U.S. Officials Can’t Confirm Obama-Era Counter-Terror Efforts Ever Succeeded

Washington Free Beacon  "Federal authorities have no way to measure whether years-long efforts to combat violent extremists have proven effective, according to a new government oversight report that is prompting calls for the Trump administration to scrap Obama-era efforts to downplay the threat of radical Islamic terrorists in its counter-terrorism operations.

"A years-long investigation by federal oversight officials has determined the U.S. government has failed to establish any method to determine if the Obama administration's Countering Violent Extremism plan, or CVE, has had any tangible impact on the U.S. fight to prevent terror attacks.

"The CVE program, a creation of the Obama administration, has long come under criticism by national security experts and lawmakers for its intentional efforts to downplay the threat of Islamic radicals and instead focus on activities by far-right extremists and others. President Donald Trump has criticized these omissions and vowed to revamp counter-terror efforts so they name and target Islamic terrorists.

"While the federal CVE program has suffered from disarray for some time, federal investigators have concluded that, since its inception, authorities across the government have failed to establish "a process by which to evaluate the effectiveness of the collective CVE effort," according to the report.

" '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," the report found.

"At this point, CVE programs have not been implemented to combat the rise of extremism is U.S. prisons and cannot produce evidence that authorities are learning from past attacks, according to the report.

" 'The federal government does not have a cohesive strategy or process for assessing the overall CVE effort," the report concludes.

"Federal investigators with the Government Accountability Office were "not able to determine if the United States is better off today than it was in 2011 as a result of these tasks," according to the report, which confirms criticism of the program made by lawmakers and others over the years. "This is because no cohesive strategy with measurable outcomes has been established to guide the multi-agency CVE effort."

"As the CVE program continues to suffer from an inability to gauge its effectiveness, the number of terrorism plots in the United States has only increased. The Trump administration in the past several months have either arrested or convicted a growing number of individuals tied to Islamic terrorists and extremists fighting in Syria.

"One senior congressional source familiar with the matter told the Washington Free Beacon that the latest report is damning and confirms the fears of many. The Obama administration's efforts to equate Islamic extremists with domestic groups have been wholly ineffective, the source said." . . .

Adam Kredo is senior writer for the Washington Free Beacon. Formerly an award-winning political reporter for the Washington Jewish Week, where he frequently broke national news, Kredo’s work has been featured in outlets such as the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and Politico, among others.