Terrorists Inside U.S. Increase Attacks, Panel Hears

[David]

Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Terrorist incidents over the past 12 months show that Islamic extremists within the U.S. increasingly are launching attacks against targets such as military bases, anti-terrorist experts said today.

“The threat is now increasingly from within, from homegrown terrorists who are inspired by violent Islamist ideology to plan and execute attacks where they live,” Mitchell Silber, director of intelligence analysis for the New York City Police Department, said.

Silber was among witnesses testifying to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has started an investigation into events leading up to the Nov. 5 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, in which 13 people were killed and 43 were injured.

While it may be “premature” to link the shootings at the Texas Army base to homegrown radical Islamic terrorism, the incident is similar to other recent incidents at military bases, Juan Zarate, President George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, said.

“Unfortunately, this event follows in a line of attacks against military personnel,” said Zarate, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based policy group.

Zarate pointed to a murder outside a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in June and killings at Camp Liberty in Iraq in May and Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait in 2003.

Premeditated Murder

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, has been charged by military authorities with 13 counts of premeditated murder in connection with the Fort Hood incident.

The Homeland Security panel’s probe is the first congressional investigation into the shootings. Republicans have been pressing Democrats, who control Congress, for more probes into the incident.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who heads the panel, has said his goal is to find out how the federal government missed detecting Hasan as a threat.

He said the panel wants to talk to members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force who were collecting information on Hasan. The task force is headed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The panel also wants to interview staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where Hasan completed a residency in psychiatry before transferring to Fort Hood.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his panel will investigate how the military handled concerns about Hasan.

New Wave

Zarate said the shootings raise “questions about whether we are facing a new wave of terrorism driven in part by self- radicalized actors.”

Some witnesses said they thought those investigating Hasan’s behavior before the shootings may have felt reluctant to act because they were overly concerned with protecting the suspect’s religious beliefs.

Retired General John Keane, the Army’s former vice chief of staff, said the military needs “clear, specific guidelines” on what constitutes jihadist behavior.

“It should not be an act of moral courage for a soldier to identify a fellow solider” as a potentially dangerous Islamic extremist, he said. “It should be an obligation.”

Keane was commanding officer at Fort Bragg in North Carolina during the investigation of racially motivated murders in the 1990s. He said the Fort Hood situation may be similar.

At Fort Bragg, “we were wrongfully tolerating extremists in our organization,” he said.

Pentagon Review

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans a broad review of the military procedures and policies that were in place before the shootings, a spokesman said.

Gates wants to “assess if the department is doing everything it can to prevent” similar incidents, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. The steps could include a review of base security and how “adverse personnel information is handled,” he said.

Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush’s former assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, said reports about Hasan’s communications and ideology indicate that investigators shouldn’t have felt restricted by his First Amendment rights.

Many of the inflammatory comments “had nothing to do with his religion or speech,” she said.

‘Political Correctness’

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, asked if “political correctness” may have contributed to authorities not stopping Hasan.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that was operating here,” Keane said.

Zarate disagreed and said that any reluctance may have stemmed from the perception of Hasan being a doctor conducting research.

Intelligence agencies last year intercepted e-mails between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim religious leader in Yemen known for his anti-American views. Investigators say there was nothing suspicious in the communications, and they appeared to be related to a research project.

Silber said Hasan’s alleged murder spree came after U.S. authorities foiled a number of terror plots by cells and individuals, including four men placing what they believed were explosives outside a Riverdale, New York, synagogue and community center in April.

In September, authorities arrested Najibullah Zazi for allegedly planning to attack New York sites with explosives.

Most recently, the Internet has become a tool for spurring militants in the U.S. to act, Silber said.

Charismatic religious leaders such as al-Awlaki have been effective in urging on would-be terrorists, he said.

Also testifying today was Brian Jenkins, senior adviser at RAND Corp., a Santa Monica, California-based policy group.

The administration provided no witnesses for the hearing.