Clint Watts: Our Elected Officials Are Targeting Institutions Like International Terrorists Have Done in the Past

EXCERPT:

WATTS: “What's fascinating is ten years ago we would be talking about Anwar al-Awlaki. He would make pronouncements online, he would designate targets in America, and then supporters who have no direct contact with him would try and take up violence on behalf of that cause. Now what we're seeing is our elected officials targeting institutions, federal employees, in a very similar way, or what I worry about most heading into the fall is election workers and polling places. I really think that’s going to be a frightening period for us, and they have no resources and very limited ability to secure and protect themselves. We can do this, though. We did it over the last decade. We developed an international terrorism operation center and, you know, processes for detecting things online and then interdicting them in person. You saw that happen today, but it’s still not done seamlessly in the way that we would do it if it’s international terror because we don’t have a domestic terrorism law, without a law you can’t designate domestic terrorist groups, and you can’t also, at the FBI level, open cases that are inspired cases, meaning it’s much more difficult to say domestic terrorism-inspired cases when you can’t really put a name on it. So it always puts the FBI or law enforcement in general on a rearward rather than a proactive footing."