Officially, the FBI agents who swarmed Donald Ray Morgan at Kennedy Airport this month were there to arrest him on a mundane gun charge. But they whisked him away to their Manhattan office and grilled him for two hours on an entirely different topic: Islamic State extremists.
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Over and over, they asked Morgan, a 44-year-old North Carolina man, converted Muslim, and author of proextremist tweets, whether he had traveled to Syria to support the militant group. More important, they wanted know whether he could identify any fighters with US ties who had left the region to return to America.
The questioning, recounted in a recent court hearing, offered a glimpse into US law enforcement’s intensifying efforts to identify Islamic State sympathizers who could help export the group’s brand of violent jihad to the United States.
The new scrutiny comes amid a new barrage of US airstrikes against the Islamic State fighters who beheaded American journalist James Foley. The group called Foley’s killing revenge for previous strikes against militants in Iraq.
Federal and New York Police Department officials have estimated that at least 100 Americans could be fighting with the Sunni extremists who have seized territory in northern and western Iraq.
In April, a Colorado woman and convert to Islam was arrested before she could travel to Syria to marry a fighter she had met online. More recently, a Texas man who was arrested trying to board a flight to Turkey pleaded guilty to terror charges alleging he wanted to join the group.
In a Pentagon news conference, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Islamic State an ‘‘immediate threat,’’ in part because of the number of Europeans and other foreigners who have traveled to the region to join the group.
‘‘And those folks can go home at some point,’’ he said.Read the rest of the story HERE.
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1 comment:
The group known as ISIS as an "imminent threat"? Noooo, the imminent threat is known as I-S-L-A-M and exists under a myriad of group names, orginizations and affiliations, be it Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al Qud, the Iranian Guard, et al. Common denominator please?
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