Possible terror clusters in NE prove my argument

I just got back from doing an interview with New England Cable News that will air later today as part of a piece on reaction to the story Brian Ross broke today on Good Morning America that more than two dozen “clusters” of young Muslim men in the Northeast are under surveillance because they may evolve into terror cells.

I told NECN’s Josh McElveen (Josh did that great expose several months ago on the Federal Protective Services cutbacks) that the news was:

The words of a new NYPD report analyzing the the threat of a repetition of 9/11 should resonate particularly in New England, because they could have been used to describe the Sons of Liberty and other grassroots groups in our area in 1775: “The threat is real; this is not some bogey man we are creating here. There are individuals who are proselytizing, inciting angry young men to go down this path.”

Back then it was guys such as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams, and those young men (we put them on stamps now in celebration of their rebelliousness) were called Minutemen.

Back then, the angry young men were meeting at taverns and coffee shops. Guess what? Today, “The report identifies mosques, bookstores, cafes, prisons and flop houses as what it calls ‘radicalization incubators’ that provide ‘extremist fodder or fuel for radicalization.’”

The report stresses that the clusters aren’t operating under a tight hierarchy in Pakistan’s tribal areas: they are largely self-organizing and self-directed. If that approach worked in 1775, given that day’s primitive communications, you can understand how it would be possible today, given the Web.

Ross and his team say that the New York City report fills a major gap in the recent National Intelligence Estimate, which fixated on Al-Qaeda, and glossed over the homegrown terror threat:

“The report, in its conclusions, asserts that the most significant threat to the homeland is not al Qaeda but the spread of the ideology promulgated by violent extremist Muslims, such as those belonging to al Qaeda, into the United States where it helps to radicalize residents.

“The report is seen by several individuals familiar with it as filling a large gap in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, which was released July 17 and contained little to no explicit discussion of homegrown terrorism.

“‘We assess that al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland,’ the NIE states in its ‘Key Judgments.’

“‘We assess that the spread of radical — especially Salafi — Internet sites, increasingly aggressive anti-U.S. rhetoric and actions and the growing number of radical, self-generating cells in Western countries indicate that the radical and violent segment of the West’s Muslim population is expanding, including in the United States,’ the NIE says in its most significant paragraph on the topic.

“‘We assess that this internal Muslim terrorist threat is not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe, however,’ is the paragraph’s close.

“The NYPD report cites at least 10 well-known recent cases where local authorities, the FBI and European police and intelligence agencies have thwarted plots developed either wholly or in a very large part by homegrown ‘actors,’ with little or no support from al Qaeda.”

I can’t stress it enough: in a country as large and spread out as the US, the only way we can combat a networked domestic terror threat is through a parallel, networked, decentralized strategy that treats you and me — the people most likely to observe something out of the ordinary in our neighborhoods and daily routines, and with the means to report real-time, location-based information given our cameraphones, etc. — as real partners, educating us on what to look for, and instituting formal processes to report what we find.

So why don’t we have such a strategy? (even NYC, which has done so much to combat terrorism, still doesn’t have an effective public outreach and education project — that distinction, to my knowledge, still belongs only to the Keystone State).

Perhaps this year’s TopOff exercises should be held at Lexington and Concord to remind officials of those lessons!

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