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Al-Qaeda drive to recruit
Westerners worries US
Washington—Attempts by Al-Qaeda to recruit Westerners has sparked
deep concerns among US national security experts, who fear the
country could be infiltrated by attackers with Caucasian looks and
European or North American identification.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller told a
congressional hearing Tuesday that the Al-Qaeda terror network was
focusing its attention of recruiting Westerners because its leaders
believed that bearers of valid European of North American passports
could enter the United States more easily than other nationals.
The statement came two days after Central Intelligence Agency
Director Michael Hayden made a similar revelation that Al-Qaeda was
recruiting and training terrorists of Western origin.
“They are bringing operatives into that region for training —
operatives that, a phrase I would use, wouldn’t attract your
attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles”
airport in Washington, Hayden told NBC television last Sunday.
The new recruits “look Western” and “would be able to come into this
country ... without attracting the kind of attention that others
might,” he said.
“They could be anybody,” said Matthew Levitt, an expert with the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Al-Qaeda could recruit radicals from Europe who would be able to
come to the United States “on valid passports perhaps through visa
waiver programs,” Levitt said.
Ted Galen Carpenter, an expert with Cato Institute, believes it is
very difficult to gauge the number of people open to such
recruitment because it could involve Western-looking European
natives like Muslims from Bosnia or Kosovo.
“How many people? That’s very hard to measure,” the expert pointed
out. You’re talking certainly thousands of people.”
Carpenter said that Al-Qaeda is looking for ways to thwart any kind
of profiling strategy that the US and other governments might employ
to single out possible threats from the huge numbers of people
entering their countries each day.
Osama bin Laden and his associates have spoken in the past of using
Muslims from the Balkans who do not fit the Arab Muslim stereotype
to infiltrate countries, he said. “There certainly are not many
sympathizers for organizations like that in the West,” he explained.
“But they don’t need many.”
Levitt recalled that British national Richard Reid, who attempted in
2001 to explode a bomb concealed inside a shoe aboard an American
Airlines plane, carried a western passport. He said there were other
similar cases.
Levitt recently met in Paris with French counterterrorism officials
whom he said have the same worries. “German officials and British
officials are similarly concerned.”
According to Newsweek, the CIA director’s statements were prompted
by a German investigation of a terrorist cell linked to an Uzbek
group led by Fritz Gelowicz, a German national who converted to
Islam and is now imprisoned in Germany.
But Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at Rand Corporation, believes
that while while individuals coming into the United States could
carry out terrorist attacks, “our greatest concerns right now are
what I refer to as local home-grown terrorists — American citizens
living right here.”
“In the attacks in Turkey, in the attacks in Spain, in the attacks
in London, in the plots that have been uncovered in Germany and
Denmark, and other places, these were not teams of terrorists ...
being sent in from abroad, they were all from the inside,” Jenkins
said.
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