Tighter border controls between the United States and Canada are likely to be less useful than better domestic intelligence and information-sharing in detecting homegrown terrorist plots in North America, terrorism experts said yesterday.
According to Canadian authorities, the suspected fertilizer bomb plot that led to the arrest Saturday in Ontario of 17 men, most of them Canadian citizens of South Asian origin, appeared to follow the pattern of successful terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 and in London last year. As in those instances, officials said, those accused in the Canadian case are Muslims with no evident ties to Al Qaeda leaders overseas except a shared ideology.
"These are the metastases of the cancer of international Islamic extremism," said John O. Brennan, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former career Central Intelligence Agency officer. "It shows the terrorist threat may be within our midst and not coming from off our shores." |