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DoD official: Military is top target for terror

WASHINGTON — Terrorist attacks on domestic military facilities have proliferated in recent years, marking service members as prime terrorist targets, defense officials told lawmakers Wednesday.

The military is now the “target of choice” for violent extremists in the U.S., Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Stockton said during a joint hearing of the House and Senate homeland security committees.

Law enforcement has prosecuted 33 domestic plots or attacks against military targets since Sept. 11, 2001, with most occurring in the last three years, according to a report released Wednesday by the House committee’s Republican staff. That represents more than half of the post-9/11 jihadist plots conceived by U.S. citizens, according to a Congressional Research Service report released last month.

The only domestic terrorist attacks that have resulted in deaths since 9/11 targeted members of the military, said the chairmen of the homeland security committees, Republican Rep. Peter King of New York and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

One soldier — Pvt. William Andrew “Andy” Long — was killed at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June 2009, and 13 more were killed during a shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

Witnesses and lawmakers at Wednesday’s hearing criticized the government’s approach to these and other plots, saying the Defense Department has avoided linking the perpetrators to radical Islam in an effort to be politically correct.

“Our government, and especially the Defense Department, must recognize who the enemy is — not a vague notion of violent extremism, but violent Islamist extremism specifically,” Lieberman said.

Republican lawmakers urged Stockton, who heads Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs at the Defense Department, to acknowledge the connections between terrorist attacks and radical Islam, but Stockton refused.

“With great respect, I don’t believe it’s helpful to frame our adversary as Islamic with any set of qualifiers we might have, because we are not at war with Islam,” he told lawmakers. “Al-Qaida would love to convince Muslims around the world that the United States is at war with Islam. That’s a prime propaganda tool, and I’m not going to aid and abet that effort.”

Stockton said the Defense Department is stepping up communication with state and local law enforcement and is training military leaders to recognize “behavioral indicators” that suggest soldiers could be plotting an attack against other members of the military.

The House committee’s top-ranking Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, warned his colleagues that “focusing on the followers of one religion as the only credible threat to this nation’s security is inaccurate, narrow, and blocks consideration of emerging threats.”

Thompson and other critics have questioned the hearings King has convened on homegrown terrorism, saying they unfairly target Muslims. Wednesday’s hearing was the fourth on the topic.

Daris Long, Andy Long’s father and a retired Marine officer, echoed Republicans’ concern.

He said the government labeled his son’s shooting a “drive-by” and ignored numerous warning signs regarding his killer, Adulhakim Muhammad, who was born in Memphis, Tenn., and moved to Yemen in 2007 after converting to Islam. Muhammad’s father, Melvin Bledsoe, sat behind Long at Wednesday’s hearing.

“The political correctness exhibited by our government over offending anyone in admitting the truth about Islamic extremism masked alarm bells that were going off,” Long said.