Adfero Group HSPI

This week, the House Homeland Security Committee held its hearing examining the Boston Marathon bombing. Parts of the testimony at the hearing focused on the motives of the bombers and the current belief that the brothers Tsarnaev were radicalized Islamists. Congressman Peter King has focus on this issue, for which he has been regularly criticized. Has he been vindicated?

The House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing today to discuss the Boston Marathon bombings. Among the witnesses was Security Debrief contributor Erroll Southers. His testimony presents critical insight into homegrown violent extremism and the steps counterterrorism and law enforcement can and should take to better address the ever-present threat of terrorism.

We now have information on 800,000 people in our terrorist databases. We have “big data,” as the people would say who pretend to know something about it. Big Data, they often claim, will solve the problem. To my mind, we have a big search, analysis and distribution problem, and despite “big data” claims of prowess, connecting the dots before a terrorist strikes is never going to be an easy thing.

You may not have seen a recent article in Eurasia Review describing how Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is using Internet games to target children at an early age, luring them into extremist beliefs. While Congress is actively seeking ways to limit the extent of those violent acts, we have a moral obligation to consider how other proven sinister forces might be threatening – with the use of popular media – our children and those predisposed to manipulation.

The radical ideology that attracts people to sympathize with and engage in Islamist terrorism is all-too-often not given the weight it deserves. Two recent separate articulations on the vital need to do more to counter and actually triumph over extremist Islamist ideology deserve a close look, those of former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith at the Aspen Security Forum and HSPI Director Frank Cilluffo speaking before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs.

It has been almost a year since the death of Osama bin Laden. Though we are right to be proud in dispensing justice to the terrorist mastermind, it is no time to rest on our laurels. Al-Qaeda is weakened and scattered, but this has only led them to adjust their tactics. A particularly worrisome trend is al-Qaeda’s shift toward recruiting homegrown terrorists.

Senator Susan Collins ripped in to representatives of the Department of Defense this week. The issue was one so absurd that I could not believe it at first. The Department has categorized the Fort Hood Shootings where Major Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people as an example of “workplace violence.” The Senator responded rightly; she was not incredulous, she was livid. Calling this incident of terrorism workplace violence equates it with the proverbial postal employee gone wild. This was an act of Islamic terrorism.

The U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security held a joint hearing today with the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs entitled “Homegrown Terrorism: The Threat to Military Communities Inside the United States.” According to the Department of Defense, American soil is the most dangerous place for our service men and women outside of actual war zones due to radicalism and homegrown terrorism.

The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence has issued a report calling attention to a new threat to the U.S. homeland. Boko Harem has up to this point focused largely in Nigeria but has recently turned its violence toward international targets.

Recent developments in terror threats against the United States are at odds with the latest counterterrorism line coming out of the White House. We need some new thinking.

ABC News Video: In a sharp reversal of the Obama administration’s policy on trying Sept. 11 suspects in U.S. courts, mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-conspirators will be tried in a military commission at Guantanamo Bay.

We’ve got anti-Muslim accusations. We’ve got anti-American accusations. We’ve got anti-Peter King accusations. We’ve got charges of bigotry, racism and religious intolerance. We’ve got a New York Times magazine writer asserting that “America is a tinderbox of prejudice and fear.” In short, we’ve got a lot of hysteria.

Like any movement that spans continents and has millions of affiliates, the global Muslim Brotherhood is hardly a monolithic block. Personal and ideological divisions are common. Divergences emerge on how the movement should try to achieve its goals and, in some cases, even on what those goals should actually be.

A public forum will be hosted Tuesday on Capitol Hill discussing Attorney General guidelines for law enforcement domestic intelligence as it relates to homegrown radicalism. Participants include Rep. Rush Hold, Chairman of House Intelligence and Michael Isikoff, national investigative correspondent for NBC, among others.

FBI agents say Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, planned to detonate explosives during a tree lighting downtown. But he’d been working all along with undercover agents, an affidavit says.

As investigations continue into the bombs shipped from Yemen to the United States, the news last week about a plot to bomb Washington, DC Metro stations should not be forgotten. Indeed, the arrest of Farooque Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, is evidence of another kind of ongoing terrorist threat to the United States, one that stems from citizens and immigrants. Ahmed’s arrest shows the threat of smaller-scale terrorist attacks carried out by U.S. citizens is growing. U.S. citizens are particularly attractive to al Qaeda and other terrorists because they can more easily plot and prepare for attacks without drawing the attention of law enforcement, the intelligence community or the Department of Homeland Security.

The Middle East has undergone a sea change at the geostrategic level, presenting U.S. policymakers with a new set of serious challenges. To design a new approach to the region that would have resonance with the key players and be ultimately successful in preserving its vital interests, the United States needs to fully understand and assimilate “why and how” this shift has taken place in the region. In this four-part series, I will attempt to shed some light at the root developments that have caused the demise of the old Mideast order, the birth of the new order and its significant impact on U.S. strategic interests, and the viable policy options at the disposal of the United States, given the new realities of the region.

At a full hearing of the Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee with DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and NCTC Director Michael Leiter, the message delivered was loud and clear. The risk of smaller scale, more individualized attacks by al Qaeda and its sympathizers within the United States is growing. Period. There should be no more blissful ignorance to our operating environment in America. It can not be afforded.

Before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, DHS Secretary Napolitano, FBI Director Mueller and NCTC Director Leiter each underscored the growing threat of homegrown terrorism and warned that there are increasing numbers of Americans inspired by al Qaeda. This summer, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released an English-language magazine, appropriately titled Inspire. This is a dangerous tool, in part because it isn’t masses of jihad-waging Americans that we foresee threatening homeland security – it’s the lone wolf radicalized in secret, which is exactly for whom Inspire was written.

It is now nine years since we suffered the huge tragedy of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. A hand full of very dedicated killers took the lives of thousands, grounded the entire U.S. commercial Air Industry and paralyzed our Nation. As the time between 9/11 and the present lengthens, people forget. It is a natural human reaction and typically American. We forget that we were attacked, that Afghanistan and Iraq were reactions to 9/11 and the war that Al Qaeda declared on us and which Saddam Hussein cheered – they were not unprovoked assaults on innocent regimes.