The U.S. Government Accountability Office is unable to say if the Department of Homeland Security’s politically correct approach to counterterrorism under President Obama actually accomplished anything.
The Countering Violent Extremism program took the focus off of radical Islam and treated right-wingers and Islamic extremists as equal threats. The program focused on education and was supposed to prevent radicalization by working with Muslim communities.
Under the program, DHS officials were instructed to avoid using terms like “sharia” or “jihad” in their counterterrorism efforts, in order to avoid alienating Muslims.
One CVE report published shortly before the Pulse nightclub shooting recommended countering violent extremism by focusing “on gender diversity of youth through careful attention to the range of push and pull factors that attract individuals of differing gender.” The same report recommended countering extremism by teaching youths “appropriate online etiquette.”
Counterterrorism experts criticized the CVE program on the grounds that it took ideological considerations out of counterterrorism work.
The GAO is unable to say if the CVE program actually accomplished anything.
“The federal government does not have a cohesive strategy or process for assessing the overall CVE effort,” reads a GAO report published this month, which was first highlighted by the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday. “Although GAO was able to determine the status of the 44 CVE tasks, it was not able to determine if the United States is better off today than it was in 2011 as a result of these tasks.”
“This is because no cohesive strategy with measurable outcomes has been established to guide the multi-agency CVE effort. Such a strategy could help ensure that the individual actions of stakeholder agencies are measureable and contributing to the overall goals of the federal government’s CVE efforts,” the 62-page report continues.
“The federal government also has not established a process by which to evaluate the effectiveness of the collective CVE effort. The CVE Task Force was established in part to evaluate and assess CVE efforts across the federal government, but has not established a process for doing so.”
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