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U.S. faces home-grown attack threat, experts say
Five years after the 9/11 attacks, New York's top counterterrorism official said the United States is facing the threat of home-grown terror.
"We're very worried about the home-grown threat, it's very difficult to counter, it has very little signature, it's very hard to detect. And it's the most prevalent form of terrorism we have seen since 9/11," he said in a phone interview. He said a thwarted 2004 plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan had been "genuinely home-grown." R.P. Eddy, director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Policing Terrorism, said the threat was widening from militant jihadists bent on large-scale hits like the September 11 attacks on the United States five years ago, which killed 2,992 people. "I think the more likely terrorist in this country -- or as likely -- in the next five to 10 years, is a 17-year-old kid who self-radicalizes on the Internet and decides he is going to make a suicide bomb, which he reads about on the Internet, and goes up and blows up his school," he said. "It's still terrorism and it's still a major threat," Eddy, whose center was created at the request of the New York police to provide counter-terrorism insights, told a Council of Foreign Relations security symposium in New York. Eddy said extremists did not need foreign links to plan an attack because everything needed was available online. But Falkenrath said that while the Internet can help a person radicalize, there normally needs to be some sort of outside influence or event to trigger their path to extremism. "I wouldn't characterize what happens as self-radicalization," he said. "There's usually a small group of people involved. It's not just one guy in a room, it's not like a pedophile. It's more like a group phenomenon." "Some switch has to be thrown in the person before they start going to the Internet and using it as a radicalization system," he said, but added that once someone starts to radicalize it can happen very quickly. "It can go from being just a disaffected, alienated member of the community, non-Muslim, to converting in a matter of months, starting to conceptualize a terrorist plot," he said. Jack Riley, a homeland security analyst with RAND Corp., said that while the United States faced a home-grown threat, he cautioned it was not as severe as the local risk posed in Britain and Europe. The U.S. Muslim community is better integrated into society, Riley said. "It's not to say it can't happen, but I think it's a much tougher row to hoe in this country than it is in other parts of the world," Riley said. But Columbia University and Council on Foreign Relations security expert Richard Betts told the council's security symposium the United States was likely to suffer some sort of domestic attack during the next five years. "We should do all we can to prevent them, but we shouldn't be shocked if they happen," he said.
Posted by: lotp 2006-09-12 |
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