As if the Fort Hood shootings weren't enough, the failed Christmas Day airline bombing attempt here in the U. S. and recent deadly terrorist attacks abroad have renewed the focus on dealing with extremists. Penn Press authors Michael Chertoff and Marc Sagemen have responded in the news media, providing informed perspectives on the threat of increased attacks by jihadists.
Former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Chertoff shared his views of the current safety situation on NPR's All Things Considered and in an article he wrote for the Daily Beast.
"Because so much of our security effort over the last few years has
been focused abroad or at our own borders, are we now getting more
vulnerable to an attack from within?" asks Chertoff in his Daily Beast commentary.
In a recent New York Times article, Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and government counterterrorism consultant, said of young men like the Nigerian terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, “They are not robots,
brainwashed. They are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is
a validation of what they already believe. The religious leaders are
lightning rods, because of the extreme statements. They form a
community around them.”
Marc Sageman is the author of Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. Michael Chertoff is the author of Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years.
