US fears Al Qaeda recruiting Westerners
Foreign Desk Report

WASHINGTON—Attempts by Al-Qaeda to recruit Westerners has sparked deep concerns among US national security experts, who fear the country could be infiltrated by attackers with Caucasian looks and European or North American identification.
Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller told a congressional hearing Tuesday that the Al-Qaeda terror network was focusing its attention of recruiting Westerners because its leaders believed that bearers of valid European of North American passports could enter the United States more easily than other nationals.
The statement came two days after Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden made a similar revelation that Al-Qaeda was recruiting and training terrorists of Western origin.
“They are bringing operatives into that region for training — operatives that, a phrase I would use, wouldn’t attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles” airport in Washington, Hayden told NBC television last Sunday. The new recruits “look Western” and “would be able to come into this country ... without attracting the kind of attention that others might,” he said. “They could be anybody,” said Matthew Levitt, an expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Al-Qaeda could recruit radicals from Europe who would be able to come to the United States “on valid passports perhaps through visa waiver programs,” Levitt said. Ted Galen Carpenter, an expert with Cato Institute, believes it is very difficult to gauge the number of people open to such recruitment because it could involve Western-looking European natives like Muslims from Bosnia or Kosovo.
“How many people? That’s very hard to measure,” the expert pointed out. You’re talking certainly thousands of people.” Carpenter said that Al-Qaeda is looking for ways to thwart any kind of profiling strategy that the US and other governments might employ to single out possible threats from the huge numbers of people entering their countries each day.
Osama bin Laden and his associates have spoken in the past of using Muslims from the Balkans who do not fit the Arab Muslim stereotype to infiltrate countries, he said. “There certainly are not many sympathizers for organizations like that in the West,” he explained. “But they don’t need many.” Levitt recalled that British national Richard Reid, who attempted in 2001 to explode a bomb concealed inside a shoe aboard an American Airlines plane, carried a western passport. He said there were other similar cases.
Levitt recently met in Paris with French counterterrorism officials whom he said have the same worries. “German officials and British officials are similarly concerned.” According to Newsweek, the CIA director’s statements were prompted by a German investigation of a terrorist cell linked to an Uzbek group led by Fritz Gelowicz, a German national who converted to Islam and is now imprisoned in Germany. But Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at Rand Corporation, believes that while while individuals coming into the United States could carry out terrorist attacks, “our greatest concerns right now are what I refer to as local home-grown terrorists — American citizens living right here.”
“In the attacks in Turkey, in the attacks in Spain, in the attacks in London, in the plots that have been uncovered in Germany and Denmark, and other places, these were not teams of terrorists ... being sent in from abroad, they were all from the inside,” Jenkins said. The Pentagon is caught between the fragile security gains made in Iraq over the past few months and the need to give US soldiers weary of combat duty time to rest.
The commander of US-led coalition forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday along with US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on progress in Iraq. Petraeus is expected to call for a pause in the planned withdrawal of some 16,000 US forces that had been scheduled for mid-year. Under this plan the number of US troops in Iraq would drop from 156,000 to around 140,000.
Over the last few months US officials have been emphasizing the security gains made in Iraq after US President George W. Bush ordered a “surge” of some 30,000 US forces in January. Other factors also played an important role, including Sunni tribes joining US-funded programs to fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and a truce called by Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr.