called reassessing the evolving al qaida threat to the homeland just over a year ago this subcommittee held a hearing at which i noted that al qaida is desire and intent to attack us remained undiminished peter bergen and lawrence wright both renowned terrorism experts testified at that hearing bergen asserted that al qaida is losing the long term battle for hearts and minds but yet has rebuilt its capacity along the afghan border and remains capable of launching large scale attacks in the west he predicted that the next terror attack in the u s will probably be committed by someone holding a european passport right said that al qaeda attacks will continue the only real question is scale he described the organization as adaptive flexible and evolutionary and a long way from extinction we return to this topic today because i for one believe al  more dangerous now than ever i'm just back from a trip with committee staff and some other colleagues not on this committee to afghanistan and pakistan where meetings with foreign american intelligence officials confirm that qaeda is spreading from its safe haven along the afghan border into yemen somalia and the magreb and into the united states since nine eleven al qaida has morphed from a top down vertically integrated into the into a loosely affiliated horizontal structure no doubt we'll hear more about that from dr crenshaw despite considerable success by the u s and allies in taking out many high value targets westerners continue to train in al  bergen is our witness again today and he in his testimony which he will deliver shortly puts the number at twenty five american citizens or residents who have been charged with traveling to such training camps since nine eleven al qaida is also inspiring copycat type attacks which may be what the hasan case is about the quote new terrorist template unquote as time magazine calls it this week will prove an even more difficult read to mitigate than that posed by the original al qaida i've been focused on this thread for eight years first as the ranking member on the house intelligence committee and now as chair of the subcommittee in fact my exposure to it predates nine eleven as i served on the congressionally mandated commission on terrorism in one nine hundred ninety nine to two thousand which predicted along with several other studies and major terrorist attack on u s soil there is much unfinished business homeland remains vulnerable recent indictments in the u s against najibullah zazi and david headley are of huge concern i am concerned these indictments are important and i applaud the excellent work of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies involved including the n y p d since nine eleven we have successfully tried and convicted more than two hundred individuals with a history of or nexus to international terrorism terrorism in the united states consistent with this strong record i support attorney general holder's decision to refer a colleague sheikh mohammed and four other get mo teaneck detainees for trial in the southern district of new york i believe holder's decision was carefully considered that our prosecutions will be successful that all five are likely to be convicted and that by doing it this way we will demonstrate to the world that we live by our values principle among them the rule of law today's hearing will update the subcommittee on the al threat and we welcome back mr bergen as well as terrorism experts paul paul our dr martha crenshaw and retired general david barno our witnesses seem to agree that al qaeda is still potent although less capable of pulling off an attack of the same magnitude or larger than nine eleven it is mr bergen's assessment that al qaida now poses a quote second order threat in which the worst case scenario would be an al qaeda trained or inspired tack unquote mr pull our sights the importance of placing the threat from al qaida within a larger context one that includes other radical islamist cells and individuals that may be motivated by grievances and sent sentiments al  agrees finally dr crenshaw who as i mentioned several weeks ago asserts that sponsoring terrorist attacks in the west is an ideological imperative essential to the al qaeda identity and brand i personally hope that president obama's emerging pack af strategy and my emphasis on pak is deliberate will include a broad strategy for targeting al qaida and any other terror group with worldwide reach and mitigating the threat to the united states i look forward to a very very useful conversation and want to welcome all of you and i will now recognize the gentleman from new york mr king who is ranking member of the full committee sitting in for the ranking member of the subcommittee for an opening statement and before i do that without objection the gentleman from new jersey mr pascrell is authorized to sit on the diocese for the purpose of questioning witnesses case which probably would have been the most serious attack since september eleventh to not have been stopped and again it was a person who while he was born in afghanistan and raised in new york in queens played high school basketball and in many ways  mistake i believe that we do comply with the lowly hold military tribunals and military tribunals are part of our law and that is what should be done with dealing with enemy combatants also as far as impressing the rest of the world we had the first world trade center case tried in open safe because they all live in new york other members of the subcommittee are reminded that under the subcommittee rules opening statements may be submitted for the record we have a large attendance here i noticed this morning because the subject important to all of us and so let me now welcome our witnesses beginning with mr peter bergen who is currently swartz a senior fellow at the new america foundation in washington he's also a print and television journalist reporting for publications such as the washington post los angeles times wall street journal and he served as c n n s senior security analyst in two thousand and eight he was an adjunct lecturer at the kennedy school of government at harvard and has also worked as an adjunct professor at the school of advanced international studies at johns hopkins university here has authored two well known books on al qaeda holy war inc inside the secret world of bin laden and the osama bin laden i let me introduce the rest of you right now to and then we'll go down the row dr paul pull are is a professor and the director of graduate studies overseeing the security studies program at georgetown university he retired in two thousand and five from a twenty eight year career in the u s intelligence community his last position being national intelligence officer for the near east and south asia dr paul are also serves on the national intelligence council as one of the original members of its analytic group dr with a federal executive fellow at the brook brookings institution from one nine hundred ninety nine to two thousand and is a retired officer of the u s army reserve and whose service included a tour in vietnam dr martha crenshaw is currently a senior fellow at the center for international security and cooperation at stanford university where she also works as a professor of political science prior to this she worked as a professor of government at wesleyan university from hundred seventy four to two thousand and seven she is a lead investigator with the national center for the study of terrorism and response to terrorism at the university of maryland and has served on the executive board of women in international security and share the american political science association taskforce on political violence and terrorism and finally lieutenant general david barno is currently the director of near east south asia center at the national defense university general barno was recently appointed as the chairman of the advisory committee on operation iraqi freedom operation enduring freedom veterans and families by secretary of veterans affairs by the secretary of veterans  affairs he holds a degree from west point georgetown university in the u s army war college in two thousand and three he deployed to afghanistan for nineteen months commanding over twenty thousand u s and coalition forces as part of operation end uring freedom without objection the witness statements will be inserted in the record and i would now ask mr bergen to summarize his statement for five minutes showing up in al qaeda training camps when you have somebody like headley the allegation is met with senior militants in the tribal areas was going to conduct an operation against a danish newspaper and may even be involved in the mumbai attacks americans or american citizens or residents have been convicted or charged of traveling to an overseas training camp and of course not number accounts the real number because for instance in the case of the somali americans there probably about two dozen of those from minnesota who traveled to somal only three of that number of actually being child or convicted of a crime so this number on the counts the number and i think it's a fairly large number given the fact that he's going to a training camp that really makes a difference i mean it's one thing to be radicalized over the internet anybody can watch a beheading camp if you don't have that experience it's very hard to conduct a terrorist operation you have to learn how to kill people which is not something that is something that is very natural to to most people i'm most concerned about the fact that two americans have conducted suicide operations of somalia the reason i'm concerned about that is once this idea sort of becomes part of the d n a of these groups they can come home the reason i say that with some certainty is the british are quite i think naive about the idea that british citizens would actually attack in the domestic united kingdom even though they're already being attacked by british citizens in tel aviv a suicide attack in two thousand and three a suicide attack in kashmir in two thousand the british government officially concluded that that was very unlikely that bridges would conduct operations at high suicide operations and of course seventy seven happened and that complacency collapse which brings me to major hasan we still don't know major hasan's exact motivations mostly inaudible that you had his tendencies is he mostly a jihadist guy with who was also inaudible we don't quite understand the proportions but the more we know about him the more interesting his case becomes and the more i would put it in the jihadist column he was a guy who dressed in white the morning when he went to the convenience store  posted postings on the internet about suicide bombings he made inquiries about the killings of innocents and he also contacted an al qaeda and basically an al qaeda apologist in yemen a cleric taking together that i think adds up to a picture of somebody who is planning  the sort of jihadist death by cop parliament another major hasan raises another issue which is if you are somebody which has tendencies the biggest the most favorable target for you is the u s military conduct an attack on this military center in broad daylight one case another case of course hasan himself another case of course at the fort dix case and another case which chairwoman hamann does very well as a case in torrance california where a group of guys who got radicalized in prison i think that we may have been a little complacent about the american muslim community which on average is much better educated to most americans has higher incomes doesn't live in ghettos but if you look at and that will look very different from a european muslim counterpart but if you look at najibullah zazi who was basically  a guy driving a shuttle bus that denver airport or the somali americans you come from one of the most disadvantaged american communities or if you look at venus the guy from long island this was a guy a high school dropout and so the profile of these people thank you very much dr paul r thank you madam chairwoman and mr king and members of the committee although the title of this hearing refers explicitly to al qaeda i take the committee's interest to be terrorist threats in general to the u s homeland which are not soley a matter of al qaeda or any other single group and by al qaeda i'm talking about al qaeda central although there's a widespread tendency to gauge the seriousness of any incident to the extent that we can draw links to someone or something connected with al qaeda the whole notion of links needs to be handled more carefully than it customarily is links can and do mean anything from command and control on the one extreme to the most casual or feckless contacts on the other and they do not themselves indicate where the initiative came from a key question to consider is why and how individuals become radicalized to the extent that they commit or attempts or even contemplate politically motivated violence a terrorist group or a leader can provide an ideological framework or inspiration but individual preexisting anger or discontent that is sufficiently strong for the blandishments of a terrorist group to have any appeal in the first place is a necessary ingredient that preterists disposition in turn can have any or all of several sources and we've seen some of this in the recent incidents ranging from personal frustrations to anger over a controversial public policy and to the extent we want to understand u s citizens or u s persons turning to terrorism against the united states those are the sources to which we have to look i would summarize the most important patterns international terrorism with particular reference to threats to the u s homeland in the eight years since nine eleven with two observations and madam chairwoman you basically touched on this yourself in your opening comments first the group that accomplished nine eleven al qaeda central although still a threat is less capable of pulling off something of that magnitude than it was in two thousand and one and for that we have in large part to bank many of the variety of measures that the american people's outrage over nine eleven made possible politically possible in a way that was not possible before that event that includes enhanced offensive security measures here at home as well as a variety of office of measures overseas the other observation is that the broader violent jihad is movement of which al qaeda central is a part is probably at least as large and widespread as it was eight years ago and here again some of our own actions have been major contributors especially i must add the war in iraq the overall result of these trends is a more diffuse threat in which the initiative for violence and attacks comes from more different places than it did a few years ago and against this backdrop that we have to view the specter of people here in the united states including possibly u s citizens perpetrating terrorist attacks within the u s homegrown perpetrators have certain advantages over outsiders after all they don't have to cross the borders where we've enhanced our security they don't stand out in short they're harder to detect this does make them more attractive potential recruits for foreign terrorist groups but for the same reasons any u s persons who do turn to terrorism would present a significant counterterrorist challenge whether or not they are affiliated with a foreign group peter bergen has already addressed quite well the comparison with  between the united states and europe as far as the american muslim community is concerned i agree with everything he said i would just say that incidents to date here in our country do not add up to a significant homegrown islamised terrorist problem in the united states at least not yet but episodes like the shooting at fort hood suggest the possibility of more and they suggest the sorts of reasons and motivations that could make for more finally i was asked about i'm sure i want to comment on what effect u s policies and war fighting have on threats to the u s it's basically two points as well so i'm uses of force overseas including for example the firing of missiles from one manned aircraft in pakistan have contributed to the eroding of the organizational capabilities of foreign terrorist groups and specifically on the other hand the use of military force can and does exacerbate the terrorist threat by stoking anger against the united states and u s polic inevitable collateral damage we've seen this take place in pakistan we've seen it take place in afghanistan and the same sort of sentiments going to rise here in the united states however one chooses to characterize or label what fort hood has reported sentiments about america's current overseas wars and how they figure into the action they took illustrate a phenomenon that we should not be colleagues have said so far i think that al qaida seriously weakened in the past eight years poses a serious threat and that our policies in afghanistan and pakistan are going to impact the future of that threat in ways that we don't really know but that we need to watch very carefully i based my judgment on two things one is the organizational capacity of al qaida and the other is there a theological intentions and their belief systems which are very simple dichotomy but still i think quite real in terms of organization and i don't disagree with my colleagues but i will point to what i regard as the all important middle level of organization and al qaida sometimes we treated as though it were al qaeda central at the top which may indeed be growing in influence again and then rank and file recruits or volunteers at the bottom when i see an intermediate level as critically important and that intermediate level to my mind has two components one is radical clerics who in cases in britain in denmark in the united states now have encouraged if not recruited individuals who have a predisposition to be recruited which is all too important and second we don't want to neglect the role of organizations in conflict zones as in yemen somalia in pakistan lashkar e toiba who are real functioning structured organizations to which these individuals can make contact as well so it's not just al central in terms of a leadership and a structured organization and arenas for training camps so the training camps don't have to be in afghanistan pakistan and if they're elsewhere they'll probably be even harder for us to locate if they're in yemen or in somalia in terms of the intention behind terrorism as the chairwoman noted it's a very important thing to al qaeda to be able to recruit in the west it is a legitimize same device and it may not necessarily matter to them whether they're actually directing what people are doing or whether they are simply inspiring them to be imitators of what they've already seen if there are attacks within the west al qaeda at some level will take credit for it so they will say there was a connection even if we don't think our intelligence agencies don't think that there was a connection if you look at the writings of abu musaab al suri who was an important in al qaeda who was captured by our forces in two thousand and five he lays out a very clear plan for recruiting in the west and points out that under western pressure the only sensible way to keep the al qaeda movement going is to encourage small cells to be created in the west now and looking at this kind of relationship one thing i want to stress i think is that in my view al qaeda is not what we would call a social movement is often referred to as a movement and in many ways it is but to me just calling it a movement implies it has a lot of grassroots support i regard it as more of a transnational secret society composed of clandestine cells around the world it has very little above ground support it has some but it's very small so i think we need to keep in mind that the number of people who are attracted to al qaeda or who belong to its organized branches wherever they are is actually a very very small number of people it may be growing it's very very hard for us to tell because as i put in my testimony we can't count the number of people  at recruiting stations we don't know how many people might be susceptible to recruitment how many people are out there but it's important to remember that it is a very small number of people in terms of the intention behind the use of violence against the west i'll just point to one encouraging dimension although i have to say that i am not completely encouraged and that is divisions within the ranks of al qaida india logs during the past eight years there have been more figures who were affiliated with al qaeda breaking ranks and saying they disapprove either of attacks on civilians or attacks on muslim civilians with that qualification i myself am not sure how much influence these clerics have most cases are clerics or leaders i'm not sure how many people find them credible but think we can regard that as sort of a source of a very cautious optimism that there may be some splits and fissures within the overall movement that may give us an opportunity for making inroads into the movement and into halting this process of recruitment however in my talks with people and counterterrorism agencies and other democratic governments they feel that the sorts of young people who are susceptible to radicalization do not feel that the more moderate figures credible are exciting or interesting and they don't really have much sway with the kind of people that we are particularly concerned about and that no doubt stop and thank you again of national defense university all my remarks are my testimony they are my personal outlook and opinions and don't represent the u s government or national defense university i would generally agree with most of what i've heard so far from my colleagues and i think perhaps one thematic that all of this will sound in one way or another today is the danger that al qaeda still represents and i think the risk of us underestimating that danger in my my opinion at least is perhaps one of the things we have to be particularly vigilant against here in the coming years events of nine eleven reminded us and no one certain terms of the cost of unpreparedness and what we now characterize as homeland security and as we all know just eight years ago the nation suffered its most serious blow ever in a single day attack by an outside attack or on the united states nearly three thousand american lives were lost here in washington in new york and in pennsylvania that's that's a day that has changed all of our lives forever and we can't forget how that came about and can't be swayed from ensuring that that never occurs again i would also note that in today's environment i think the emergence of a violent video logically driven non state actor such as al qaeda is really radical altered the calculus of u s national defense and i come from a military background i grew up in a world where we faced a cold war threat from the soviet union the warsaw pact in europe we're in a completely different world today and i'm not sure all of our institutions in looking at defense of the country of caught up conventional military organizations today provide little defensive or deterrent power against this particular adversary law enforcement organizations are demonstrating a lot of difficulty  dealing with these deadly threats as well and doing them in a timely manner before attacks occur despite the great successes we've seen here in the united states over the last eight years in reality of course our adversary only has to be lucky once where our defensive measures have to be like the one hundred percent of the time which is a very tough standard to meet i think the ambiguity in this world of non state threats argues for both a defense of law enforcement criminal enterprise but also an off hand some set of tools defensive measures we're all familiar with include hardening of the dental targets red teaming our vulnerabilities and even even increased vigilance by our citizens as well as law enforcement i think these measures are necessary but they're not fully sufficient often to have measures to keep terrorist organizations and other malign non state actors off balance and under pressure are simply essential this is a war our enemy views this as a war we sometimes it is a war sometimes the autism is a myriad combination of other issues perhaps rightfully so but our enemy uses very much as a war in a multigenerational war and we have to respond to that with the degree of seriousness that it requires defeating al qaeda in my view will require a long term american presence in support of our friends in south and central asia especially now afghanistan and pakistan i think that there our presence the not be realized by large numbers of u s and nato troops as is the case today but our long term presence should be characterized by american partnership in intelligence law enforcement border control and counterterrorism forces across the region i'm not sure that day will ever arrive our unless we can defeat the ascendancy of the taliban threat today i would view that the taliban relationship with al qaeda today is symbiotic sometimes we like to desegregate  but i very much see the two of these having grown together in many ways i would describe it as the al qaeda fish today in the afghanistan pakistan border region swim inside of a taliban sea and that arena and that our fight has to be able to take on both of those issues and i think a long term partnership with our friends in the region is absolutely essential for our enduring security of the united states we can't simply walk away we can't withdraw we cannot disengage from that region and expect our nation to be safe here at home so i would i would close by saying that i share the belief of many others that only our consistent and and persistent military and intelligence pressure on al qaeda in many ways enabled by our local presence there on the afghanistan pakistan region those factors have come together to help prevent a large scale al qaeda attack on the united states in these last eight years there are many other components of this defense and there are other components of the office but i do have concern that our disconnection our potential disengagement  viewing in this region could be very debilitating to our long term security and works against our interests al qaeda is still a deadly threatening powerful organization thanks and i look forward your question thank you very much and thanks to all the witnesses for excellent testimony and for confining yourselves to five minutes given the number of members who showed up to ask you questions we're going to have a very very full morning in accordance with committee rules i will recognize members who were present at the start of the hearing based on seniority on the subcommittee alternating between majority and minority those members coming in later will be recognized in their order of the in their order of arrival i also would ask unanimous consent for m lee of texas and mr lundgren of california to sit on the dyess for the purposes of questioning witnesses during the hearing today they are not members of our subcommittee but they are members of the full committee hearing no objection so ordered let me now recognize myself for five minutes first to dr paul our and general barno thank you for your service both of you have spent years and years away from your families one in the intelligence area and the other in our military keeping our country safe and we recognize it and salute you both and i think that your service now is even more valuable because of your service then i understand general barno you're still serving but you were on active duty in the middle east and it and and and in vietnam i think that was you  community and our law enforcement agencies have played a major role these past eight years in keeping our country safe i think we all recognize that we should also all recognize that some actions that congress has taken have helped as well mr so for all the bad stories about congress there have been some good stories as well having said that as i said in my opening remarks i think al qaeda remains potent and my first question to you is  if we are able or one of our allies is able to capture or kill osama bin laden and or i'm an al zawahiri will that make a difference to al of sorts and you know to do that you can do it whether you're dead or alive so the question you raise madam chairwoman is one that the specialists have debated among themselves a long time i know when i was in government we we debated amongst ourselves a long time i think it's a wash quite frankly there would be a kind of martyrdom aspect to it depending on how they were killed if they were killed and then of course if they were captured we would face the same respond to the danish cartoons that's one of the reasons the danish embassy was attacked in islamabad and there are many other examples so i think that they are important in a way that much more important anybody else has been captured or killed so far thank you shah i think they both have enormous power over the movement and i think so are you now even more so than bin laden because we have not seen any video tapes from bin laden for quite a long time my colleagues and i know exactly  issues a stream of videos that i think are enormously influential and that what we have to understand is the role of communications within the movement of communications frantically defining organization of al qaeda so if you cut off those sources of unification i think that it would have an impact on the movement although i think that dr people are is also right that there might be a sense of desperation in the rank and file in the lower levels if the top leaders were removed if they believe that they were removed remember the role of conspiracy theories off the table how does this organization perpetuate itself five years from now ten years now is going to have that degree of energy and i think they make a difference and i think they remain extremely important well thank you i'm going to respect my own five minutes and i assume a other members well i would just say that i tend to agree that they at least have symbolic importance and there is a communications value to them when we were in pakistan and afghanistan last week of course we inquired about  whether there are will be additional opportunities to find these people hopefully there will be in the near future i think it's quite important i would now yield five foreign policy on the issue of muslim leadership in the united states most recent zazi one of the only moms new york was cooperated with the new york police department was brought in on this case and he turned out to be a double agent who took the doing my understanding of what's going on in minneapolis this very low cooperation from the muslim leadership in the somali investigation it was the largest mosque on long island in the off three thousand members for months after nine  and whether or not we agree on a particular or not of any just go back to the one nine hundred ninety s where we had to open trials in the southern district on first world trade center attack and also on the blind sheikh the only two times we committed troops to war and i supported both engagements was in bosnia and kosovo all times on behalf of muslims and against christians and that war they were religious was if you will between orthodox christians and muslims we came down on the side of muslims as well well for us there was no territorial gain for us and yet during that entire time khobar towers we saw the african embassies the u s s cole and the preparations for nine eleven long before any of the policies we're talking about now into effect when we talk about iraq and afghanistan if you well if we leave those wars aside we are going to be engaged in long struggles in the struggle with al qaeda whether it's in those countries or somewhere else they will always be collateral damage and that collateral damage will always be highlighted by the enemy during world war it was enormous quadrille damage in germany and italy but the german american population italian american population didn't carry out actions against american government so i'm asking is this unique just different and how do we we're going to say well because they just signed didn't support our policy in afghanistan we have to be looking out for those type cases that future are we doing that to be more aggressive or we doing it to be apologetic and so i would put those questions out some leading questions  well i'll just address the second one mr king and someone like peter bergen my other colleagues know much more about the first we're not talking about a single cause here for resentment against the united states for the inspiration to commit violence against u s interests i certainly want to not intend to suggest it will be that it's the iraq war or the afghanistan war or any other conflict is the make or break difference with regard to whether people will commit such outrageous acts against us rather than kind of dwelling in history i think we ought to look at the direct evidence in afghanistan today afghanistan had been a welcome a waste of goodwill toward the united states  the opinion polls showed you know our numbers were up in the eighty percent something like that a rarity in the muslim world that has in large part dissipated you can look at different polls and interpret things a bit differently but we are nowhere near as much considered a friend as we were some time ago and quite clearly this has to do with the as you correctly say inevitable collateral damage no matter how skillfully our military operations are planned and executed it's going to happen we also have the phenomenon of being viewed as occupiers in afghanistan which among other things has has caused a lot of people to take up arms against us there who have no sympathy or support at all for the extreme taliban ideology although we often call them taleban in describing the enemy and those are the kinds of sentiments that can very easily go across oceans and across continents to affect our security here in the united states provide some help to the government there that there are there are a diversity of views on the u s in the nato force in afghanistan but even today after having been there for eight years the opinion polls show that there's over fifty percent levels of support for the military effort in afghanistan the more common refrain that still is the case today and it varies by region in afghanistan but the more common refrain the more common fear is the question that i heard regularly you americans are not going to abandon us again are you there's a greater fear of us leaving and leaving them exposed to you know the depredations of the taliban which they know very well from the one nine hundred ninety s in the rest of us you know being a overwhelming force in a country we're we're still a relatively modest what part of afghanistan in the northern half the country we have a virtually minimal four footprint across that of a part of the country and that area is quite favorable towards the nato presence and is really not impacted by the insurgency to anything like the rate of the south as i think we have to be very careful about broad generalisations about being unpopular in afghanistan being viewed as occupiers in afghanistan i did not find that the case had not seen that to be the case with the afghans i interact there are areas that you don't agree with colin's idea of the accidental guerrilla that you can go into valleys and be fought simply because you're in a valley there's no question about that but that should be i don't think can be extended to a broader perception because a lot of very briefly dr grandchild i would just address representative king first question the islamic faith is very decentralized and the leadership of mosques is a very localized sort of thing so it's you know the british discovered sometimes radical elements move in and take over mosques and hard to tell where what their religious credentials are or what kind of support they actually have in the community thank you mr king your time is expired i would just observe that from my travels to the region and i've been to afghanistan twice this year one of the reasons for disaffection with americans by the afghan population is the rampant levels of corruption of the afghan government and their perception that we should be doing we america should be doing more about that i now yield five minutes to ms kurt patrick of arizona thank you madam chairwoman my question is to all of the panelists more often than not there is a discussion of homegrown threats it centers around the possibility of american residents joining up with international organizations like al qaeda however we all recognize that there are also many militant organizations and individuals in the united states who would like to cause harm to our country for reasons that have to nothing to do with our foreign policy in your views which poses a greater threat to our security is it americans linking themselves to global terrorist organizations or americans getting involved with organizations that happen to be pure that is really the problem if i could take a slightly different perspective there aren't a bevy of domestic terrorist groups to which people can attach themselves by way of comparison so almost by definition if we're worrying about somebody getting getting in cahoots with a group it's a foreign group that we're talking about you have to ask where the initiative comes from i address this in my statement if someone does  reach out to a group is it the individual reaching out to the group or is it the group reaching out to the individual in the zazi case for example it appears that he was radicalized during his days selling coffee and pastries from a car in lower manhattan and the you know the training camp business in pakistan came after that after all why would he take why would he be motivated to go miles away to a camp if he wasn't already radicalized another point i'd like to make is you know the kinds of operations that we ought to be most worried about because of the domestic security measures that we have taken the things that the the chairwoman referred to before a terrorist spectacular on the likes of on the scale of nine eleven or even less than nine eleven is a lot order to do that was eight years ago that is the kind of operation where the skills and sophistication of the foreign group may be most relevant i think what we need to worry about more are the kinds of things we saw with fort hood with the d c sniper who was executed virginia last week low tech things where the skills that can be imparted by a foreign group are simply less relevant but that is where we are inherently unavoidably more vulnerable given given the way our society is structured anyone else want to comment on the it's interesting that you mention can i say that mcveigh because my district in arizona borders the county where he lived in hatched the idea and so of course it's a concern to us and that part of arizona thank you thank you very lords in the warlords if they thought they were gonna get off scot free and then we start to crack down additional collateral damage we're likely go down a little bit in popularity among their supporters because one of the challenge is how to get the regional leadership and then when you get the real regional leadership in many of them were corrupted for a variety of reasons and as we actually try to get order you're not going to probably hit eighty percent the polls in any country that i have a core question here in my district because unemployment was low before it got really high because we're heavily manufacturing area we had lots of refugees and that in addition to the early on we had refugees when the because of fort wayne indiana about fifteen hundred bosnians with related gang questions with that i have a largest burmese population for different subgroups but in addition of that for example i found out as they went into iraq we have a sunni iraqi mosque a shia and the kurds would meet with them in my office because they felt some of the defectors who left early were actually plants and they were there to target some of the detroit leaders and leaders of the in my region new york times published an open source which  the group to disappear but i have a lot to yemenis who have been following my region i have somewhere around fifteen hundred pakistani that and then the newest thing is where one of the largest areas for dar free in refugees from somalia chad and east africa now many of them came to america because they've been persecuted many of them are more patriotic than many of the people here who are long time u s citizens because they're they love the country they love the freedom they scape the tyranny they're our best sources at the same time we see what happened in fort hood we're pretty good at figuring out afterwards but as i understood dr crenshaw to say in our other briefing that i got upset about but i heard you say before  when you track people in london who are going to pakistan the difficult thing is is how to figure out those who were possible risk and those who aren't risk how do we do this i mean it's one thing to go to facebook app words one thing to try to put it together how do we prevent rather than explain after we're dead it's one of the biggest challenges and i would like your insights on that and also if you could throw in why we haven't seen i d s we're seeing lots of we're talking about low tech high tech organizations that doesn't seem to be that terribly sophisticated and yet we're not seeing him and it's certainly  worse those are about two very good questions represented souter and you point out quite accurately that there are large numbers of refugees and immigrants with ties to home countries with experience in conflict zones with social networks and the vast majority of course have nothing to do with al qaeda or any desire to use violence whatsoever and happen do you pinpoint those people who might become radicals who might become extremists in the sense of wishing to use violence i don't have a clear a good answer for you because i think when we look at the individuals in question and going beyond the twenty five so far in the courts there is so much disparity in terms of so feel economic background in terms of ethnic origin and american case  is really extremely difficult and we certainly need to know quite a lot more about it as to why we've not seen more low tech type attacks in the u s whether we call them idees or simply building very unsophisticated explosives or shootings like major hasan i have to honestly say i don't have a good answer for that either except to be relieved that we have not seen more but to be afraid that there is a certain contagion effect and when someone breaks a barrier although we have had shootings before it's hard to tell when that when that tipping point comes when someone does something that others look at and say i could do that and begin to want to imitate it so we need to learn more about what creates that kind of opening of the doors a kind of release in that sense and i don't  same bombs that were used in the seventy seven attacks in london which killed fifty two commuters bruce hoffman describes it as potentially mumbai on the hudson but because of the post nine eleven things were in place his travel to pakistan i think flagged him as a potentially interesting clearly his e mail accounts because if you look at the indictment the e mails that he was sending were very important part of the case against him and so that's sort of really a good news story about the american government doing what it's supposed to do thank you so much time is expired mr chater i think you have the most ethnically diverse district on the planet i would also just observe consistent with the answers of the witnesses that this subcommittee has been trying for several years to understand as precisely as we can what turns somebody with radical views which are protected by the first amendment to our constitution into someone who wants to undertake  violent acts which are crimes and understanding that nexus and trying to intervene just at that point so that we're not preventing freethought has been a huge check well and you we haven't figured it out can go back to nine eleven and mr berg and dr phil are this probably for you first have we fully investigated and do you think we fully understand the domestic links to nine eleven i mean how did one thousand guys half of which didn't speak english manage to pull off something of that magnitude here without insight help i come in i have on that is this was the largest criminal investigation in history i think they interviewed  hundred eighty two thousand people they followed up five hundred thousand leads i mean you know it's hard to prove negatives but i think to the extent that this was the best investigation of a crime in history and i think you know the nine eleven commission report speaks for itself anybody who helped the nine eleven  the wall was always exaggerated i have to disagree on this one after the trauma of nine eleven we as a country were seeking catharsis in various ways one of those ways was to reorganize that's  favorite way of seeking satisfaction here in washington the n c d c to a chip peter bergen refers to doing outstanding work i think some of the objective much of the objective of trying to get you know people from the agencies you mentioned literally around the same tables they're doing very good work but at least as many questions were raised quite frankly by the december two thousand and four reorganization you still have counterterrorist components at the f cia and you know well intentioned efforts to try to break down interagency barriers may have inadvertently increased some of the difficulty in communicating between people within the same agency particularly between those who are working explicitly on counterterrorist topics or investigations and those such as at the cia who cover other topics that don't have a counterterrorism label but are very pertinent to emergent threats people who can follow opposition movements in other countries for example that may morph into the next terrorist threat to hit us we haven't improved that and so no i don't i don't think the reorganization made us safer well has the mindset of the analyst in the people doing the work change the intelligence committee a number of years ago before nine eleven are actually said exactly the opposite well i'll need more than a minute and fifteen seconds to respond to that the  main that the huge thing that changed on september twelfth at the world in two thousand and one was political will to do all those sorts of things overseas and domestically in the chair when i was all ready for it referred to some of them that we didn't have before and that includes  the particular concerns that have been the subject of previous questions the sorts of investigative powers we have domestically as well as the more aggressive often said measures overseas it wasn't that there wasn't creative thinking it was that it takes an outrage like nine eleven to change the political circumstances in this country in order to make these things possible if we have adequate number of linguists in the intelligence agencies that you know how are we thinking about how much mirror imag was going on in terms of analysis and that sort of thing there are never an adequate number of linguists fifty years from now no matter what you on this committee and people in the intelligence communities do we will still be talking that those of us who are still alive and about not having enough language skills that we'll see in fifty years and we'll have that chat my time's up but i've got a bunch more questions about well if if there is the political will we'll have a second round of questions because this  panel is fascinating i just observe again based on last week we have a lot more linguists than we had a year ago or two years ago we're doing better now you know five minutes to mr brown of georgia out there terroristic terroristic attacks on us all our own soul this can't be an easy task it's not like go on to london on vacation our intelligence committee community would love to have that same kind of access how these americans do it do we know who they're talking to do and how they're connecting with terrorist groups overseas they don't just go knock on the door and say here i am i want to be trained i'm sure they've got to have some access and and what do we know what do we need to know and how do we get there and how do we how do we stop this  of american citizens or american rattle radicalize even folks who have come here is emigrants from getting engaged in this kind of training getting engaged in carrying out these terrorist attacks in it's a very murky area as you point out who's going to go and then what happens when they get there and i guess i'll just point out what i think are some impediments and my colleagues will know better than i but if they're going to another country then we have we may have some of our own intelligence assets they are going to be largely dependent on the government there to tell us what's going on and i know from the british experience that there were a lot of problems with lack of coordination between them and the pakistanis leading britain now to send a unit of m i five to pakistan to try to figure out what's going on when people get there i would imagine that when you go to other conflict zones somalia where there isn't anybody even there i would think the good track what's going on the extremely difficult to say what people do want to get me or i think it's a key question as to how would they know where to go and who to go to unless there had been prior crimes and if they are going with the intention of training and fighting jihad where muslims are threatened and there's fighting and then they change their minds they are in effect converted now to terrorists who want to go back to their home countries and attack we don't quite know how that happens whether they went with that intention or whether they change ilk have to do with armed conflict in which they didn't start out with the intention of becoming terrorists come back and attack targets in their own homeland the jihad against the soviets throughout the one nine hundred eighty s did this in spades and we still seeing the effect of it today with jihad as multiple nationalities going there to free what they consider the laws of homeland against the soviet invaders and then some of them only a small percentage but some of them got wrapped up into these other things that worry us today if i could make a comment about that because i think the american government has got a pretty good handle on not whether the zazi case we talked about headley you know clearly e mails were helpful then detecting these people what they were doing but i would also raise the issue of westerners in general traveling to these training camps because you know because of the visa waiver program if you're a european possible to be easy to come back and the associated press had an interesting story just recently where the estimate was about one hundred  concern shouldn't be just about americans it should also be about the westerners are going on and on in the british experience four hundred thousand british citizens go to pakistan every day for completely legitimate reasons if zero point zero one percent of them are going for joe how detraining you still got a lot forty people so that that's kind of the problem and it shouldn't be just focusing on the american dimension my time's about up but i just want to indicate that this to me is is a just a very strong wake up call that we need to have human intelligence on the ground in those areas in the fall region as well as other reasons we have to have those people and i'm real concerned that we don't have that kind of intelligence are you back western travel documents that was interesting and in the camps in pakistan and elsewhere poses a grave threat to our security and an even more of a threat to the security in britain where as mr bergen pointed out there are so many britons of pakistani origin who travel to pakistan for a month long vacations every single year so i appreciate your raising that it is something that is critically important and it is very important to the subcommittee we're going to have votes in about fifteen minutes i'm told i want to get to everyone and if we don't we will come back and make sure we do get to everyone the order of questions at this point connecticut as i do we were particularly involved with the events of nine eleven so i think this topic is one that is both critical to all of us but particularly had to home to an awful lot of people that i represent i've got two questions that are kind of in the are we doing enough category with respect to what we as a government can do to to advance what seem to be positive numbers within the american muslim  community the revulsion against extremism are we doing enough what else could we as a government do to dampen down the likelihood that out of that community there would be radical elements emerging i think one of the interesting things i'll just jump in and that came immediately in aftermath of the attack at fort hood was elements of the american muslim community coming out and condemning those killings unequivocally on within literally within hours on the first day and i think that's a positive indicator but it but to your point are we doing enough i think that this is also an opportunity do do a reappraisal of where we are collectively in our law enforcement and government relations with the american muslim community to really emphasize the importance of leadership among american muslims on the unacceptability of this outlook and really to condemn the very outlook that extensively major hasan had about the leadership in the u s muslim community and i would add that it's critically important for a local authorities local political authorities to understand who the influential people are in the muslim community because i know at least in the british case there's been criticism that the people that the police and other authorities chose to deal with did not really speak for anybody the government thought they did but the local community didn't think so that made their efforts misplaced and probably more damaging so you've got to know something about who would be the people who would shape opinion in the community thank you so similar question one of the disheartening things in the last eight years has been the silence frankly of global leaders moderate political leaders of islamic nations clerics senior clerics do we have the standing and the ability to urg encourage in said global islamic leaders to take a more aggressive stance against their own extremists and if we do have that standing and capability what what's what's the path how do we do it i think the short answer is no to that because of the kiss of death and so you know there are many other examples of clerics militant cleric who are former friends of bin laden who actually turned against him publicly and so they really losing the war of ideas and if you look at support for suicide bombing in the world in pakistan is dropping thirty three percent or five percent  so but clearly they're losing the war of ideas and i think that our role in that is just of let it happen and be cognizant of it but not to try to control it and i agree with that and the only thing that would give us better standing to to take a somewhat more active role would be well we're talking about the indirect effects of countless perceptions of countless policies around the world and that goes far beyond the immediate more of ideas but but  in the one thing i'm concerned about since fort hood was brought up one thing i'm concerned about since i've been called an apologist at times is that we do not simply tried to do the politically correct thing because dr hassan is muslim to me means he should be treated no differently than anybody else i think that would be wrong and i don't think that's happening at either way the fact that he is muslim is secondary to the fact that he killed americans it looks like you did anyone having said that eric on for a road an interesting book forty years ago forty five years ago the true believer where he went into  the very depths of what makes what makes folks go off the edge and turn away from their human history qualities and become basic animals to kill their brothers and sisters what idealism would bring someone you know to that end in that we could learn a lot about it and these are many times individual efforts which become subordinate perhaps to organizations that folks attach themselves to i live in probably an interesting district also it's probably one of the most diverse districts in the united states and it's the second largest muslim population in the country i have a large jewish population in my district too but i was a mayor previous to this life and you learn to deal with those things on a day to day basis in fact that becomes your most important significant problem so when i hear statements like as you said mr bergen being complacent with american muslims what do you mean by that i think because of the fact that american muslims are better educated most americans have higher incomes and don't live in ghettos unlike their european muslim counterparts i think the assumption was this was not going to be a big problem the united states and i think that assumption is still problem existing here i think you know but i grew up in united kingdom and so the united kingdom faces a very severe threat not i'm not talking about being complacent with just in general when i go back to your words you talk about complacency with muslims don't you think that that brings a lot of folks over the edge that would wonder that we paint with a wide brush doesn't this do more damage than good would you disagree with  think that's something that occurred across the nation after nine eleven and i think that that continues to be the case today i have not dug through each of these cases over the last year that have resulted in arrests of prospective terrorists united states but in many of them there were indications that ordinary americans that checkout counter at other places were being more alert than they would have been perhaps ten years ago to the prospects of something not quite right going on i think that's something we have to continue to encourage i mean that that should be aimed at any particular group but the idea that there is a terrorist threat the united states inside the united states is important for all of us to continue that we didn't have that work ten years ago they want to continue on your point i have found no greater vigilance in the general population than with the muslim community in fact in my district where which the f b i has been deeply involved in i get glowing reports about the cooperation they're getting from the moms and i think again to paint would arrive brush does what you folks have been talking about bring brings us closer to the embassy when when when the abyss where we should be trying to reach out and they should be trying to reach out this is a two way street here the silence of the political leaders does not exist in my community and i think i have no better source than than th get beyond our words leaving myself and deal with the fact that we need strong espionage efforts i'm not afraid to use that word by the way for some reason it's been wiped off our  dictionaries it's not politically correct it's absolutely necessary that we have strong espionage efforts to cover anyone who was plotting in any way against this country we need those efforts not only here but we also need them primarily of course in other countries which are many times the source of our own problems i hope for good will be clarified i really i think some good can come out of this tragedy thank you thank you mr pascrell and let me just just comment on what you said i i think congress has acted i said this earlier since nine eleven to strengthen the tools available to our intelligence community and our law enforcement community and maybe you're right dr paul are that our first instinct is to reorganize and so i plead guilty but we've done more than think that that will have given every member a chance to ask questions votes are coming in that would mean that our witnesses would have to wait around for a long while so i would like to suggest that following these two sets of questions we had during the hearing is there any objection to that thank you mr green thank you madam chair and i absolutely concur with you i thank the witnesses for appearing i thank you and the ranking member for this hearing and  democracy such as pakistan where the rank and file of the military have not acclimated to civilian rule the general still maintains and an ordinary amount of influence as was the case with his predecessor meszaros my question is to what extent are we with understanding that it is an independent state that  sovereignty that all of its agencies of government have to be respected to what extent are we focusing on this day kiani such that we can better understand his commentary i've read as of late some very strong language to some extent depending on how you use what as a test you utilize what strong but some language that c helping the united states in the war on terror which they had you know they did really want to be involved in the last year has changed very dramatically so that the attack in two was it was not is done with the full support of the pakistani population the attack at us water this year was done with full support of the pakistani population because the pakistani population is trying to get the taliban al qaeda and these other jihadi groups as i turned in to support the united states no this is still one of the most anti american countries in the well but do we really care and to the end of the day our interests and their interests are more closely aligning doesn't mean that they're going to go off to the quite assuring us a sorry but it does mean that they're going off to people that are attacking us right now in afghanistan so i think that there is really kind of a bright future in this particular  sympathy for the extremist movement among some elements of the military whether they will continue and the prior question i have is what possessed the pakistani taliban to start attacking civilian targets and thus provoke the wrath of the military and how long this will last so i'm not quite so  add i know general kiani personally i went to the us army granted staff college with many years ago which is a tribute to our international military education program which was absent for a period of time after that as we all know here in a lot of ways i think is the exemplar of where we would like  pakistani military leadership to go calling sometimes kicking and screaming some of the subordinate officers and his direction and he is he's got a very close relationship with admiral mike mullen the chairman of the joint chiefs who's gone far out of his way to spend time with both here in the united states and there's lamb of god and also to promote programs to bring pox on the officers here part of which ahmed wallet to help them better understand u s foreign policy national security what we're doing encounters are just i think he's a bright light there that's very very just observe that based on his visit last week i think the pakistani military is press of and they are targeting terror groups however there seems to be a line between terror groups that attack them and share groups the don't and some of the don't group is still attacking in afghanistan attacking both afghan a military and our own troops so there is work to do that would be my observation the vote has been called ms jackson lee you get the final five minutes of questions and thank you very much madam chair for your courtesies and to the ranking member and in particular chairwoman harman let me say that you are very much a part of the improvement that we've made in intelligence gathering since nine eleven so thank you very much let me focus then on human intelligence and thank you mr bergen for clarifying your comments in response to congress and past grows questions you're not suggesting a broad profiling of muslim americans and let me carry then as relates to major hasan and the whole fort hood issue i think it frees us up to ask a question about human intelligence and i would ask your commentary and what has been in the public domain about what we knew of him  the point that you made that the military is a very likely target maybe you meant overseas but let's just say that we look at fort dix and now fort hood what do you think we were missing in our  advance thinking living in a climate that great britain lives in what were we missing in america in terms of not containing major hasan i frankly believe it's a question of intelligence and sharing that intelligence do you have an assessment of that if we take away or not look that or hold as a block the potential of his mental state which i can't judge at this point but the information is in the public domain to the f b i was looking into his internet postings as you know about suicide bombings and his inquiries about the killings of innocents and they determined that this was not a subject the subject was within the realm of his normal activities as a psychometrist dealing with ami veterans was that a mistake turns out that was a mistaken assumption was that original assumption the time probably but in the backdrop of what you're suggesting the al qaida amongst us do we need to have a lucky and one of the reasons we've been pretty lucky is not because we're lucky but because the kinds of things that you're suggesting we should be doing while being done so you think in light of this particular hearing that there does not need to be an increase s v and look at a major hasan in a different light i would say the one thing that we still lack in the human intelligence realm is penetration of al qaeda itself and not to me is more important than the kinds of things that it's and that would other falls in general are they intertwined in terms of the efforts that we need to make in both intelligence and tactics i think there are intertwined in the really wants the war in a sense there are different challenges and there nuanced in both places but if you look at this from the enemy's standpoint they would very much view this as a single theater as a single fight and we have to step back occasionally and not simply put the conventional borders on those countries but look at how our adversary looks at and make sure we're coming up with a strategy that will defeat his strategy would anyone take me up on the point that i think that there is a basic desire for democracy amongst the pakistani people maybe based on their history based on my interaction there are these elements how do we separate or push democracy loving people even if there is a question about civilian rule versus military rule so that we can encourage that democracy building in pakistan  push then we get back to the problem and there was the earlier discussion about general kiani absolutely you know the chief of the army staff in pakistan always is one of the most politically powerful people in the world even if we are not in one of those periods of direct military rule but once we start pushing people start pushing back ok my pushing termites and let me draw that back and say encouraging and suggesting that they have democratic tendencies in the civilian population yes just i don't want to sound too pessimistic but when we did try to offer them aid with very small strings trying to encourage more civilian influence we've got to push back on that and also point to the high levels of corruption in pakistan in addition to various autocratic tendencies i think it's an enormous challenge and that the general is quite right that we have to see the two countries as part of a regional theater madam chair let me just let me thank the just one and say this on the record  you know i co chair the pakistan caucus and and also the afghan caucus i continue to have this battle i think we need to work more with muslim americans pakistani americans and others in a more visible way that translates to the civilian populations in pakistan in particular to say that we are friends of democracy is good and i hope we can do that as we move on human intelligence and i thank you for yielding and let me observe that i share your view it's not inconsistent with also being aggressive against specific threats and having been there last week i observed a lot of positive steps both on the civil society side and on the military side that we are taking in afghanistan in particular we don't have military on the ground in pakistan but we do have efforts ongoing it was really for example heartening to be in swat which has now been taken back by the pakistani government and to see girls in school again and to see the ngo community which we actively support engaged in rebuilding the girls schools which were destroyed by the taliban so there are positive efforts i think they matter and let me just close with this observation i think it is some of you have observed i think with dr paul are we can't win whatever winning means militarily against these threats that doesn't mean our military doesn't have a role but it is not the way we will succeed in this era what i call an era of terror we have to win the argument with the next generation and persuade them against this this particular set of activities and to do that i think we have to live our values american generosity matters the fact that we help with the devastating earthquake in pakistan was a big deal a similarly in iran so there are things we can do way outside of the military and intelligence fear that will have a have a big impact on how the future goes it's a tough set of challenges this panel was spectacular you are i want to thank you all for excellent testimony and and very good answers to very good questions i want to thank the subcommittee and the full committee for what you brought to this hearing we are going to have more of these and we are going to try in the most careful way we can fashion to engage this very tough question of what changes someone with radical views into a violent killer and especially focused on america because there are new threats i'm aware of them among us and we want to be sure that  we prevent and disrupt as many plots as possible not just respond to them having no further business before the subcommittee the hearing is a