The FBI and Department of Homeland Security successfully thwarted a serious threat in Boston with the shooting of one man and the capture of another who were
allegedly plotting to behead a police officer in Boston, House Homeland Security Committee Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Wednesday.
"This was a success in my judgment," the Texas Republican told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program. "We've seen directives to attack military installations and also police officers. I think the good news is, I think the FBI and Homeland were on top of this one."
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Early a knife-wielding man, Usaama Rahim, was shot and killed in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. Members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force approached the man to ask him about "terrorist-related information," and he refused to drop a large military-style knife as he walked toward them, leaving officers no choice but to shoot him, according to a
Boston Globe report.
Authorities also arrested another man, David Wright, in Everett, Mass., who is being accused of conspiring with Rahim to attack police officers. Wright will be arraigned in federal court on Wednesday.
McCaul told Fox News that "terrorism has gone viral," and authorities are finding that there are operatives in Syria who have sent "directives or calls to arms, calls to arms to people in the United States to activate them like sleeper cells," and in the Boston case, the individuals were planning to attack the police.
Wright and Rahim were both under 24/7 physical and technical surveillance, said McCaul, which was triggered by "a lot of the Internet communication that we picked up."
He said it's important to remember that top recruiters in Syria can "have thousands of followers in the United States if they try to activate. Again this is kind of a new concern wave of terror we're trying to deal with."
But it's difficult to stop, said McCaul, because there are so many people following Twitter accounts out of Syria, noting that the attempted attack in Garland, Texas, last month is another example of ISIS radicalization efforts.
McCaul said Tuesday night's passage of the USA Freedom Act, which stops the bulk collection of telephone metadata and requires legal steps to be taken to trace phone records is much like what he used to do when he was federal prosecutor, but what he really expects to hear from the FBI is a report on how sophisticated ISIS is on social media.
"They know how to jump out of different platforms," he said. "They change their Twitter accounts almost daily. And then they also go into what is called dark space, Securecom. That is very difficult for to us monitor even if we have coverage by say, a warrant or wiretap, they can jump into a message box and then to another platform that is called dark space that we cannot cover."
And when that happens, McCaul said, their communications are not known, and he expects to hear from the FBI and Homeland Security that "probably the biggest concern is what we can't monitor and what we don't know and what is occurring in the United States right now."
McCaul said he is also "highly disturbed" by reports that screeners for the Transportation Security Agency failed to detect mock explosives and weapons in 95 percent of undercover tests.
On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said he reassigned the acting administrator for the
TSA after earlier ordering improved security at U.S. airports.
McCaul told Fox that the failed tests are "unacceptable within the TSA, given the high threat environment that's out there."
Just this week, said McCaul, there was a threat to five jets that turned out to be a hoax, but the threat of non-metallic explosives being used on airlines is still a real problem.
"The idea that weapons are getting through and potentially explosive devices getting through, whether human error or technical is unacceptable, and I will be holding oversight hearings on the issue," he said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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