Islamic State Remains Distant Threat to U.S. Homeland

[Purveyor]

By Mike Dorning and David Lerman Sep 12, 2014 12:00 AM ET

Islamic State terrorists have swept across Iraq and released lurid videos showing the beheading of two U.S. journalists, yet the group poses little immediate threat to the U.S. homeland, former intelligence officers and counterterrorism officials said.

There’s no evidence Islamic State has a network of assets outside the Middle East, and its ambitions are concentrated on gaining control of territory in Syria and Iraq rather than hitting American territory, they said.

“The group is focusing on, and has its hands full with, establishing and maintaining its caliphate in the Middle East,” said Paul Pillar, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer for the Near East and South Asia who is now at Georgetown University in Washington. “This is an alternative to, rather than support for, any terrorist campaign in the West.”

President Barack Obama is escalating a U.S. offensive in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State, which he called brutal and barbaric with “no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.” In the same Sept. 10 speech, he added that intelligence agencies haven’t detected plotting against the U.S.

The direct danger posed to Americans at home is mostly hypothetical and sometime in the future. High among them is the possibility that U.S. citizens and Western Europeans drawn to fight alongside the Islamic State will become radicalized and trained in terrorist tradecraft and then travel to the U.S. undetected.

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-12/islamic-state-remains-distant-threat-to-u-s-homeland.html

[tularetom]

1. We needed a new boogeyman to be scared to death of

Since we killed about a thousand #2 al Qaeda guys and finally got bin Laden, we were getting to the point where al Qaeda was getting to be kind of a joke and people just sort of rolled their eyes when the pundits tried to terrify us with scary stories about them.

ISIS showed up just in time and chopped off the heads of a couple of American journalists (just like aQ did a decade ago) and now the press has their meme.

I'm just sorry that the President seeks to have bought into it. I hope he has devised a way to get out of it when he finds out he's been suckered.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. "Threat"