(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
By James Rainey
The report from the Department of Homeland Security three years ago asserted that right-wing extremist groups were on the ascent and might seek to recruit disaffected veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conservatives from Rep. John A. Boehner to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage accused the Obama administration and its security apparatus of pretending to hunt for terrorists while really engaged in a thinly veiled plot to stifle the emerging tea party movement.
The furor became so intense, particularly over the suggestion that military veterans could become the instruments of domestic terror, that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized. Her agency, responding to the backlash, steered away from intensive focus on far-right groups. It disbanded the five-member “domestic terrorism” team that drafted the report, replacing it with a single person.
The backpedaling by the Obama administration all seems more than a little misguided then and looks even more so now, after six people died at the hands of a onetime Army washout (not a combat veteran) who had fallen under the thrall of extremist hate groups.