US citizens must take front line in national security: Napolitano
Published: Wednesday July 29, 2009
A top US domestic security chief called Wednesday on ordinary citizens to join law enforcement bodies in fighting an increasingly elusive — and homegrown — terrorist threat.
“We need a culture of collective responsibility, a culture where every individual understands his or her role,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.
Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the first line of defense.
In just the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.
Napolitano stressed she was not advocating “a culture of spying on one another,” but said that crucial intelligence came from the bottom up.
“You are the ones who know when something is not right in your community,” she said.
“Arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina, so I think better education about the depth of the threat is important.”
Napolitano, also due to visit Ground Zero, site of the devastating September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on Manhattan, said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations that modern communications have sharply increased the sophistication of threats.
“The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”
That growing elusiveness is what requires a “much broader society response,” she said, calling even on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.
“There’s actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you’re in an airport and you see a package left with no one around,” she said.
She insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.
“We have to be careful,” she said. “That’s a balance to be struck.”
An example, she said, was the need to respect mosques and other Islamic institutions.
“We have to be very careful about profiling a religious institution just as we have to be careful about profiling individuals,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful about interfering with the free exercise of religion.”
Even as US troops become increasingly mired in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, attention is building on violent plots hatched within US borders — often led by US citizens or residents.
The Washington Post on Wednesday described the chief suspect in the North Carolina arrests, Daniel Boyd, as the son of a US marine who had a “typical American childhood” in suburban Washington, DC.
This week, a New York court unsealed a confession made in January by a Long Island man, Bryant Vinas, who says he joined al Qaeda to attack US forces in Afghanistan and had plotted to attack a New York commuter train.
In May, five Miami men found guilty of plotting to blow up the Sears Towers in Chicago, which just this month was renamed the Willis Towers.
Also in May, four New York men — three of them US citizens — were arrested on charges of trying to blow up synagogues and destroying a US military plane.
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