NCTC director Nick Rasmussen testifies before House committee on worldwide threats, challenges
By Loren Blinde
October 27, 2015
On October 21, Nick Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testified at a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee on “Worldwide Threats and Homeland Security Challenges.” An excerpt from his prepared remarks is below.
With the fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks several weeks behind us, it’s clear that we’ve had great success at substantially reducing the chances of that kind of attack recurring. We’ve done that not only with aggressive CT action against core al-Qa’ida in South Asia and around the world but also through the array of defenses we’ve erected as a country. The counterterrorism and homeland security infrastructure that exists gives us much greater defense, disruption, and mitigation capabilities that we did not have at the time of those attacks.
That said, the array of extremist terrorist actors around the globe is broader, wider, and deeper than it has been at any time since 9/11, and the threat landscape is less predictable. While the scale of the capabilities of these violent extremist actors does not rise to the level that core alQa’ida had at its disposal at the time of 9/11, it is fair to say that we face more threats originating in more places and involving more individuals than we have at any time in the last fourteen years.
Source: ODNI
