Christine Douglass Williams
Former Obama White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco is warning that “the terror threat getting worse.” She is referring, of course, to the jihad threat that neither she nor any other Obama official dares to name. It was the Obama Administration that tied the hands of counter-jihad analysts by scrubbing all reference to Islam from counterterror training materials, making it nearly impossible for intelligence and law enforcement agents to know and understand the people they were trying to stop. While serving as FBI director, Robert Mueller “decided to purge hundreds of counter-terrorism training materials that arguably rendered America less safe in the face of a growing domestic Islamic extremist problem.”
Today the media is quick to attack Trump as racist when he speaks about the jihad threat. Had Trump said the same thing Monaco said, he would be accused of stoking irrational fears.
Monaco also stated that “the U.S. government today is ‘not equipped’ and inadequately focused on domestic terrorist issues in particular, and that the risks of radicalization outside of jihadist violence remained pervasive.”
“Outside of jihadist violence,” that is, she is referring to the so-called “right-wing extremist” threat.
“Terror threat is ‘getting worse’ says former homeland security adviser,” by Olivia Gazis, CBS News, January 2, 2019:
Conditions that allowed foreign terrorist organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda to seed and grow their ideologies persist across the Middle East, according to former White House counterterrorism chief Lisa Monaco. And although the U.S. has made meaningful strides in preventing attacks on its soil that originate overseas, Monaco warned that the risks of radicalization for potential domestic terrorists may be increasing.
“The good news is that the threat as we saw it, post-9/11, of command-and-control, complex, foreign directed attacks is greatly diminished,” said Monaco, who served from 2013 to 2017 as homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to President Barack Obama. She credited the work of multiple administrations over the past 17 years with preventing elaborate attacks and, more recently, in rolling back the territory once occupied by ISIS.
“The bad news is that the conditions that made it possible for al-Qaeda to take root, that made it possible for ISIS to expand and occupy the territory to recruit and radicalize – all of those things still exist in the Middle East, in other regions,” Monaco said. “And those things are not going away.”
There were more than 8,500 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2017, according to a State Department report, though the total declined 23 percent from the previous year. The report also found that terror threats had grown more complex as ISIS lost territory and sought to inspire simpler but still deadly attacks on Western targets.
In an interview with Intelligence Matters host and CBS News senior national security contributor Michael Morell, Monaco said the U.S. government today is “not equipped” and inadequately focused on domestic terrorist issues in particular, and that the risks of radicalization outside of jihadist violence remained pervasive.