Radicalized U.S. residents willing to carry out attacks with “little or no warning” have helped create one of the biggest terrorist threats in years, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday.
“The terrorist threat to the homeland is in many ways at its most heightened state since 9/11,” she said in prepared testimony for a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee in Washington.
Al-Qaida affiliates and allies increasingly are trying to recruit Westerners or those with ties to the U.S. and Europe, Napolitano said. The recruits include Pakistani immigrant Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a bomb in New York’s Times Square in May, she said.
U.S. intelligence officials are monitoring the actions of allies such as the Haqqani network, Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and al-Shabaab, which have signaled more of a willingness recently to conduct attacks outside of their regions, said Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
“The past two years have highlighted the growing breadth of terrorism faced by the United States and our allies,” Leiter said in prepared remarks.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, a New York Republican, called the hearings – which have provoked much controversy – to explore the threat of Islamic radicalization. Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s ranking Democrat, has said the focus should be expanded to include extreme environmentalists and neo-Nazis.
But King has said that doing that would be ridiculous. Law enforcement, he says, clearly knows that Islamic terrorists are the key problem. They are just concerned that they’ll be punished for being politically incorrect.
King said in a written statement that threats from "Islamic jihad were uniquely diabolical."
"The Committee cannot ignore the fact that al Qaida is actively attempting to recruit individuals living within the Muslim American community to commit acts of terror," he said.
Napolitano, appearing before the House Homeland Security Committee, said the threat from al-Qaida, the group that planned the assaults in 2001, has been augmented by al-Qaida-inspired groups and the emergence of homegrown radicals throughout the United States.
"One of the most striking elements of today's threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens," she said. "We are now operating under the assumption, based on the latest intelligence and recent arrests, that individuals prepared to carry out terrorist attacks and acts of violence might be in the United States, and they could carry out acts of violence with little or no warning."
More than 120 people have been indicted in federal court over the last two years on terror-related charges. About 50 of them were U.S. citizens, said King, citing Justice Department statistics.
King described the threat as "serious and evolving," adding that increasing domestic radicalization marked a "game-changer" in the anti-terror effort.
"We must confront this threat explicitly and directly," King said.
The Justice Department also announced Wednesday that a U.S. citizen, Daniel Patrick Boyd, 40, of North Carolina, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping to "advance violent jihad" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"This case proves how our world is changing," North Carolina U.S. Attorney George E.B. Holding said. "Terrorists are no longer only from foreign countries but also citizens who live within our own borders."
Don Borelli, a former FBI counterterrorism official who helped oversee the 2009 inquiry into a plot to bomb the New York subway by Denver shuttle driver Najibullah Zazi, told USA Today that Napolitano and others are right to be concerned. Zazi pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing.
"I don't think she's overreacting here," said Borelli, a senior vice president for the Soufan Group, an international security firm. He told the newspaper Wednesday that the homegrown threat will require a change in strategy to help identify people vulnerable to radicalization.
"I think that what you've got is a stage that is certainly set for something to happen," he said.
One of the groups widely discussed at the hearings was al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
"I actually consider al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula . . . [to be] probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland," said Leiter, using the formal name for the Yemeni affiliate. "They've been quite successful at being innovators."
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has been tied to attempts to blow up a commercial aircraft over Detroit and two cargo planes traveling to the United States, according to The Washington Post. One of the group's leading ideologues, the U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, has been linked to Nidal M. Hasan, the Army major facing trial for the mass shooting at Fort Hood.
The Yemeni group aggressively recruits and courts Westerners, an effort that has included the launch of an English-language magazine titled Inspire.
"It is spiffy," Leiter said. "It's got great graphics and in some sense we think probably speaks to individuals who are likely to be radicalized."
Articles in the magazine have called on supporters to launch their own attacks in Western cities. King asked Leiter whether he was concerned that messages or signals were being sent through Inspire.
“I think I'd take that more in a classified setting," Leiter said, "but as a general matter, I think Inspire is attempting not to build a secret network between AQAP folks in the United States or other English-speaking countries. It is more looking to what the title suggests: inspire them to act on their own."
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