Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Thursday that he finds the growing terrorist threat from U.S. citizens, not foreign terrorists, most worrisome.
“I have a lot of things that keep me up at night,” Johnson told a House Homeland Security subcommittee on Thursday. “The prospect of homegrown violent extremists — another San Bernardino, another Orlando — is No. 1 on my list.”
“We deal in this age not just with a terrorist direct attack but the terrorist-inspired attack, and now new a new category of terrorist-enabled attacks,” he said. “These are things that keep me up at night.”
“Foreign terrorist travel, the prospect of foreign terrorist travel to our homeland, keeps me up at night,” he added. “Of course cybersecurity, aviation security, border security, the prospect of what we refer to as ‘special interest aliens’ arriving on our southern border, are things that we should all be focused on and dedicated to addressing.”
He noted the difficulty of finding self-radicalized attackers before they strike, as did FBI Director James Comey, who testified along with Johnson.
It is the job of the Homeland Security Department, the FBI and police to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, Comey said.
“In fact, our job is harder than that. It’s to find pieces of hay in that haystack that may become a needle and disrupt them before they move from consuming to acting on that poisonous propaganda,” Comey told the subcommittee.
Johnson the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition has made significant progress in Iraq and Syria. The so-called caliphate’s territory has shrunk, and their ability to self-finance is greatly diminished. However, he did say the group’s ability to strike externally “is still very much present.”
“We are making significant progress” but the U.S. can’t “step back and take a breather” either, he said.
National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen said the success of the terrorists in Orlando, Fla., and San Bernardino, Calif., could inspire others.
“Looking ahead, we certainly expect that more additional home-grown violent extremists will try to replicate the violence and potentially capitalize on media attention that came from attacks like those, like the one in Florida generated,” he testified. “It is clearly the case that in the past few years, the pool of potential home-grown violent extremists has expanded significantly.”
It’s “fair to say that the array of terrorist actors around the globe is broader, deeper and wider than it has been at any time since 9/11,” Rasmussen said. The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s ability to down a Russian airliner departing from Egypt, strike the heart of Paris and attack airports in Istanbul, Turkey and Brussels, Belgium demonstrates that its reach has extended beyond its Iraqi and Syrian base.
“So this array of recent attacks that I just rattled through demonstrates that the threat landscape is in many ways less predictable than ever,” Rasmussen said.
The coalition battling the Islamic State must destroy its “caliphate” because it gives the Sunni-led group a base from which to operate, he said.
“And for that reason, shrinking the size of that territory controlled by ISIL, denying ISIL access to additional manpower in the form of foreign fighters, remains a top priority,” Rasmussen said.
