The Terrorist Next Door (2 page)

As Erick details for you in
The Terrorist Next Door
, the list of jihadist plotters within our own borders is growing. Later this year, America
will mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Remembrance is worthless without resolve. And resolve is useless without recognition. You can't know our enemies, let alone defeat them, with your head buried in the sand and your government's collective hands grasping a whitewash brush. The first step every American must make to combat the radical tide of jihad in our midst is to get angry, get active, and get informed. Turn the page and turn the tide—now.

INTRODUCTION

“Y
ou know the plane they found a bomb on today—the one that flew out of Yemen? I was on that plane.”

The voice on the other end of the phone was a trusted intelligence source, one of the many Jack Bauer types I've formed relationships with in my ten years of covering the global jihad. He doesn't call often, so when he does I know he has something important to say. This call, on October 29, 2010, was no different.

“I flew out of Sana'a [the Yemeni capital] this morning, bound for Dubai,” he continued. “I'm not surprised that they found a bomb on the plane. You wouldn't believe the scene at the airport in Yemen. Total chaos.”

Authorities in Dubai had found an explosive device concealed inside a computer printer aboard my source's Qatar Airways flight. That same day, a similar bomb was found on a UPS cargo plane at the East Midlands Airport in Great Britain. The explosive had made its way to Britain from Yemen on a passenger aircraft before being transferred onto the UPS plane. Both packages were addressed to synagogues in Chicago—
a symbolic threat to Islam's eternal target, the Jews. But the terrorists who assembled the bombs likely planned for them to go off in mid-air aboard the passenger flights, hoping to kill hundreds of civilians in a Lockerbiestyle massacre.
¹

My source told me he had a pretty good inkling as to how the bombs made it onto the planes. He described for me how pre-teen boys were pulling bags out of X-ray machines at the Yemen airport and essentially acting as porters, complete with uniforms. No word yet on whether they've been hired by the TSA, but give it time. My source also noticed a good deal of large bags, “thirty or forty of them,” being brought by porters—grown men, this time—to the personal baggage terminal, rather than to the cargo terminal.

“This was odd,” he told me. “Some of these packages looked like they could fit a piano inside. But no one said a thing.”

He added that virtually all the women on his Yemen-to-Dubai flight wore full-body Islamic garb, yet security did not ask them to remove their face coverings. Considering that male terrorists have repeatedly disguised themselves under burqas, who knows who could have been under there? When jihadists stage mini-reenactments of
Some Like It Hot
, a lot of innocent people can get burnt.

Yet according to my source, none of the Yemeni airport employees seemed to have a care in the world about the circus atmosphere unfolding around them, acting as if it was all just business-as-usual.

“People need to know what's going on at that airport in Yemen,” he told me firmly before hanging up. “It's a threat to our national security.”

Given the insane conditions my source had seen firsthand, it isn't hard to imagine how two suspicious packages made their way onto the planes. It also isn't difficult to imagine that al-Qaeda has sympathizers or operatives actually working at the Yemen airport who would help get explosives onto flights. After all, something similar happened in Britain, where in March 2011 an Islamist working as a computer expert for British Airways was convicted of plotting with al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki to blow
up in mid-flight a U.S.-bound passenger airplane. A jury found Rajib Karim had secured a job with British Airways specifically to advance his terrorist plan. As a prosecutor on the case said, “The most chilling element... is probably the fact that Karim tried to enroll as cabin crew and anyone can imagine how horrific the consequences of this could have been, had he succeeded.”
²

As for the so-called Yemen Cargo Plane Plot, we indeed soon learned that it was an al-Qaeda creation hatched by the group's Yemen branch, known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)—the same al-Awlaki-connected outfit that was behind the British Airways plot as well as the failed Underwear Bomber scheme to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009.

My source in Yemen told me that AQAP was growing in size and influence—with thousands of indigenous new fighters, particularly from south Yemen, lining up to join the cause. While troubling, this news was hardly shocking. With al-Qaeda's leadership in the tribal regions of Pakistan feeling increased pressure in recent years due to a steady barrage of CIA predator drone strikes, the organization's operational focus has gradually been shifting to other AQ hotspots like North Africa, Somalia, and yes, Yemen.
³

If Yemen's airport was unsecure then, imagine the situation now as Yemen—like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Oman, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern countries—is roiled by civil unrest. The revolutions sweeping the Middle East have given rise to a host of national security problems that the Obama administration has utterly failed to address or even comprehend. In most of the Arab countries now gripped by revolutionary fervor, there is a well-organized Islamist movement waiting in the wings. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood comprised the most popular opposition movement to now-deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak. In Yemen and Libya, the tottering regimes, though brutal, have found it in their own interests to suppress al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organizations. Those same terrorists would likely find a friendly safe-haven in both countries if central authority collapsed or fell into the hands of Islamic radicals.

No one knows the shape of the new Middle East that will emerge from the current chaos. But considering the rising popularity of Islamism throughout the region and the poisonous hostility to America—notwithstanding President Obama's seemingly endless tributes to the “peace and justice and fairness and tolerance” of Islam, as he puts it
⁴
—there is a good chance the outcome will not be favorable to America's national security. The Mubarak government and various now-unstable Arab regimes formed a bulwark against the malign influence of Iran, which stands to emerge from the wreckage greatly empowered. As argued in chapter seven of this book, Iran is the epicenter of the global jihad, a nation whose threatening activities—from developing its own arsenal of nuclear weapons to helping turn Venezuela into a jihadist safe haven in our own backyard—the Obama administration has entirely failed to restrain. But the fact that Obama officials seem indifferent to the rising global tide of Islamic fanaticism is, sadly, unsurprising, considering their duplicity in coping with the same threat we are facing right here at home.

For example, the administration is recklessly downplaying a crucial new strategy adopted by al-Qaeda. Even while pursuing spectacular, 9/11-style attacks, the terror group is increasingly interested in smaller-scale assaults on softer targets—such as the foiled 2009 attempt to bomb the New York City subway system; the failed Times Square bombing plot of 2010; the 2009 attack on an Army recruiting office in Little Rock that left one soldier dead and another seriously wounded; and the gruesomely successful jihadist massacre at Fort Hood. Even as I write these words, we are receiving news that two U.S. servicemen were shot and killed in a jihadist attack at Germany's Frankfurt airport by a gunman yelling “Allahu Akbar.”

As described in chapter two, al-Qaeda has endorsed this modus operandi, which I call the Chip Away strategy, in its own publications and in video statements by its spokesmen. Yet the Obama administration insists that every new terrorist attack is the work of a lone “isolated extremist.” Prevented by their “Islam-is-peace” dogma from analyzing
these attacks as part of a wider strategy, Obama officials are allowing key vulnerabilities in our national security to remain in place.

In recent decades, we've seen a growing number of homegrown terrorists in America, both converts to Islam and those raised Muslim. You'll meet these American jihadists throughout the pages of this book; people like Daniel Patrick Boyd, an all-American kid, former high school football player, and son of a Marine who converted to Islam and pled guilty in 2010 to charges stemming from a plot to massacre U.S. soldiers at Quantico, Virginia; Adam Pearlman Gadahn, a former heavy metal fan who was raised Christian by hippie parents before adopting Islam and becoming al-Qaeda's chief English-language propagandist; and Anwar al-Awlaki, the aforementioned AQAP honcho who is, in fact, a New Mexico-born U.S. citizen and alum of Colorado State University.

Far from being the proverbial “isolated extremists,” these individuals moved within a rapidly growing American Islamic community. And if that community is dedicated to peace and tolerance and co-existence, as its spokesmen and government officials both emphatically claim, a lot of its own members have yet to get the message. In chapter five I describe my investigation of Halalco, the largest Islamic supermarket in the Washington, D.C. area, where I found for sale scores of jihadist tracts including dozens of propaganda videos by none other than Anwar al-Awlaki. Likewise, in chapter three you will read about my visit to one of many secretive Islamic compounds springing up across America, this one located in the rural town of Red House, Virginia, where neighbors listen to the enclave's residents conduct firearms training and where a back country road is named after a notorious jihadist leader from Pakistan.

Another unspeakable truth for the Obama administration is that the threat of domestic Islamic terrorism increases along with the rising number of Muslims in America. According to a Pew Research Center report, America's Muslim population is projected to nearly triple, from 2.6 million to 6.2 million, by 2030.
⁵
As Islam spreads, so does the main location for preaching Islam: mosques. As recounted in chapter one, American
Muslims are already engaged in a nationwide campaign of mosquebuilding—including in the very heart of the Bible Belt. Consequently, there are currently over 2,000 mosques operating in the United States and an untold number of Islamic schools. To put it in perspective, in the year 2000, there were only 1,200 mosques in the United States
⁶
—so in just over ten years, their number has nearly doubled, despite the 9/11 attacks and an unceasing onslaught against the West by Islamic jihadists during that same timeframe.

There is plenty of evidence that the creed being preached at American mosques is often not the “tolerant” doctrine that Obama officials tell us constitutes “mainstream” Islam. Take, for example, my visit to one of the largest mosques in America, the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn, Michigan. As described in chapter eight, the imam there is an unabashed supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini and of the Hezbollah terrorist group. While that mosque is Shia, Sunni mosques don't seem particularly interested in co-existence either; many of them are funded by Saudi Arabia and are highly influenced by Saudi-style Wahhabism, replete with all the hatred for Christians and Jews for which that ideology is rightly infamous.

As explained in chapter three, these rapidly growing Islamic communities have taken root not just in the traditional coastal gateway cities, but in rural areas and heartland states like Tennessee, where the local culture is being fundamentally altered by the erection of mosques, the appearance of burqa-clad women, and the insistence on “accommodations” for Islamic traditions and religious practices. One of the fastest growing segments of Islamic America today consists of Somali immigrants. As described in chapter four, the continued arrival of thousands of Somali immigrants every year is part of a fraud-ridden State Department program whose overseers, believing in diversity-uber-alles, seem unconcerned by the growing number of terrorism cases related to the Somali newcomers. The most recent such example is the November 2010 alleged attempt by Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to
massacre thousands of gatherers at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon.

All of these threats to American security are being allowed to fester due to the Obama administration's steadfast refusal to acknowledge the violent jihadist impulse within Islam. Insisting, in the face of all evidence, that Islam is inherently peaceful, government officials recoil from listening to our enemies' explanation of why they are attacking us—that is, because Islamic scripture commands them to do so.

This was the constant refrain I heard when I travelled to England to interview some of the world's most notorious jihadists, all of whom walk the streets of London as free men. As described in chapter six, I spoke to Saad al-Faqih, a reputed associate of Osama bin Laden himself, who explained to me the inner workings of al-Qaeda and warned of coming attacks against the West that will be bigger than 9/11; Yasser al-Sirri, a longtime al-Qaeda associate who earned a death sentence in Egypt for his part in a jihadist assassination attempt against a former Egyptian prime minister; and Anjem Choudary, the leader of Britain's most notorious Islamist organization, who uttered to me, on the record, a thinly veiled terrorist threat against the British state.

The overall ideological threat we face is known by various names, including
Islamic supremacism, Islamism,
and
jihadism
. With those terms, I'm referring to everyone from Armani-wearing stealth jihadists like the Muslim Brotherhood to violent ones like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. Some Islamists are Sunni Muslims and some are Shia. As you will see throughout this book, some conduct their jihad through legal, subversive means, while others use terrorism as the means to their end. But while they may employ different tactics, all of them—from the Saudi Wahhabis to the Iranian regime to the Taliban to Hamas and beyond—share a similar desire: to see the world subjugated to Islamic law, or
sharia
, and to see all non-Muslims bow to the will of Allah.