The U.S. has devoted billions of dollars to fighting terrorism overseas since 9/11, but the Justice Department is increasingly warning about the danger posed by radicals on American soil, and Attorney General Eric Holder wants prosecutors and FBI agents to devote more attention to the threat, reports NPR. Nearly two decades ago, after the Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people, DOJ launched a group to fight domestic terrorism.
Holder is re-launching the group, focused this time on home grown extremists. “The threat from al-Qaida is much more diffuse after Sept. 11 and the threats posed by a single horribly misguided citizen or permanent legal resident in the U.S. is in a sense as great as what core al-Qaida posed before Sept. 11,” says Neil MacBride, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia. Among recent incidents: the deadly shootings at Jewish facilities in Kansas, the attack at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that killed six people in 2012 and a bomb designed to detonate at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, WA.