Attacks by self-radicalized Muslim terrorists in Canada are causing a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official to warn Americans that they are living in a very dangerous time for a terror attack from a new direction — north.
"I am now more worried about a terrorist threat in the U.S. than I have been for a long, long time," Mike Morell, former deputy director and twice acting director of the CIA and a CBS News security contributor,
told CBS This Morning.
On Wednesday, gunman Michael Joseph Hall, who had changed his name to Michael Abdul Zehaf-Bibeau, gunned down a soldier at the National War Memorial in Ottawa and attacked the Parliament building, where he was shot and killed by a House of Commons security guard. Just three days before, Martin Couture Rouleau, believed to be yet another self-radicalized Islamic terrorist, ran down two Canadian soldiers with his car, killing one, before police killed him.
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Morell's concern is the long, lightly-guarded Canadian border, which could allow self-radicalized Canadian jihadists to enter the U.S. and launch deadly terror attacks at will.
"I'm much more concerned about the Canada border than I am the Mexican border because it’s much easier to come across the border," Morell told CBS. "To stop somebody who has been radicalized in Canada from coming across that border requires that you know about them, that the Canadians know about them and tell us, and that they try to cross that border illegally. There are many, many ways to cross that border illegally, so I worry about that."
Morell, noting that British authorities arrested a self-radicalized woman in England who was planning attacks yesterday, told CBS, "We have the self-radicalization problem ourselves. We’ve got the possibility that ISIS (Islamic State) might send fighters here to conduct attacks. We still have al-Qaida in Pakistan, al-Qaida in Yemen and the Khorasan group planning attacks.
"And we have the fact that what Edward Snowden did has made it much more difficult for law enforcement and intelligence to track these guys, so we are at, I think, a very dangerous time here."
President Obama has said, "Obviously there's a lot of interaction between Canadians and the U.S., where we have such a long border."
Morell noted that there are two types of threats — ISIS-trained fighters sent into the U.S. to launch terrorist attacks, and self-radicalized jihadists already here, who fall under the influence of radical Muslims and stay under the radar of intelligence groups until they launch their own "lone wolf" attacks.
"In terms of the insider threat, really the only thing you can do is monitor extremist websites and see who goes there and see what kind of conversations they have there," Morell told CBS. "If those conversations start talking about violence, then the FBI can open up an investigation and take a look at that person, but that’s a lot of ifs to be able to find somebody who’s been radicalized.
"We are starting to see one of the two types of threats become a reality," Morel said.
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