A man lays down flowers during a vigil in front of the United States embassy in Berlin yesterday to honor the victims of the attack on the gay nightclub in Orlando
The FBI let the Orlando mass-shooting suspect slip through its grasp despite interviewing him twice since 2013 due to a lack of evidence to hold him, a troubling fact that will pressure officials struggling to detect lone terrorists without eroding basic civil liberties.
The FBI is investigating Sunday’s killing spree at a gay dance club in Orlando, Florida, as an act of terrorism after 29-year-old shooting suspect Omar Mateen killed 49 people using an assault weapon and a handgun. Mateen, who called 9-1-1 as he began the assault to claim allegiance to Islamic State, was killed in a shootout with police.
While the U.S. has made progress in countering groups like Islamic State on the ground overseas, technology allows their radical ideology to reach across borders and lure true believers, the socially disaffected or the mentally unstable. Even when a potential terrorism suspect comes to the attention of U.S. law enforcement – as Mateen did – there may not be enough evidence, resources or coordination to continue an investigation.
“Law enforcement is following hundreds of people and there are thousands of people that have come on their radar,” Shawn Henry, a former FBI executive assistant director, said in an interview. “The complexity of trying to navigate our laws and Constitution while trying to maintain optimal security is a really difficult challenge. You just cannot protect against everything.”
The FBI said it interviewed Mateen in 2013 because the agency was told he had made inflammatory remarks about having terrorist ties and again in 2014 because of a connection to an American who went to fight with Islamic State.
“Those interviews turned out to be inconclusive, so there was nothing to keep the investigation going,” Ronald Hopper, an FBI assistant special agent in charge of the bureau’s Orlando office, told reporters Sunday.
Senior U.S. national security officials, including Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, have warned for several years about the threat from “lone-wolf” terrorists – those who become self-
radicalized and plot attacks with little notice or resources.
The challenge for intelligence and law enforcement officials, however, is knowing when radical beliefs have crossed the line into action.
“The step from just having some extreme views to acting violently is extremely hard to detect from the outside unless that individual is sharing that with others on social media, telephonically, or what have you,” said Daniel Benjamin, director of the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College and a former State Department counterterrorism coordinator.
That effort is compounded in a country like the U.S., where free speech and the ability to buy guns are considered fundamental rights. “Just making statements isn’t enough to arrest somebody,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on CBS News.
“The ominous feeling today is that while lone-wolf operators may 99 percent of the time not be capable of complex, high-end attacks on their own, we’ve been reminded of how much damage an assault weapon can do,” said Benjamin.
Officials say it is too early to determine what, if any, actual link Mateen had with Islamic State, despite his 9-1-1 call and the group’s announcement claiming credit for the assault. Even as Islamic State has lost territory in Syria, Iraq and Libya, individuals connected or inspired by the group have carried out successful attacks in the past year in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, California – and now perhaps Orlando.
Early on, Islamic State was viewed as less of a direct threat to the U.S. and Europe than other groups such as al-Qaeda because it was focused on seizing territory for its claimed caliphate. But Islamic State should be seen as both an insurgency – which is struggling to hold on to its territory – and as a global terrorist organization, which is recording successes, said Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University who studies transnational jihadist movements and insurgencies.
In terms of its ability to inspire attacks, Islamic State “looks more powerful than it has before,” Winter said in a phone interview from Atlanta. MDT/Bloomberg
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