have fallen off nearly everyone’s radar once the hoopla was done. Task force created; all’s well.
Except, of course, it isn’t — as we saw just last month with the mass killing of 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket in a minority community, allegedly by a shooter who espoused right-wing “Great Replacement Theory” — the idea that racial, ethnic and religious minorities are slowly taking over the United States as part of a plot to supplant the longstanding white Christian majority. For more terrorism, look to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.
The task force has much work to do, starting with setting clear parameters of what domestic terrorism means.
The ADL defines it as “a preplanned act or attempted act of significant violence by one or more nonstate actors” — in this case citizens or permanent U.S. residents — “in order to further an ideological, social or religious cause, or to harm perceived opponents of such causes.”
But who qualifies? Is it only, say, the person who shoots a gun or drives a car through a crowd of people, or mails out letter bombs? What about those who espouse the conspiracy theories and talk of violent solutions that motivate the terrorist? What about politicians and media personalities who repeat those ideas, overtly or in coded dog whistles? What about social media sites that host such conversations? Where is the dividing line between free speech and the plotting or enabling of domestic terrorism? Who will be marked for surveillance, and under what circumstances?
One has only to recall the uproar from Republicans in 2009 program to study potential radicalization of veterans returning from overseas wars by right-wing militias and other groups — groups whose anti-government, white nationalistic narratives have crept into mainstream conservative and Republican talking points — to see the complexity of this.
America has struggled with this issue at least since the 1995 bombing of Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It can’t be crammed into a few months of occasional meetings. The Legislature should fully appoint the task force and extend its for at least a year, if not the full two it was supposed to have. This is not the kind of assignment you pull off with the bureaucratic equivalent of an all-nighter.