The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits

[Valin]

Christian Science Monitor:

A TV journalist tracks the ‘next wave’ of terrorists – the home-grown variety
David Holahan
June 20, 2011

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The thesis of The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits is that home-grown terrorists are the threat tsunami of our recent past, present, and future. These Jihad Joes and Janes are American citizens, speak English, have clean records, American passports, and mass murder in their hearts. Herridge reminds us that they could be our neighbors. She also promises the reader, “What we discover together will surprise and anger you. It will change your view of the future. It will also change how you see those behind the 9/11 attacks.”

It is a tall order, one that she doesn’t fill. What she does do is to provide a reasonably thorough survey of prominent terrorist attacks, or attempted attacks, within the United States and around the world in the past decade, including the inept underwear bomber and the tragically more accomplished Fort Hood, Texas, shooter, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan.


She also ties a number of these cases to the poster child of born-in-the-USA bad guys, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born imam who had contact with three of the 9/11 hi-jackers and who is now known as the bin Laden of the Internet. This is not news. The Obama administration put Awlaki, believed to be hiding in Yemen, on its kill or capture list.

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Herridge might have done better to focus her poorly organized book from start to finish on Awlaki. She speculates that he may have been part of a support cell for the 9/11 hi-jackers and also that the US government didn’t snatch him up in 2002 (or 2007, although, again, she omits this more compelling incident) because officials were trying to recruit him as an intelligence asset. Again, she is plowing well-harrowed fields.

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