Hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee - The Rise of Radicalization: Is the U.S. Government Failing to Counter International and Domestic Terrorism?

Hearing

Our Nation is grappling with a new wave of terror.

From the suburbs of Massachusetts to the streets of South Carolina, we have apprehended a string of
assailants who--while living among us--plotted to cause mass harm in the name of their hateful
ideology. Just days ago U.S. authorities disrupted an ISIS-linked plot to attack an American university
with assault rifles and improvised explosive devices. The suspect planned to execute students and
broadcast it live on the internet. And last month our nation reacted with horror as another extremist
launched an attack on black worshippers in a Charleston church.

Whether inspired by Islamist terror or white supremacy, these assailants share one trait in common:
they want to attack the innocent, intimidate our population, and coerce us in order to achieve their
insidious goals. Both international and domestic extremist groups are seeking to radicalize our citizens.
And they have begun to master social media as a recruitment tool, placing people on a path to violence
at alarming speed. But we cannot bow down in the face of terror, and we must refuse to live at the mercy
of fanatics. That is why we are here today: to confront the dangers we face, identify gaps in our
defenses, and counter the viral spread of violent extremism.

Americans are worried about a heightened threat environment and for good reason. The number of post-
9/11 homegrown terror plots in the United States has surged. In fact, there have been more U.S.-based
terror plots in the first half of 2015 than any full year since 9/11. In particular, Islamist terror groups are
on the march. The attack disrupted this week marks the 50th ISIS-linked terror plot against the Western
world since early last year--and the 12th inside America.

These fanatics have warped a peaceful religion into deceitful propaganda, designed to convince
vulnerable young people to embrace inhuman barbarism. Their success at recruiting from within our
own communities cannot be ignored. Since the beginning of 2014, we have arrested or charged more
than 60 ISIS-inspired suspects in 19 states, and the FBI says it now has opened ISIS-related
investigations in every single state. In just the past few weeks, we have disrupted heinous plots to
behead law enforcement officers, to detonate explosives in New York City, and to conduct mass
shootings of Americans. All of the attack plotters were U.S. citizens.

Extremists have also lured hundreds of Americans to try and join them on the battlefield in Syria--and
at least one has already returned to our country and was arrested earlier this year while planning a
terrorist attack on a U.S. military base.

I commend the FBI, Homeland Security, and State and local law enforcement for disrupting so many of
these cases, but we are nowhere near close to reducing the threat. We are living in a new age of peer-topeer
terrorism. Eighty percent of the ISIS-inspired Americans who have been arrested were recruited by
the terrorist group over social media or engaged in online communications sympathetic to it. This is how
extremism goes viral: online and out-of-sight, until it's almost too late.

But while we spend billions of dollars to detect and disrupt terror attacks, we have dedicated few
resources toward combating the radicalization at the root of terror. That is what countering violent
extremism--or "CVE"--is all about. It is about warning communities, helping them spot signs of
radicalization, training State and local law enforcement, combating extremist propaganda, and
developing "off-ramps" to radicalization so we have an alternative to simply arresting young people who
are preyed upon and recruited by terrorists. This is the crucial "prevention" aspect of counterterrorism.
Sadly, while extremist recruiters are moving at broadband speed, we are moving at bureaucratic speed.
The Administration has not appointed a lead agency in charge of CVE, and few resources or full-time
personnel are even allocated to it. Our Committee asked the top agencies responsible for CVE how
much money and how many people they have assigned to the problem. They could only identify around
$15 million being spent and around 2 dozen people working full-time to combating domestic
radicalization. That's it.

That means we've arrested twice as many ISIS recruits in the United States this year than there are fulltime
officials working to prevent ISIS from radicalizing Americans in the first place. In a high-threat
environment, this is unacceptable.

Following this hearing today, our Committee will take up a bill crafted to elevate, accelerate, and
streamline the Department of Homeland Security's CVE efforts to tackle both international and
domestic terrorist recruitment and radicalization.

It is time for us to come together on this issue in bipartisan fashion. Ranking Member Thompson has
agreed with me in the past that DHS "has a vital role to play" in CVE and made a point I find
compelling: "Prevention is likely to be more cost effective than surveillance, trials, or wars."

I thank our witnesses for joining us, and I hope they will illuminate the gaps in our defenses and the
importance of ramping up our efforts to counter violent extremism.

Source