9/11 VOICES
look back with a sense of sadness at the loss of human life. It is a moment to reflect on the bravery of so many people on that day. I think of the children who have now lived a decade without their mothers or fathers. The 9/11 Commission Report concluded there is a people at war with us, and I fear that we are letting our guard down again . . . This is a president that has a hard time recognizing that terror even exists. This is an administration that prohibits the use of the word ‘terrorist’ and substitutes the phrase ‘man-made disaster.’ The president and Democrats’ desire to cut defense is reprehensible.
“ I“I — Sean Hannity | Fox News and radio personality ”
cations, worries about the graduates of that extended campaign against American occupation. “What is hap- pening to this large pool of young Muslims who fl ocked to Iraq to set off
car — these battle-hardened
jihadists who have returned home, and may now be looking for some- thing to do?” says Venzke. “There is no shortage of their videos showing up in the West.”
Also looming large as potential sources of danger are the political vacuums created by the collapse of governments in the Horn of Africa. In Yemen, for instance, AQAP is said to already control the towns of Zinjibar and Jaar and is advancing on the key port of Aden. Somalia has attracted dozens of young Somali immigrants from Minnesota to fi ght in al-Shabaab’s declared “jihad.” Larry Sanchez, a former assistant commissioner of the New York Police Department, worries about what he calls the intermingling of jihadi and pirate networks. “The Islamists are already selling arms to Somali pirates for a cut of their booty,” he says. Drug cartel experts fear a similar intermingling of drug and terror- ist networks in Mexico, where drug
84 9|11: A DECADE LATER / NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011
cartels have been battling the central government for control.
No future problem worries the
NYPD more than the emergence of homegrown terrorism, or jihadis who are radicalized through friends, recruiters,
and material on the
Internet, a trend fi rst identifi ed in 2007 by former analysts Arvin Bhatt and NYPD chief intelligence analyst, Mitchell Silber. Rather than being the uneducated young Arab immigrants of popu- lar imagination, Bergen says the homegrown militants fi t no particu- lar socioeconomic or ethnic profi le. Their average age is 30.
Only a quarter are of Arab descent, while 10 percent are African- American, 13 percent are Caucasian, 18 percent are South Asian, 20 per- cent are of Somali descent, and the rest are either mixed race or of other ethnicities. About half the terror cases involved a U.S-born American citizen; another third were natural- ized citizens. Converts to Islam — particularly Hispanic converts, are disproportionately represented. What worries many analysts the most is not the threat of terrorism per se, but Washington’s apparent
inability to stay focused on the chal- lenge. Rep. King, for one, says that America can stave off catastrophic terror strikes “if we stay on top of it.” But his hearings on homegrown radicalization provoked a torrent of criticism from the Muslim and civil libertarian communities.
Add to that, Congress itself is problematic. “There are still over a hundred committees that claim some jurisdiction over counterterror- ism programs,” King says.
Venzke complains about the slash in counterterrorism funding — between 30 and 50 percent in some of the agencies for which he works. And the recent DHS report boasts of having identifi ed “over $1 billion in cost avoidances and cuts under this administration” as well as $800 million more in further cuts in the agency’s fi scal 2012 budget request. While counterterrorism funding probably should be cut, pressure to declare victory in the war on terror- ism and focus on other challenges mounts every year without an attack. “You must go back to the 1960s to
fi nd such an absence of attacks,” says Brian Jenkins, Rand’s senior adviser on terrorism who launched the cor- poration’s terrorism studies almost 40 years ago.
Bin Laden’s death and the Arab Spring uprisings have intensifi ed pressure to pronounce the campaign over, Jenkins adds. “Declaring victory and turning our back would be dan- gerous,” he writes in a Rand study, “The Long Shadow of 9/11, America’s Response to Terrorism.” America needs to be smarter in
fi nding ways to sustain the hunt for bin Laden’s successor. Washington will no longer be able to devote another $3.8 trillion, the estimated cost of the global war on terror since 2001, on deterring future attacks. “We are very much the victims of our success,” says King, adding, “That is our greatest counterterror- ism future challenge.”
© 2011 BILL KALLAHER
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