02/15/2016
Sunday’s Sixty Minutes program presented an interview with CIA Director John Brennan, commenting on the national security threat that ISIS presents. He answered questions carefully about potential attacks, allowing that “I believe that their attempts are inevitable.” [Watch.]
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Another interesting remark from Brennan was an affirmation of ISIS having chemical weapons. It reminded me of the Middle Eastern men arrested near the Mexican border carrying steel cylinders in their backpacks in December. It can’t be easy to run a national security agency when open borders permit enemies to enter at will and bring their jihad stuff.
Security expert Sebastian Gorka appeared on Fox Business News Monday to fill in some gaps in what Director Brennan said.
MARIA BARTIROMO: What is your reaction to John Brennan’s comments last night?GORKA: A little bit surprised, He gave this long interview in which he said that the threat is maybe out there, and ISIS is trying. This isn’t trying; ISIS has succeeded. If you look at the fact that since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the Caliphate in summer of 2014, we have killed or arrested over 90 people in America with links to ISIS. So you know the threat is real, the threat is here, whether it’s a Malik and Farouk on social media after the attack in San Bernardino, this isn’t a theoretical threat. It is a real threat.
BARTIROMO: From the number of investigations going on within the United States of people who are either joining the fight or are related to the fight, tell us what the status of ISIS in America is right now, Sebastian.
GORKA: Okay, so if you break down the figures, we wrote this report in ThreatKnowledge.org, so we’ve had almost a hundred people arrested on US soil. If you break that down, half of them are people who want to go and fight jihad in the Middle East, go and fight for ISIS in Syria or Iraq. Twenty percent of those are facilitators, people that are talent spotting, recruiting, buying the plane tickets to Turkey. But the really scary thing — and this is what Brennan really should be talking about — 30 percent of the people we have interdicted have decided the best way to serve ISIS is to kill Americans here on US soil. As you said, the director of the FBI Director Comey, he has said there are ongoing investigations, more than 900 leads right now in all 50 states, and that isn’t jihadi cases, that’s specifically ISIS, Maria.
DAGAN McDOWELL: Sebastian, is the government doing enough in terms of counter propaganda if you will? The FBI came out with this goat video game basically aimed at children to try and prevent them from being radicalized? And if you look at it, it’s quite frankly laughable and it kind of goes to the fact of what government isn’t doing.
GORKA: When it comes to the propaganda war, we are still in the kindergarten, we’re in the pre-K and ISIS is in grad school. They’re eating our lunch every day in the propaganda domain, whether it’s with their magazine Dabiq, the ISIS English language internet magazine, with their presence on social media, the use of encrypted means of communication. Everything we do is either laughable, as you mentioned, especially what’s coming out of the Department of State, or it’s absolutely tactical; it’s at the lowest level with the idea that we’re going to stop individuals from becoming terrorists, when that’s not what we have to do. We have to degrade and de-legitimize the whole ideology of the Caliphate but this administration won’t touch it, because it says you can’t talk about religion which is very very strange.
MICHAEL BLOCK: Dr. Gorka, with that, here in the West, we are majority non-Muslim. What place do we have trying to establish legitimacy for any interpretation of Islam? Is this something that needs to be solved within the Islamic world? Is there really anything the West can do about this?
GORKA: Great question. We have to be part of this is same way we were during the Cold War. We have to help those in the region fight this fight. There are some very brave Muslim reformers on the internet. There are people like General Cici, King Abdullah II of Jordan. We have to help them in the same way that we help people in Europe. Remember the CIA owns publishing houses in Europe, whole publishing houses to push back on Communist ideology during the Cold War. Today we are just not present, we are absent in the war and we’re not helping our allies, like the good guy Sunnis like the Jordanians or like the Egyptians fight this fight and win it for us … .
BARTIROMO: And you think that an ISIS attack is imminent?
GORKA: We published a report a week before San Bernardino after Paris saying that type of attack we saw in Paris is not a question of if in America; it’s a question of when, and our assessment has not changed.
Gorka is probably right about helping non-chopper Muslims in the Middle East, since a few friendlies apparently do exist. Jordan’s King Abdullah, for example, seems quite civilized as illustrated by his cameo on Star Trek and unpublicized motorcycle trips in the US, as well as being an anti-jihad stalwart in a tough region.
Of course, there’s still no excuse to admit thousands of hostile Muslims inside the gates via immigration and refugee programs. President Roosevelt didn’t offer visas to Nazis during WWII.
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