The U.S. needs to figure out how to counter terrorists’ efforts to radicalize young men, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said Thursday, one day after the FBI foiled an Ohio man’s plot to attack the Capitol building.
King, a member of the Senate’s intelligence and armed services committee, echoed intelligence assessments that “lone wolf” terrorists are the “toughest” threat to counter, but disagreed with his Republican colleagues, most notably Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who argue that the U.S. needs to ramp up its military effort against ISIS and other terrorist organizations.
“We’ve been in the stamping out business for the last 12 or 13 years and it hasn’t worked all that well,” King said Thursday on CNN’s “New Day.” “Part of the problem is the more we, the U.S. and the West, are active — particularly with troops on the ground — the more it becomes a recruiting tool for the extremists.”
Instead, King said the U.S. needs to address what he called a “deeper question”: figuring out how the U.S. can combat the radical ideology spread increasingly online by extremists like ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Christopher Lee Cornell, the 20-year-old Ohioan who was in the early stages scheming to attack the U.S. Capitol, was allegedly inspired by ISIS. And the terrorists in France became increasingly radicalized while in prison before traveling to Yemen, where at least one met with the American jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki, a notorious al Qaeda cleric.
The brothers’ travel to Yemen and intelligence reports that one also traveled to Syria turned the West’s worst fears — foreign fighters returning to the West to carry out attacks — into a grisly reality.
“The real weapons of mass destruction today are unemployed 22-year-olds who fall for this radical ideology and we’ve got to figure out how to counter that,” he said.
King pointed to a program being developed in the United Kingdom, where officials are working to “de-radicalize or anti-radicalize” their prisons, which can be hotbeds of extremist recruitment.
Even ISIS, which now controls swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and seeks to inspire the lone wolf attacks U.S. officials are most concerned about, was reportedly formed from an American military prison in Iraq, Camp Bucca, according to The Guardian. There, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi met the men who would years later become the branches of ISIS’s senior leadership.
King stood firm against calls from McCain and other Republican hawks like freshman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) who are calling on President Barack Obama to escalate the military fight against ISIS. And American troops certainly shouldn’t be the ones “rooting them (ISIS) out door to door in Mosul,” a city ISIS captured in Iraq.
“We are not going to be able to take them out by killing them one at a time. It’s not going to work,” King said. “We’ve got to go deeper than just police, FBI, CIA and military. We’ve got to talk about how do we stop this movement toward radicalization because otherwise this is going to be a 100-year war.”
Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron made it clear in an opinion piece published Thursday that they are closely watching the threat of lone wolfs, vowing not to be “cowed by extremists,” whether they come in the shape of terrorist groups or “lone fanatics.”
Reacting to the foiled Ohio plot in an interview with NewsMax, potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry made a quick connection between terrorism and border security, one of his top issues.
Perry said there is “very good intelligence” that the south Texas border with Mexico could allow “individuals” to come into this country.
“Americans will sleep better knowing that their government is actual doing their constitutional duty,” Perry said.