FBI: Constitution Stands In Way of Government Thwarting “Extremist” Groups

 The FBI and federal law enforcement are stymied in detecting these groups by the First Amendment and political opposition “suspicious of the government’s motives,” the website reports.

 

The portrayal of military veteran and suspected Sikh temple shooter Wade Michael Page as a white supremacist has given new credence to the Department of Homeland Security’s debunked report on “rightwing extremism.” The 2009 report, initiated during the Bush regime, characterizes returning veterans as fodder for hate groups supposedly below the government’s radar.

“What is clear from the FBI surveillance and analysis of extremist groups in the United States, surveillance which intensified after 9/11, is that the U.S. government has considered neo-Nazi and white supremacists as genuine threats for many years,” the Homeland Security News Wire reports. Declassified FBI documents released through FOIA requests show that the government considers “these groups as threats for decades — so long in fact, that it has been lost on many that white supremacists, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, pioneered modern homegrown terrorism.”