Homegrown terror suspects raise concern
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer Tue Aug 29, 2:36 PM ET
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Intelligence officials now fear that homegrowns pose as much of a threat to the U.S. as foreign terrorists. State and local police are being enlisted to watch for signs from people who in the past would have never gotten a second look.
"We want to understand the phenomena: What causes a person from being, say, extreme in views, to moving to actually committing violence?" said Charles E. Allen, chief intelligence officer at the Homeland Security Department.
Little is known about how many homegrown terrorists are in the country — or how many sympathizers are being recruited to join their ranks. The FBI has long monitored groups that pose potential threats, from al-Qaida sympathizers to abortion clinic bombers and radical animal rights and environmental activists.
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Local police, however, have little training to know what to look for. Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, authorities have focused mostly on young Middle Eastern men.
"We need to start looking at people who look more like us," said Gaithersburg, Md., police detective Patrick Word, president of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Gang Investigators Network, which shares intelligence among law enforcement officials.
Word said the federal government also "needs to broaden the scope of what terrorism is and what homeland security is."
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Beyond carrying out devastating attacks, homegrowns also can inflict far greater psychological damage on the nation, said John Rollins, a former Homeland Security senior intelligence official. Homegrown attacks will inevitably make people become paranoid about neighbors, community members and others they've known for a long time, he said.
"It's easy for us to say it's those guys over there, or it's folks that follow a certain religious belief, but if they're Americans, it's not easy for us to keep them at arms' length," said Rollins, a terrorism specialist at the Congressional Research Service. "They're part of the makeup. They're undetected."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060829/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/homegrown_terrorists