From Mueller's speech to the ADL:
Your support of hate crime and terrorist investigations, which are now front and center in the work of the FBI, is essential to us. And the training and education you provide for the FBI and for law enforcement have never been more relevant. That includes the conference on extremist and terrorist threats you are sponsoring later this month at the FBI Academy. And it especially includes the classes at the Holocaust Museum that Abe and Jess helped arrange for our New Agents and for National Academy students. . .
Project Megiddo, the FBI’s "strategic assessment" of potential millennium-related domestic terrorism, represents a significant victory in the radical left’s "long march through the institutions" of U.S. law enforcement. The report, which was unveiled on November 2nd at a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police at Charlotte, North Carolina, has been distributed to law enforcement agencies nationwide. While no author is mentioned in the publicly available version of Project Megiddo, its contents are largely indistinguishable from the materials generated by leftist "watchdog" organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which regularly furnish law enforcement agencies with lurid reports intended to catechize law enforcement agencies about the supposed threat posed by the "radical right."
...While the Megiddo report is clearly a product of the FBI’s counter-terrorism center, there are strong indications that the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training SLATT) program was involved as well. As THE NEW AMERICAN recently reported, SLATT is funded, through the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR), by a grant from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). The SLATT program is an outgrowth of the 1996 post-OKC bombing anti-terrorism act; its purpose is to provide "anti-terrorism preparedness training" to state and local police agencies, including "pre-incident awareness" training to help identify potential terrorist threats.
Documents obtained by THE NEW AMERICAN under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that SLATT may have played a substantial role in composing Megiddo. IIR’s 1998 proposal for the "continuation and expansion" of the SLATT program states that the program’s main purposes include providing "state and local law enforcement … [with] a general awareness and working knowledge of domestic terrorist and ‘political’ extremist movements (including ideologies, illegal activities, tactics, and strategies), and provid[ing] an initial assessment of the threat potential posed by extremists...." The document refers to "individuals adhering to ‘patriot’ extremist or other domestic terrorist philosophies," indicating that, by SLATT’s definitions, those who espouse "extremist" views are ideational co-conspirators with those who commit crimes against persons or property.
Among SLATT’s purposes, according to the IIR’s grant proposal, are "early identification of extremist-generated illegal activities and tactics; recognition of extremist movements operating within a jurisdiction and lawful monitoring of such movements." It recommends the "establishment of an effective working relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the designated lead agency," and points out that "the SLATT Program and the many activities and tasks set forth herein are based on the continued participation of the FBI." In light of the FBI/SLATT relationship, it is significant that the "Background" section of the grant proposal reads very much like an early draft of Megiddo. That section asserts that "right-wing political and racist extremist groups have re-emerged [in recent years], mostly with new names, in somewhat different forms, and with variations in organization and differing tactics" than those used by previous groups in the 1980s. "Extremists" can be recognized, according to the SLATT grant proposal, as those who "identify with one or more of the following philosophies: anti-tax, anti-federal government, anti-state government, anti-authority, anti-world alliances, pro-racial purity, pro-white supremacy, anti-Semitic, and a fear of loss of Constitutional rights … with an equal fear of a one world order...."