الرئيسية
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano
delivers a speech during a press conference with French interior
minister Claude Gueant and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, unseen, in
Paris, Friday, Dec. 2, 2011. French authorities have increased security
for Syrian opposition members who have come under threat, the interior
minister said Friday. France, Syria's one-time colonial ruler, has
strongly endorsed the council and holds a tough diplomatic line against
the deadly crackdown by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime on an
anti-government uprising. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
By ANGELA CHARLTON, AP
PARIS (AP) — U.S. Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano
said Friday that the risk of "lone wolf" attackers, with no ties to
known extremist networks or grand conspiracies, is on the rise as the
global terrorist threat has shifted.
Such risks, Napolitano said
in an interview in Paris, heighten the need to keep dangerous travelers
from reaching the United States, and she urged European partners to
finalize a deal on sharing passenger data that has met resistance over
privacy concerns.
Napolitano acknowledged shifts in the terror
threat this year, but said the changes had little to do with the
uprisings that have overturned the old order in countries around the
Arab world and opened up new opportunities for extremist groups.
Asked
about the greatest current threats to the United States, she said one
from al-Qaida has morphed. "From a U.S. perspective, over the last
several years we have had more attacks emanating from AQAP (al-Qaida in
the Arabian Peninsula) than from core al-Qaida," she told The Associated
Press.
"There's been a lot of evolution over the past three
years," she said. "The thing that's most noticeable to me is the growth
of the lone wolf," the single attacker who lives in the United States or
elsewhere who is not part of a larger global conspiracy or network, she
said.
She named no examples, but it's a phenomenon that is increasingly the focus of international anti-terror operations.
A
former U.S. Army psychiatrist is the sole suspect in deadly shootings
at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. In March, a Kosovo Albanian acting alone
fatally shot two American airmen in Frankfurt, Germany. In April, a
remote-control bomb exploded in a Marrakech cafe popular with tourists,
killing 17 people, mostly foreigners — an attack devised by a Moroccan
who was inspired by al-Qaida and tried unsuccessfully for years to join
the international terror network before returning to Morocco to devise
an attack of his own.
One threat that has remained constant,
Napolitano stressed, is that of terrorists reaching U.S. territory. She
said the agreement with the EU on sharing data on air passengers for
flights from Europe to America is needed to "make sure these global
networks and global systems that we all rely on remain safe."
She
stressed that such data aided high-profile U.S. terrorist
investigations in recent years, including that into Najibullah Zazi, who
admitted plotting to bomb New York subways, and David Headley, who was
involved in the 2008 Mumbai, India, terrorist attack.
The United
States and European Union initialed a new agreement on Nov. 17 after a
previous accord from 2007 had to be renegotiated because of changes in
EU legislation, and amid criticism that it allowed U.S. authorities too
much insight into the private data of EU citizens.
The new deal
sets clear limits to what data can be used by U.S. authorities and for
how long, and allows passengers to obtain access to their records to
correct and delete them.
The accord must still be endorsed by the
EU Council — the heads of state, expected to sign off easily later this
month — and the European Parliament, where a small group of legislators
remains opposed.
The U.S. effort won support Friday from
France's interior minister, who acknowledged that Europe gets spillover
benefits from the tough U.S. line on terrorism. Claude Gueant said the
U.S. made concessions to European concerns about privacy and agreed to
share some data with Europe.
"I think this is accord is really a
win-win," he told reporters after meeting with Napolitano and U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder.
Napolitano and Holder were in Paris
for a meeting with counterparts from the so-called G-6 countries:
Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain.