Home-grown terror threat for US
2006-09-12 07:28
New York - 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.
The New York Police Department's counter-terrorism chief,
Richard Falkenrath, told Reuters the home-grown threat of
attack was a serious problem and that while there had not been
any successful strikes there had been thwarted local attempts.
"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".
Internet
RP Eddy, director of the Manhattan Institute's Centre 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.
He said the danger has expanded to include attackers he
likened to the teenage Columbine high school killers, who shot
dead 13 people and themselves at the Colorado school in 1999.
"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-radicalises 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 centre 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.
Trigger for path to extremism
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 radicalise, there normally needs to be some sort of
outside influence or event to trigger their path to extremism.
"I wouldn't characterise what happens as self-radicalisation," 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 paedophile. 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 radicalisation
system," he said, but added that once someone starts to
radicalise 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 conceptualise a terrorist plot," he said.
- Reuters