[hermit22]

I'd suggest that the reason right wing extremist groups were the target of so much FBI scrutiny is twofold: a) we can understand them as they're not of a different culture (maybe a subculture) and b) al Qaeda was not taken as seriously as it should have been. We underestimated their ability to target and carry out missions on our soil. Remember as well that up until 9/11, the largest terrorist attack on our soil was from Timothy McVeigh, who is very much a right wing extremist.

As for the justification for Homeland Security... I don't think it's necessarily correct that we need to create more bureacracy to combat terrorism. I think we need to streamline things. We need to follow a similar approach as terrorists do in organizational and attack structure. Obviously, we cannot allow for autonomous cells inside our government, but you can't fight a network with a monolithic structure. However, I do think that the information sharing strategies can be good for our fight against terrorism. On the other hand, they can be horrific for our privacy.

I'm going to stop here, because I just finished an entirely too long paper, part of which was on this networked approach (netwar). I don't want to get going on this topic and end up on some mindless ramble.