The Homegrown Terrorists Are Coming
September 11th, 2010In other news: Mossad Impersonating U.S. Intelligence Operatives and Trying to Recruit Arab Americans.
Via: McClatchy:
The United States faces a more homegrown, hard-to-predict terrorist threat today than it did nine years ago, and the U.S. government isn’t well-equipped to understand it, an expert panel said Friday.
Terrorism today is more likely to come as small-scale attacks, such as last November’s shootings at Fort Hood military base in Texas, where a gunman killed 13 people, or the failed attempt May 1 to set off explosives in Times Square.
“Today, America faces a dynamic threat that has diversified to a broad array of attacks, from shootings to car bombs to simultaneous suicide attacks to attempted in-flight bombings of passenger aircraft,” says a 42-page report from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, a Washington research group.
Lee Hamilton, a vice chairman of the 9-11 Commission, which urged the government six years ago to be vigilant and nimble, warned Friday that the new report shows that, “The American people just have to get a more realistic sense of what they’re confronted with.”
So does the government. “There are a lot of things that still need to be done to make our country safer,” said Hamilton, a former Indiana Democratic congressman who co-chairs the group that produced Friday’s report.
Last year proved to be a “watershed” in domestic terrorist attacks and plots, the report says.
“In the past year alone,” it says, “the United States has seen affluent suburban Americans and the progeny of hardworking immigrants gravitate to terrorism. Persons of color and Caucasians have done so. Women along with men. Good students and well-educated individuals and high school dropouts and jailbirds. ”
The only common denominator, it said, “appears to be a newfound hatred for their native or adopted country, a degree of dangerous malleability and a religious fervor” that they think justifies their violence.
The group said that “al Qaida is believed to lack the capability to launch a mass casualty attack sufficiently deadly in scope to reorient American foreign policy, as the 9-11 attacks did,” but that its influence remained substantial.
The Fort Hood shooter? A terrorist? Ha, don’t make me laugh. Only under the most strained definition of the word, the kind that results from the thinking that produces the term “terroristic threatening.” A real terrorist, especially with a military background would have done way more damage.