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United States
OpinionComment
C. Uday Bhaskar
C. Uday Bhaskar

Opinion | Attack on US Capitol: two security time bombs for America revealed by committee report

  • White supremacists and extremism remain a powder keg that could be ignited in the next presidential election
  • Also, if someone like Trump could be placed in charge of the ‘nuclear button’, are US nuclear codes secure enough?

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Trump supporters push against barricades on January 6, 2021, at the US Capitol in Washington. Photo: TNS
C. Uday Bhaskar
January 6, 2021, will go down in history as the day the United States was shocked out of its self-image as a robust, liberal nation committed to democracy. On that tumultuous day, the rule of law and sanctity of the ballot in one of the world’s oldest democracies came under brutal assault and the lives of elected legislators were at grave risk. In an unprecedented development, a sitting president stoked a mob that included many white supremacists into rejecting the voter verdict and casting aspersions on the integrity of the government and electoral system.
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There are two security-related strands pertaining to the attack on the US Capitol. Fortuitously, the recent case of a foiled kidnapping plot targeting Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer provides an instructive frame of reference.

The first strand can be extrapolated from the Department of Justice’s statement on the Michigan case, which noted that Barry Croft Jnr had conspired to kidnap the governor using “weapons of mass destruction against persons or property, and knowingly possessing an unregistered destructive device, which was a commercial firework refashioned with shrapnel to serve as a hand grenade”.

The convicted members of the group who planned the kidnapping are part of a scattered mosaic of largely dormant militia across the US, most of whom believe that their government has become increasingly tyrannical or too left-liberal, and that citizen violence is the only defence against this oppression.

This divisive ideology of oppression is similar to what former president Donald Trump advocated in his vitriolic denunciation of his political opponents and was the core of the message communicated to his supporters in the run-up to the January 6 charge on the Capitol, the seat of the US legislature.

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The enormity of what Trump’s supporters had embarked upon to overturn US constitutional norms led to a House committee investigation. The findings of its 845-page report, released last month, are disturbing when it comes to America’s sociopolitical fabric.

As committee chairman Bennie Thompson noted in his foreword: “If this Select Committee has accomplished one thing, I hope it has shed light on how dangerous it would be to empower anyone whose desire for authority comes before their commitment to American democracy and the Constitution.” Expressing faith that “most Americans will turn their backs on those enemies of democracy”, he noted that “some will rally to the side of the election deniers”, including “white supremacists”, “violent extremists” and “groups that subscribe to racism, anti-Semitism and violent conspiracy theories”.

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