ICAP’s Mary McCord & Joshua Geltzer Discuss Domestic Terrorism
The recent tragedies in El Paso and Dayton have reinvigorated calls for the federal government to confront more seriously the threat posed by domestic terrorism. ICAP’s Mary McCord and Joshua Geltzer have taken to the media to add their voices to the national conversation.
Mary has written in the past on the need for a federal domestic terrorism statute, noting the moral equivalency it would establish between domestic and international terrorism as well as the attendant increases in resources, budgeting, data analysis and record keeping that would come with it. She has also laid out a roadmap for passing a domestic terrorism statute, outlining the priorities Congress needs to focus on in order to make the change.
In recent days she appeared on television and in print to reiterate that call for a change in federal law. Check out some of her appearances on MSNBC with Ari Melber and Hallie Jackson, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and on CBS, as well as her words in:
· The New York Times:
“It’s a big blank spot,’ said Mary McCord, a former top national security prosecutor who has drafted a proposed statute to criminalize domestic terrorism not covered by existing laws.”
· The Washington Post
“When you use terrorism as a means to further your goals, whatever they may be, regardless of their content, that should be prosecuted as terrorism.”
· The Wall Street Journal
“I think that’s important for people to understand — that the threat of terrorism isn’t all from foreign terrorists organizations & Islamist extremists.”
· Buzzfeed:
“Americans tend to equate terrorism with Islamic extremism and, in today’s polarized environment, with Muslims. But they don’t tend to associate white supremacist violence with terrorism, and they should,” said McCord, a legal scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. “You can’t prevent what you don’t understand.”
· The Washington Times:
“Using undercover informants, running sting operations and disrupting a plot before it happens, that would come along with making this a federal crime.”
Meanwhile, ICAP’s Joshua Geltzer joined five other former National Security Council Senior Directors for Counterterrorism in issuing a statement calling on the government “to make addressing this form of terrorism as high a priority as countering international terrorism has become since 9/11.” He appeared on CNN, and the Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the statement, noting, “It’s hard [to stop this kind of terror attack] on the international level but it’s especially hard here on the domestic level. That’s in part because the Trump administration has rolled back some of the efforts to get at this problem earlier.” He also spoke with CBS and the UK’s Channel 4 News to discuss what makes Trump’s rhetoric distinctively dangerous, noting that “many politicians talk about immigration in ways that don’t verge into the racism we see from Donald Trump,” and appeared on the BBC to discuss making domestic terrorism a federal crime.
