'No credible information that Isis planning to attack the US'



THE GUARDIAN

Hours before Barack Obama is to announce an expanded military campaign against Islamic State (Isis) militants, his senior homeland security official assessed that the organization poses no imminent danger to America at home.
“At present, we have no credible information that [Isis] is planning to attack the homeland of the United States,” Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson told a Manhattan audience on Wednesday.
Johnson is the latest in a string of top US officials to concede that the jihadist army currently in control of much of eastern Syria and northern and central Iraq is not targeting the US at present, despite beheading two captured American journalists.

Similarly, when the leaders of US intelligence agencies provided their annual threat assessments to congressional oversight committees in January and February, they stressed a domestic threat emanating from a rival jihadist group. The Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s preferred Syrian affiliate, “does have aspirations for attacks on the homeland,” director of national intelligence James Clapper said, weeks after Isis invaded the Iraqi city of Fallujah. He and his colleagues gave relatively scant focus to Isis, which has now upended the Obama administration’s foreign policy.
The discrepancy between Isis’s assessed threat to the US and the buildup of US military action – thus far standing at 154 air strikes in Iraq and over 1,100 ostensibly noncombat troops deployed – has sparked accusations of fearmongering.

Despite the assessed lack of imminent threat, Johnson portrayed Obama’s forthcoming anti-Isis strategy as a responsible approach against the “serious threat” posed by a “depraved” adversary.
 Johnson signaled that one of his main tasks in the coming months will be preventing Isis fighters from entering the United States.