Not since the Bush Administration and the 9/11 Commission Report has there been a task force or congressional study group that has investigated and evaluated a new domestic threat report. In March of 2015, a bi-partisan committee in Congress was established with 10 members to study domestic Islamic soldiers and sympathizers. The report is chilling and further it has declared the White House has no strategy, so the committee crafted 32 recommendations. The full report is here.
The report studied individual cases where they were provided access to files by the FBI as countless other cases are still under investigation. Minnesota, California, New York and New Jersey were the 4 top listed states that had the majority of travelers leaving the United States to join Islamic State or other in kind terror groups. Up to at least 250 are known at this time.
The United States has failed to stop the flow back and forth and further allied intelligence agencies and countries are not advanced enough or have authorization to fully cooperate with the United States.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has largely failed to stop more than 250 Americans who have traveled overseas since 2011 to join or try to join terrorist groups, including the Islamic State group, a new congressional study concluded on Tuesday. It did not provide details on the several dozen who have sneaked back into the United States without being arrested or monitored.
“The findings are concerning; we are losing in this struggle to keep Americans from the battlefield,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Tuesday after his committee released the 65-page report.
The report said the Obama administration lacked a strategy to prevent such travel abroad, identify all who try to return to commit terror attacks, or cope with new recruitment practices and technology that allow extremists to communicate securely.
“Of the hundreds of Americans who have sought to travel to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq, authorities have only interdicted a fraction of them,” the report said. “Several dozen have also managed to make it back into America.” It noted that several people were identified and arrested this year trying to return to the United States.
In other cases, authorities are monitoring people who have returned form the region, said McCaul, R-Texas.
Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., who helped author the report, said radicalization of Americans over the Internet “poses probably the biggest problem” for U.S. law enforcement and others trying to detect and combat efforts by international terrorist organization to recruit U.S. citizens to join the fight overseas.
The report said of particular concern were western Europeans who travel to Iraq or Syria and would be permitted to fly to the U.S. without applying for a visa.
“American returnees are not the only threat to the United States,” it said.
Katko said the committee will work to draft several pieces of legislation based on the report’s 32 recommendations.
After the release of the committee report, the State Department announced that 10 people and five groups were declared Specially Designated Global Terrorists. People in the U.S. are generally prohibited from doing business with those given that designation.
