Friday, September 12, 2014

Team Obama wants to Talk to U.S. Citizens in ISIS ... Not Scare Them Away

An urgent U.S. counterterrorism effort to track Westerners who join extremist groups in Syria and Iraq is running into complications amid differing international approaches to information sharing and domestic security.
In recent months, officials on both sides of the Atlantic have predicted that the West will face a dire threat from U.S. and European citizens joining groups like Islamic State and Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate, and then returning to the West to launch terrorist attacks.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have developed an extensive intelligence-sharing operation with European security services, which have established their own task force aimed at combating the threat from citizens who join extremist groups. Intelligence on potential extremists from both the U.S. and Europe goes into a designated part of the National Counterterrorism Center's database, known as TIDE, which feeds U.S. watch lists like the no-fly list.
But U.S. officials say they still don't have as clear a window as they would like into the movement of people once they get to certain European countries. One U.S. law-enforcement official described the effort as a "work in progress."
"There's significant concern about the idea that some of these individuals may try to travel back to the West, using the Western passports, and carry out acts of violence or engage in terrorism here," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.
Security concerns about foreign fighters returning from Syria have also produced rare disagreement between U.S. and U.K. counterterrorism officials over Britain's move to potentially revoke passports of citizens who have gone to fight.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has called for a "targeted, discretionary power to allow us to exclude British nationals from the U.K.'' But such measures go against the goals of many U.S. counterterrorism officials, who would rather draw such individuals in to be questioned than scare them away.
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