Domestic Terror Enemy No. 1: Lone Wolves Like Orlando Mass Murderer

(TNS) - In the aftermath of 9/11, the nation’s top domestic security priority focused on stopping foreign sleeper cells planted by al-Qaida or other radical groups.

Now, Omar Mateen defines what anti-terrorism experts say is the most serious and increasing threat for the United States — the “lone wolf.”

One person, perhaps beset by some mix of mental and personal issues, who “self-radicalizes,” proclaiming an affinity for Islamic extremists and acting on it alone with easily accessible high-powered weapons. That’s what investigators believe the 29-year-old security guard from Fort Pierce did on Sunday morning, killing 49 and wounding 53 others at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando to become the nation’s worst mass murderer.

For federal agencies charged with thwarting terrorism, Mateen’s case underlines the difficulty they face in tracking lone wolves. Before Mateen, there have already been a string of similar loners who have been arrested in Florida, including one man who threatened to blow up a Jewish center in Aventura in April.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama said “it is increasingly clear” that the killer, a U.S. citizen, became “radicalized” by “extremist information and propaganda over the internet” — noting that such lone-wolf attacks are “the hardest to detect.”
Some critics say the FBI may have dropped the ball with Mateen, who was investigated twice in 2013 and 2014 — first for spewing extremist rhetoric and then for possible associations with another Fort Pierce man who died as a suicide bomber in Syria.

But others working at the front of the nation’s domestic war on terror say today’s No. 1 enemy, the lone wolf, can be so unstable and unpredictable that it’s difficult to track them or predict when or if they might strike — as mass shootings in Orlando, San Bernardino, Calif., and Fort Hood, Texas, have shown.

Typically, there are no complicated plots for agents to uncover, no communications chatter to provide clues of what might be coming.

“Instead of large-scale attacks on landmark targets, we are now seeing these mass shootings,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C. “The problem in these cases is, the perpetrator is committing the crime the second he pulls the trigger. By then, it’s too late to stop him.”

The horror in Orlando already has renewed political debate about stalled federal legislation that would block sales of firearms to people on the government’s terror watch list. Mateen, who in recent weeks bought an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and Glock 9 mm pistol from a Port St. Lucie gun dealer, had been on the list but was taken off in 2014 after he was no longer considered a possible threat, according to the FBI.

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