An attack in the USA similar to the one on March 22 claimed by ISIS at the Crocus City hall in Moscow, where 144 people died: the head of the FBI Christopher Wray warned against this danger in a congressional hearing on the budget for the Bureau. “Looking back over my career, I would be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many threats to our public safety and national security were all so high at the same time, but that’s the case as I stand here today,” he cautioned. “Our most immediate concern was that individuals or small groups would draw distorted inspiration from events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” he told the House funding committee. “But now the potential for a coordinated attack here at home, similar to the ISIS-K attack we saw in the Russian concert hall a couple of weeks ago, is increasingly worrying,” he stressed. We no longer fear not only the action of lone wolves or small improvised groups but the plan of a well-organised commando.
The alert is therefore rising in the country and is added to that due to the fear of imminent attacks by Tehran on Israel or its American ally in response to the IDF raid in Beirut against the Iranian consulate, in which Pasdaran leaders died. A first false alarm was triggered on Wednesday in Philadelphia at an event with a thousand people for the end of Ramadan, with a shooting (without deaths) which was later sparked by two rival youth gangs.
But Wray’s warning is also part of his appeal to Congress to face the threats by not cutting funding for the FBI (500 million less in the latest budget) and by reapproving an “indispensable tool against our adversaries” such as section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial law that allows warrantless surveillance of people inside and outside the United States to protect national security. A measure that is believed to have made it possible to prevent terrorist attacks in the USA but accused of having been used improperly to spy on American citizens, for example against the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the 2020 protests and against the Capitol attackers the following year.
This is why on Wednesday he was sunk in a preliminary vote by the Trumpist faction, which once again put Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in an embarrassing minority. “Kill Fisa”, wrote in Truth on the eve of the vote Donald Trump, who considers himself a victim of the ‘deep state’ and the intelligence community. And so it was, with 228 no and 193 yes. Voting against were 19 ‘Maga’ Republicans, who joined the progressive Democrats in arguing that the law, which expires on April 19, gives too much power to spy on citizens.