August 15, 2007 7:00 AM
Brian Ross, Richard Esposito & Maddy Sauer Report:
U.S. law enforcement officials say they have identified more than two dozen "clusters" of young Muslim men in the northeast United States who are on a path that could lead to homegrown terror, ABC News has learned.
"Any one of those clusters may be capable of carrying out a terrorist action that will result in fatalities," Rand Corporation terrorism expert Brian Jenkins tells ABC News.
In a report to be made public today, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly concludes the 9/ll attacks were an "anomaly" and the most serious terror threat to the country comes from clusters of "unremarkable" individuals who are on a path that could lead to homegrown terror.
The report by the NYPD intelligence division, "Radicalization in the West and the Homegrown Threat," plots "the trajectory of radicalization" and tracks the path of a non-radicalized individual to an individual with the willingness to commit an act of terror, multiple sources say.
"The threat is real; this is not some bogey man we are creating here. There are individuals who are proselytizing, inciting angry young men to go down this path," said Jenkins, who reviewed and contributed to the NYPD report.
The report identifies mosques, bookstores, cafes, prisons and flop houses as what it calls "radicalization incubators" that provide "extremist fodder or fuel for radicalization."
The leader of an American Arab civil rights group labeled the NYPD report as "unfortunate stereotyping" and at odds with federal law enforcement findings that the threat from homegrown terrorists was minimal.
"It is completely un-American; it goes against everything we stand for," said Kareem Shora, executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "We do not want to alienate any segment of any community, and by using that language you are actually aiding the extremists in their recruiting efforts."
The NYPD report, ABC News sources said, concludes that while al Qaeda can provide inspiration and an "ideological reference point," instances of command and control by al Qaeda are the exception rather than the rule.
It states that most or many terrorist attacks and attempted attacks in Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States have been thought up by and planned by local residents seeking to attack their own country of residence.
The report, in its conclusions, asserts that the most significant threat to the homeland is not al Qaeda but the spread of the ideology promulgated by violent extremist Muslims, such as those belonging to al Qaeda, into the United States where it helps to radicalize residents.
The report is seen by several individuals familiar with it as filling a large gap in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate, which was released July 17 and contained little to no explicit discussion of homegrown terrorism.
"We assess that al-Qa'ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland," the NIE states in its "Key Judgments."
"We assess that the spread of radical -- especially Salafi -- Internet sites, increasingly aggressive anti-U.S. rhetoric and actions and the growing number of radical, self-generating cells in Western countries indicate that the radical and violent segment of the West's Muslim population is expanding, including in the United States," the NIE says in its most significant paragraph on the topic.
read more here..
The Blotter: Exclusive: U.S. Studying Two Dozen 'Clusters' of Possible Homegrown Terrorists
in the comments section:
Is our government going to arm its citizens like Iraq did so we can protect ourselves? Why? Because who in the hell is going to protect us since George & **** have all our military in Iraq? Wake up people. We can't even protect our homeland now. Is that the result of good leadership?
U.S. Studying Two Dozen 'Clusters' of Possible Homegrown Terrorists
