President Obama’s new national security strategy will include a new focus on the threat posed by Americans who can be recruited and radicalized by al Qaeda through the Internet, the president’s senior counterterrorism adviser said Wednesday.
“The president’s national security strategy explicitly recognizes the threat to the United States posed by individuals radicalized here at home,” said John Brennan, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, in a speech.
Mr. Brennan told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that “we have seen individuals, including U.S. citizens, armed with their U.S. passports, travel easily to extremist safe havens and return to America, their deadly plans disrupted by coordinated intelligence and law enforcement.”
Mr. Brennan spoke on the eve of the release by the Obama administration of a new National Security Strategy report.
The new strategy, according to Mr. Brennan, will continue the George W. Bush administration strategy of seeking to distinguish al Qaeda terrorism from the religion of Islam. Mr. Brennan specifically said the Obama administration would no longer use the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist” “because jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.”
At the same time, the new strategy states that the United States remains on a war footing against al Qaeda and seeks to destroy the group and its affiliates, Mr. Brennan said. He further noted that the group behind the Sept. 11 attacks is different from other Muslim terrorist groups that might have local grievances.
The emphasis on homegrown radicals reflects the recent trend of attacks and attempted attacks in the United States by U.S. citizens or residents who were inspired to wage terrorism as a result of information posted on the Internet.
The latest such attempt was purportedly made by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born naturalized American arrested in connection with an unsuccessful attempt to detonate a homemade car bomb in New York City’s Times Square.
Highlighting the new concerns about U.S. citizens becoming radicalized, Mr. Brennan declined to comment when asked if he thought al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden posed a greater danger to the United States than Anwar al-Awlaki.
Mr. al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born Yemeni cleric whose English and Arabic Internet sermons and e-mails have been credited with inspiring both Nigerian national Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, and U.S. Army psychologist Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan, charged with killing 13 people during a Fort Hood, Texas, shooting rampage in November.
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