Amine el Khalifi wanted to kill as many Americans as possible in the U.S. Capitol building either by shooting them with the MAC-10 machine gun he was carrying or by detonating the bomb concealed in his vest. The vest bomb was packed with nails, a standard terrorist method of maximizing the horror and casualties of a suicide bombing. Born and raised in Morocco, Khalifi came to America in 1999 with his parents on a trip to Disneyland. He arrived on a tourist visa, then remained in this country illegally after the temporary document expired. He believed the U.S. war on terrorism was in fact a war on Muslims and he thought his co-conspirators — “Hussein” and “Yusuf” — were al Qaeda operatives in the war against the Great Satan, America.
Khalifi was not was simply a “lone wolf,” as assumed by officials like Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the Maryland Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as by most reporters and editors in the mainstream media. Lone wolves don’t band together with others claiming to be comrades on a lethal mission. Khalifi believed he was acting in concert with al Qaeda, which he asked to join. He thought his attack was to be coordinated with a larger one being mounted by other al Qaeda operatives. In short, he believed he was on the al Qaeda terrorist team. So using the term “lone wolf” to describe Khalifi is, at best, a misnomer and at worst a dangerous misrepresentation.
It is not surprising, however, to hear the term being used to describe how Muslim terrorists plan to unleash their bloody, destructive rage against innocent men, women and children. Recall last summer when President Obama told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that a lone-wolf attack was “the most likely scenario that we have to guard against right now. When you’ve got one person who is deranged or driven by a hateful ideology, they can do a lot of damage, and it’s a lot harder to trace those lone-wolf operators.” Similarly, Janet Napolitano, Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, said lone wolves “were harder to detect in part because by their very definition, they’re not conspiring with others, they may not be communicating with others, there’s very little to indicate that something is under way.”
But by Napolitano’s own words, Khalifi doesn’t fit the “lone wolf” profile because he believed “Hussein” and “Yusuf” were his al Qaeda co-conspirators. It doesn’t matter that they were in fact FBI operatives working undercover to ferret out Khalifi-style plots. And there is nothing in the FBI’s criminal complaint filed in federal court last week against Khalifi to suggest he had to be pushed or otherwise encouraged to participate in the plot. Which leaves us with this issue: How many more Khalifis are out there, having resided undisturbed here in the U.S. illegally for years just waiting to connect with co-conspirators, ready to don suicide vests and cause carnage in a crowd? Next time, the FBI might not catch them in time to prevent the carnage.
