As we rapidly approach the holiday season, some people are expressing concern about the possibility of terrorist attacks in the United States, particularly aimed at the mass gatherings that take place around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
According to The Washington Times, senior FBI officials are quietly worrying that they don’t have the resources to stop all potential attacks before they happen, leaving potentially millions of Americans vulnerable.
These anonymous officials say that FBI Director James Comey, most recently in the news for tangling publicly with President Barack Obama, has been putting on a “brave public face” to hide significant worries regarding Islamic State group terrorists and the potential for radical jihadists to infiltrate the Muslim refugees Obama intends to bring to the United States.
“We have suspects we’ve been tracking that have gone dark, because we can no longer follow their encrypted activities. Physical surveillance can only take us so far and the urgency to solve that gap in the political realm isn’t there,” one unnamed official explained.
Another official declared, “The administration has a calming public storyline that we have this all under control and life can go on as normal. But we’re one crack in the sidewalk away from a tragedy, and that crack could be an encrypted message we can’t follow, a lead we couldn’t resource or a refugee who slips in like we saw in Paris.”
The greatest fear of the FBI over the next several weeks is that the Islamic State group has plotted and planned Paris-style attacks within the United States, utilizing fighters armed with small arms, grenades and suicide belts who could attack soft targets like retail stores, restaurants, sporting events and other locations where large numbers of people gather.
“The attackers could look and act just like everyday Americans until they strike with weapons we haven’t seen in terror attacks here,” summarized one official.
Photo credit: Benson Kua
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