Wahib Sadek Hamed claimed to be a terrorist. Shirtless, with tan pants, long beads and shaggy dark hair, the 22-year-old Hamed parked his car in the middle of a roadway in Arlington on May 26, then jumped out of his car and lunged at people who passed in their cars. He then threatened a woman with a knife.
Arlington school resource officer Richard Morrison tased him four times before Hamed fell to the ground, shaking uncontrollably. Police found an arsenal in Hamed’s car, including a knife and three loaded weapons, one of them an AK-47, along with 200 rounds of ammunition. “He made some strange remarks about having ties to some type of terrorist group,” police told a local news station. The FBI is currently investigating his claims.
Hamed doesn’t act like a well-trained terrorist operative, but what the FBI is looking for is any evidence that he had been steered toward violence by a terrorist groups. This is the new frontier of terrorism.
“With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States — spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize — either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack,” the agency posted on its website. “The foreign terrorist now has direct access into the United States like never before.”
But does that access also include operatives who are slipping across the border? The conflation of border security and counter terrorism is a popular topic, and it comes up often during debates over the southern border of Texas. “The threat poised to Texas by ISIS is very real,” Governor Greg Abbot wrote to President Obama in November 2015.
Some of the burden to monitor threats falls on local police. Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter in 2014 claimed he received reports from federal agencies that ISIS operatives are crossing the border with immigrants and drugs. When Congress asked Department of Homeland Security officials about this claim during hearings, they said rumors of this ISIS effort has never been substantiated. John Wagner, an assistant commissioner for the Custom and Border Patrol operations unit, noted that Islamic extremists are much more likely to the United States by commercial plane.
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