U.S. Military Bases Raise Security Level as FBI Director Warns of ISIS Threat

FBI Director James Comey warned on Thursday that potentially thousands of people inside the United States are consuming recruitment “poison” and directives to attack the U.S. from Islamic State (ISIS), which he compared to “‘a devil sitting on the shoulder saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill’ all day long.’”

Comey elaborated to a small group of reporters that ISIS is using social media in an unprecedented manner to reach large amounts of people on personal electronic devices. From Syria, the jihadists are initially contacting individuals on Twitter and then directing them to encrypted venues where U.S. authorities lose the communications.

J.M. Berger, an analyst at The Brookings Institution, told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “We’re [the US] getting creamed on social media.” He added that ISIS’s magazine, Dabiq, which is named after a key town in Islamic eschatology where the Muslim and Christian armies will face each other, is another effective propaganda tool.

Social media, however, does not sufficiently explain why people join ISIS; a tweet in itself will not cause someone to kill and wish to join the caliphate. People who support ISIS must first be indoctrinated to accept shariah law obligations regarding waging jihad.

Comey noted that ISIS’s recruitment is difficult because the group says if foreigners cannot travel to “the caliphate” to fight, then they should kill wherever they are, thus breaking down the model of “‘inspired’” versus “‘directed,’” making it difficult to determine if someone is a “‘talker or a doer.’”

In a chilling assessment, Comey described how “the haystack is the entire country. We are looking for the needles, but increasingly the needles are unavailable to us. … This is the ‘going dark’ problem in living color. There are other Elton Simpsons out there that I have not found and I cannot see.”

Simpson was one of two men who launched a failed attack in Garland, Texas against a “Draw the Prophet” Muhammad contest before being killed. Authorities have been watching him since 2006 for terrorist-related activity, and he was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to three years probation.

Simpson was indoctrinated well before reaching out to Islamic State from attending the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix (ICCP), which has produced multiple terrorists beyond Simpson and his partner Nadir Hamid Soofi. ICCP’s imam has strong connections to Muslim Brotherhood front organizations. It is reasonable to ask what role the Garland shooters’ mosque played in preparing the men to be susceptible to ISIS propaganda.

The Texas attack is not an isolated incident as other ISIS-inspired acts have taken place on American soil. As recently as Thursday, for example, 21-year-old Christopher Lee Cornell, who was arrested last year for planning an assault on the US Capitol, was additionally accused of providing material support to ISIS. Furthermore, 20-year-old John Booker, Jr. was arrested a month ago for allegedly trying to bomb Fort Riley in Kansas in support of ISIS.

The FBI Director’s warnings and aforementioned events, among others, helped cause all US military bases to raise their security levels to “Bravo,” the third of five levels of alert and the highest point since the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, because of a threatening environment created by ISIS. The Pentagon defines level “Bravo” as an “increased and predictable threat of terrorism.”

Admiral William Gortney, head of the U.S. Northern Command, which manages U.S. military instillations in the continental US, signed the order “as a prudent measure due to a lot of things in the news lately.”

Comey’s comments and Gortney’s security order make clear that Islamic State’s ability to recruit sympathetic Muslims from within the United States poses a real threat to the American homeland, and not just to Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

In countering this enemy, however, the U.S. must remember that it is the ideological content of the message, and not the chosen media, that leads jihadists to join the fight.