© rightwingnews.comCIA Director John Brennan
Despite losing ground in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State is still able to organize terrorist attacks across the world and can draw on large numbers of Westerners in its ranks, CIA Director John Brennan warned lawmakers.
Contradicting the positive messages coming from the White House and the Pentagon about the state of the fight against IS (also known as ISIS/ISIL), the CIA chief told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that
the group remained "a formidable, resilient, and largely cohesive enemy.""Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm,
our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach," Brennan said in his opening statement. "The resources needed for terrorism are very modest, and the group
would have to suffer even heavier losses of territory, manpower, and money for its terrorist capacity to decline significantly."As IS continues to lose ground and funding, the
CIA believes the group will "intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda," Brennan added. Of
particular concern to the intelligence agency are the Western IS fighters, who can infiltrate back into their countries of origin through a variety of means, "including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel," according to Brennan.
Even without such infiltrators, the agency is dealing with the
"exceptionally challenging" issue of the so-called lone wolves such as Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida on Sunday.
The CIA has not been able to uncover "any direct link" between the attacker and foreign terrorist groups. Mateen had claimed allegiance to IS in a phone call to the authorities during his rampage.
Comment: 'The pen is mightier than the sword'...and spin doctors prove it over and over again. They know that messaging is the working answer to direct the public to almost any point of view they desire. There are so many questions about the Orlando massacre that haven't been answered, nor yet asked. Politicizing a tragedy, using it to create a public opinion vector, shows the pathological mindset at work. Israel is a master of it.