The nation’s intelligence chief warned Tuesday that terror attacks in
Paris and California last year could lead to a wave of follow-on plots
in the United States and Europe carried out by militants emboldened by
the failure to prevent earlier strikes.
James Clapper, the
director of national intelligence, said in prepared Senate testimony
that U.S.-based extremists “pose the most significant Sunni terrorist
threat to the U.S. homeland in 2016.”
“The perceived success” of
the attacks in Paris, Chattanooga, Tenn., and San Bernardino, Calif.,
“might motivate others to replicate opportunistic attacks with little or
no warning, diminishing our ability to detect terrorist operational
planning and readiness,” Clapper said in testimony submitted to the
Senate intelligence and armed services committees.
Clapper also warned of other dangers including increased
aggressiveness from Russia in cyber attacks and penetrations, and
continued signals from North Korea that it is determined to develop
nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States.
Clapper,
CIA Director John O. Brennan and other intelligence officials are
expected to spend much of the day Tuesday in hearings aimed at examining
the most pressing security threats to the United States.
It will
be Brennan’s first public appearance before the Senate intelligence
committee since early 2014, months before the panel issued a scathing
report on the agency’s use of brutal interrogation measures against
al-Qaeda suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Although
Clapper cited the rising danger of home-grown terror plots, he led his
written testimony with a survey of threats related to the rising U.S.
dependence on computer systems.
Russia is increasingly
willing “to target critical infrastructure systems and conduct
espionage operations even when detected and under increased public
scrutiny,” Clapper said.
THE WASHINGTON POST
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