AUSTIN, Texas — Americans were horrified today when the terrorist group ISIS released a video that purports to show a militant beheading the American journalist Steven Sotloff, who had been held hostage since being captured in Syria in August 2013. The ISIS militant is reported to be the same individual who beheaded another American journalist, James Foley last month. Now, a new report by CNN sheds light on how dangerous the threat from ISIS may be here in America.
Today, on CNN’s The Lead, host Jake Tapper asked former CIA operative Bob Baer to comment on whether ISIS posed a threat to the United States. “I’ve been told from national security experts that the concern of ISIS trying to strike here in the homeland, here in the United States, is a very real and serious concern,” commented Tapper, asking Baer what he had heard from his sources about “any cells of ISIS within the United States.”
Baer replied that his contacts in the American intelligence community were “very alarmed” and that they believed that ISIS cells have already infiltrated the United States.
“The people who collect tactical intelligence on the ground, day-to-day — and this isn’t Washington — but people collecting this stuff say they’re here, ISIS is here, they’re capable of striking,” said Baer. “They don’t know what their plans and intentions are. But it’s a definite concern.”
When Tapper asked him to clarify what he meant by “they’re here,” Baer stated that the intelligence community believed that some ISIS agents had crossed the Mexican border illegally, while others were American citizens who had returned from Syria.
“And then there’s the unknown, of how many people have come back they’re not even aware of,” he added.
The CNN report validates an article from over a year ago by Breitbart Texas’ Managing Director, Brandon Darby, where he described a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that showed how our unsecured border with Mexico and Somalia’s porous borders and lack of law enforcement were being used as a “global pathway” for illegal immigrants, vulnerable to exploitation by Al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorists.
Last week, in another article by Darby, Breitbart Texas exclusively reported on a leaked document that was distributed to federal agents all along the U.S.-Mexico border, warning about an ISIS-related terrorism threat. Darby also reported that U.S. Border Patrol agents were” taking the threat seriously” and considered it “credible information.”
“I’m glad our reporting on border security issues has, once again, been validated,” said Darby, in response to the CNN report, “but there is little comfort in that because we would much rather prefer that the situation not be so dangerous. If there weren’t already enough legitimate reasons to finally get serious about border security, than today’s news should get Americans demanding that their government take action.”
Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter at @rumpfshaker.
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