America Could Face Home-Grown Threat

June 4, 2006 — -- The threat of "home-grown" terror cells is taking on new urgency after Canadian police said they broke up a major terrorist bomb plot just across the border in Toronto by arresting 17 men and youths mostly born in Canada.

The fear among analysts is that the Canadian cell represents a new threat "home-grown" Islamic radicals like those who bombed trains in Madrid and London.

"The structure of al Qaeda as we know it has now been destroyed," said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI counterterrorism official and an ABC News consultant. "It's no longer a top-to-bottom organization. … They don't need direct control from al Qaeda, so that makes it a lot more difficult for us to counter."

It's a threat the FBI Director Robert Mueller warned about back in April.

"Today's threat is just as likely to come from our own streets," Mueller said, "as it is to come from persons who are sent here from overseas."

Trying to prevent that has become a top priority. The New York City Police Department, for instance, has one of the most sophisticated local anti-terrorism operations in the country. It has more than 1,000 undercover detectives keeping tabs on members of the Muslim community considered highly radicalized and potentially dangerous.

Security experts say such groups and individuals are even more difficult to detect than traditional al Qaeda cells who report back to Osama Bin Laden, because they are local citizens who may have done nothing to call attention to themselves.

"People who were born in Canada, people who were born in England, don't show up on wanted lists, don't show up on do-not-fly lists, do not have leaders who are known," said Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar who is an ABC News consultant. "This is leaderless terrorism. It's self starters. It's cells that are not connected to anything. They are very, very hard to find."

Since such people may be operating on their own, without direction from others overseas, they can do their plotting face-to-face.

"There's nothing in their communications that would indicate this is terrorist communication," Clarke said. "The calls are domestic. They're not going back to Afghanistan. And what's probably being said is the equivalent of, 'Let's all get together at Joe's house.' "