A Dire Domestic Threat

According to U.S. intelligence services, individual terrorists may have already slipped into the United States with the intention of carrying out attacks, and they may well put their murderous plans into action without warning. Meanwhile, the terrorist threat to the United States is “at its most heightened state since 9/11,” as Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano stated during hearings on Capitol Hill.

That is why America is launching a large-scale national public vigilance campaign called “If You See Something, Say Something.” Another measure to foster this heightened vigilance is a new system of informing the nation of the terrorism threat level to replace the existing color-based scale.

However, Napolitano told congressmen that even with all the counter-intelligence efforts, “we cannot guarantee that there will never be another terrorist attack, and we cannot seal our country under a glass dome.”

United States National Counter-Terrorism Center Director Michael Leiter told the House Homeland Security Committee hearings that the U.S. now has a new “enemy number one.” According to the intelligence official, the leader of the Yemen al-Qaida cell Anwar al-Awlaki poses a much greater danger today than Osama bin-Laden.

He was behind U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan’s deadly attack on his fellow soldiers in the fall of 2009. In addition, several other attempts at terrorist attacks in the United States were organized from Yemen and failed only by pure chance. Among them was the attempt by a Nigerian to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Eve in 2009 and the smuggling of bombs disguised as printer cartridges to America.

U.S. intelligence services are especially alarmed that terrorists are now trying to overcome the existing system of national territorial defense by focusing on recruiting American citizens. Indeed, statistics show that out of 88 people arrested for their involvement in preparing acts of terrorism after the devastating attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, 50 were American citizens.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago another U.S. citizen named Daniel Patrick Boyd admitted to plotting terrorism and conspiring to provide support to terrorists. Previously, Boyd, who is regarded as the leader of a group of American Islamic militants, had been charged with preparation of an explosion at a Marine Corps base in Virginia.

Washington intelligence officials consider the radicalization of American individuals strongly inspired by terrorist ideologists to be an ever growing internal threat that “cannot be ignored.”

The Department of Homeland Security now plans to make maximum use of the resources of law enforcement agencies at the state and district levels in the fight against all manifestations of the “terrorist hydra.” From now on, the FBI and other security services will be sharing intelligence and coordinating their actions on a permanent basis with local police departments, who are going to play the principal role in the fight against the domestic terrorist threat.

Experts in Washington note that the Obama administration has changed its approach to fighting terrorism. When the new president moved into the White House two years ago, his team hoped that problems of that sort would disappear after George Bush and Dick Cheney were gone and after they promised to close Guantanamo.

The reality turned out to be quite different, and today Obama is forced to pay much more attention to security than he had planned.