U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson joined NJTV News’ Mary Alice Williams to have an in-depth conversation about the state of security in the U.S. today. Find the rest of the series here.
It has been a day since home-grown terrorists in Paris slaughtered 12 people working for a satirical newspaper. Two are still at large. One had already been on authorities’ radar. Here on our shores, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is working to prevent that kind of terror, home-grown or otherwise. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson talked about terrorism with NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams and said that ISIL is a very dangerous terrorist organization that requires a lot of attention.
The DHS was formed as a result of 9/11, said Johnson. He said that the terrorist threat to the United States is still out there and it is still a dangerous world, but it is evolving. He said that al-Qaeda, which attacked the U.S. on 9/11, has been decimated to a very large extent because many of its leaders have been captured or killed. He said a rise has been seen in al-Qaeda affiliates and groups such as ISIL that the core al-Qaeda denounces. He said he also sees a rise in social media being used by terrorist organizations on the internet to put out propaganda and to recruit.
“We’re concerned about domestic-based threats, the so-called lone wolf actor that may be inspired by the social media, the literature that we’re seeing. And so more and more our efforts in the Department of Homeland Security in the federal government are based on potential threats to the homeland from within the homeland,” said Johnson.
A man from New Jersey reportedly went to join the ISIL forces. When asked what is done about Americans who are joining groups like ISIL, Johnson said that one of the new things about the terrorist threat is the phenomenon of foreign fighters. He said that when one looks at the membership of ISIL for example, it’s a diverse group of people from a diverse set of nationalities that are coming from their countries to pick up the fight in Syria. He said that those people go for a number of different reasons and then eventually they are going to go back to the countries they came from.
Johnson said that some of those people are Americans but other countries have far bigger numbers. Johnson said that the department does its best to track those individuals and they do a pretty good job. He said that he can’t know with complete certainty everyone who is leaving the United States, going to some place like Turkey for example, and then migrating into Syria off the radar. He said DHS can’t know it all, but through collection of travel data and intelligence collection, the department has a pretty good way of knowing a large number of those people and they are tracked.
“In appropriate circumstances, they’re not allowed to travel. They’re restricted. They’re put on a no fly list. A number of people have been prosecuted. The FBI has done a very good job of tracking foreign fighters and prosecuting people for material support to terrorism,” said Johnson.
Al-Qaeda and ISIL are non-state organizations. When asked how the rise of ISIL has changed the DHS’s approach to terrorism, Johnson said that “ISIL is new and different in the following respects. They have 31,000 fighters on the ground in Iraq and Syria, they take in millions in elicit revenue, their social media is as slick as any I’ve ever seen in a terrorist organization and they are willing to kill Americans in a very public and depraved fashion. They are a very, very dangerous terrorist organization.”
Johnson said that ISIL deserves and requires a lot of attention and focus. He said that he thinks that the airstrikes and the international coalition on ISIL have done a fair amount in slowing their momentum but there is a lot more that DHS needs to do, in America, in order to deal with the potential of those who may be drawn to the ISIL message to commit an act of violence here or to go there. He said that he is spending a lot of time on what DHS calls “countering violent extremism initiatives.” He said that is something that he personally has done and he has been to a number of places around the U.S. including Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Columbus and Los Angeles to talk to community organizations and Islamic cultural centers about talking to people who may have the inclination to turn to violence, about countering the narrative and about building trust.
“When I meet with leaders of a Muslim community in a particular city, there’s a lot of suspicion about my deportment in particular. We’ve got aviation security, we’ve got airport screening, we’ve got immigration laws, we’ve got the enforcement and administration of our immigration laws. So there are a lot of things they want to talk to me about and there are things that I want to talk to them about, which is, ‘It’s your homeland too. It’s your public safety too,'” said Johnson.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on CIA interrogation techniques after 9/11, some of them depraved, brutal and apparently not effective in eliciting valuable information. At the time, it was said that the very release of that information jeopardized America’s national security. Johnson said, “We very definitely have to be vigilant in watching for responses to that report. So far, in the few days since the report has been released, we have not seen any major events. I hope that continues, but we need to continue to be vigilant in looking for potential responses from the report. I believe the report is an important piece of work that documents a point in our history, post 9/11. And the publication of it sort of closes a chapter that a lot of people want to know more about.”