Lapses still exist in fight on terror
Distrust, miscues prevent sharing of info to foil attacks
WASHINGTON — When FBI agents realized Elton Simpson had slipped away from his north Phoenix apartment last month, they immediately became concerned. Their worries grew when they learned after he vanished that he had been surfing the Internet using the hashtag “attacktexas.”
According to FBI Director James Comey and other top federal officials, the bureau immediately warned Garland, Texas, police that the avowed jihadi, inspired by Islamic State militants, might be headed there to attack a cartoon contest designed to mock the Prophet Muhammad.
But local law enforcement officials in Garland, including the police chief, insist that they were never warned and that only with the luck of some quick-acting officers managed to stop Simpson and an accomplice from storming the event with assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Both men were shot dead, and a terror attack was averted.
Left unanswered from that May 3 confrontation and the subsequent finger-pointing are questions raised years earlier by the 9/11 Commission and at numerous hearings on Capitol Hill: Are federal and police agencies doing enough to share intelligence information with each other and cooperating to keep the country safe from terrorism?
The commission concluded that a key failure in stopping the 9/11 hijackers was rooted in the resistance by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to trade critical information. Weeks after the terror attacks, a communications lapse between federal and local agencies was blamed by some lawmakers for slowing the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks.
“The biggest impediment,” the commission warned, “is the human or systemic resistance to sharing information.” Intelligence “should be processed, turned into reports, and distributed according to the same quality standards, whether it is collected in Pakistan or in Texas.”
In response to 9/11, officials created Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, where federal, county and city police work together to gather, analyze and act on intelligence.
The Garland case has emerged as one of the biggest tests of that system, and, although the attack was foiled, it revealed that communications lapses and distrust continue to complicate the fight against terrorism.
TheFBImaintains it alerted the Garland police representative on the Dallas-area joint task force about Simpson and suggested the cartoon convention might be at risk. “We developed information just hours before the event that Simpson might be interested in going to Garland,” Comey said at a May 7 news briefing.
He said the FBI quickly issued a bulletin to the Garland police warning them that Simpson or his accomplice, Nadir Soofi, might show up there.
But Garland police insist that they never received an immediate warning from the FBI and that their task force was not alerted either.
Garland police Chief Mitch Bates said reports that his Police Department re- ceived word that an attack might be imminent “are not accurate.”
“No one,” the chief stressed. “Not the Garland Police Department, the FBI, the Texas Department of Public Safety nor any other agency had the information prior to the event that either suspect may target this event. No information was missed or ignored.”
Bates said an FBI bulletin was issued two days earlier on May 1. But he said it indicated “no known, credible threats” and simply said “what we already knew: that the event was a potential target.”
The question of who knew what and when, and told whom, looms large, as does the issue of howthe FBI lost track of Simpson. According to FBI officials, federal agents are working 100 or more active terror investigations and do not have the manpower or equipment to provide 24-hour surveillance on all of them.
And federal officials say the threat of “lone-wolf” attacks like the one in Texas is only growing.
Comeyandotherspointed to the explosion of social media on the Internet that makes it easy for foreign terror groups to recruit jihadis in this country. “I know there are other Elton Simpsons out there,” the director said.
Michael Steinbach, the FBI’s assistant director for its Counterterrorism Division, testified at a June 3 House Homeland Security Committee hearing that about 200 Americans have traveled to Syria or tried to reach that region to join the Islamic State.
All of them, he said, “potentially pose a significant threat to the safety of the United States.”
To combat that growing threat, federal agents are holding training exercises with community leaders to heighten public awareness of suspicious activity, said John Mulligan, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, during the hearing.
Francis Taylor, undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledged at the hearing that the Garland incident has “reinforced the importance of close collaboration and information sharing.”
Better cooperation between local and federal agencies weighed heavily in Boston last month, when a knifewielding manwhowantedto behead police officers was slain during a confrontation with an FBI agent and a Boston police officer.
Members of the local joint task force in Boston, including FBI agents and state and city police officers, were tracking the man for some weeks and moved in on him when he purchased several large knives and began discussing plans to behead officers.
In the end, a two-man team — comprised of an FBI agent and a Boston police officer — worked together in confronting him. They shot him dead when he reportedly threatened them with one of the knives.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security panel, said no one can say whether Garland would have had a different outcome — without a gunbattle — had the FBI bulletin gotten through.
“But I do think this illustrates we need to continue looking into information sharing,” he said, “and listening to the boots on the ground on how to recognize and prevent acts of homegrown violent extremism.”
“The biggest impediment is the human or systemic resistance to sharing information” between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.