FOIA Re. White-Wing Terror To DHS Nets Paper On Threat To Pipelines From "Environmental Extremists"
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In a three-page letter, the FOIA office for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at DHS said its final response was the result of “a collaboration of thirteen analysis worked on domestic terrorism threats” — a garbled sentence that doesn’t make sense. (Was it referring to 13 different “analysts,” as in employees, or 13 “analyses,” as in reports?) After trying to explain how much work went into DHS’s response, the agency wrote that it could neither confirm nor deny whether any records existed that fit American Oversight’s parameters due to exemptions meant to protect “law enforcement techniques or procedures” and “intelligence sources and methods.”
As if its letter wasn’t confusing enough, DHS attached to its denial an official report — about “suspected environmental rights extremists.” The May 2017 “Field Analysis Report,” jointly produced by DHS and several state-level intelligence centers, accuses pipeline protesters of exploiting “Native American causes” to benefit their “own violent agenda” to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It documents a series of incidents in which protesters allegedly briefly shut down pipelines along the U.S.-Canada border; fired a gun several times into a portable toilet and a backhoe; and sabotaged heavy construction equipment on several pipeline construction sites. (American Oversight provided the response letter and the report to Rolling Stone.)
The report does not document any incidents resulting in loss of life or bodily injury suffered by any individuals. It does not mention right-wing extremism or any form of domestic terrorism apart from what it calls “environmental rights extremism.” A confusing denial and a report about pipeline attacks was the sum total of DHS’s response to a legitimate and timely request for information about right-wing extremism and the agency’s efforts to track and prevent it. In other words: Here’s all the work we did. We can’t give you any relevant documents. We can’t confirm or deny whether any such documents even exist. But here’s one random document that’s sort of relevant.
DHS’s response is bewildering on several levels. Why did the agency give multiple reasons for not releasing any information — and then provide a report on environmental extremism anyway? Why a report on environmental extremism as opposed to a more serious threat like, say, white supremacy or anti-government ideology? Who made the call to release just this one report to American Oversight? The FOIA officer for the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at DHS tells Rolling Stone that the agency’s inclusion of the environmental extremism report was “an administrative error.” The official added that DHS’s response to American Oversight “was less clear than it should have been” because it didn’t fully respond to all of the group’s requests. “We asked DHS how many people were assigned to analyze domestic terror threats, and they responded with a report about protecting pipelines from environmental activists,” Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s always possible this was a mistake, but with violent, white-nationalist extremism on the rise, this is information you’d expect an administration to have handy and to want to advertise if they were taking the threat seriously.”
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/white-nationalist-extremist-trump-dhs-environmentalist-869090/