Inflammatory Committee Terror Report Helps McCain/Lieberman Target Obama

Chip Berlet
The Huffington Post

An inflammatory first report on the domestic threat of "violent Islamist extremism" issued a week ago via the Senate Committee on Homeland Security turns out not to have been drafted by the Committee at all. The report was drafted solely under the direction of Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (CT) -- a pro-war "Independent Democrat" -- and ranking Republican Susan Collins (ME). It appears that other members of the Committee, including Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), had no part in authoring the controversial document, titled: "Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorism Threat."

"Neither Senator Obama nor his staff had any input into the report," said the spokesperson in Obama's Washington, DC, office Wednesday evening.

The international news service Reuters carried a story identifying the report as coming from the Homeland Security Committee as a whole, and the confusion is understandable. Senator Collins's office in DC, however, stressed that "It was never a full Committee report" and that the cover and inside text of the report itself made that clear. The spokesperson added that "There is a lot of cooperation on this Committee, it is very bipartisan."

(Continued here.)