State Department/Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, speech given 13 Jan 10: . . . . Equally important, the events of Christmas day demonstrated that some of the understandings that underlay how we organized ourselves for counterterrorism needed updating. Other events in the latter half of 2009 have also underscored how some of our operating assumptions were no longer adequate. Let me name the most outstanding of these assumptions:

First, we know now that al-Qa’ida affiliates – not just the group’s core leadership in Pakistan – will indeed seek to carry out strikes against the U.S. homeland. We can no longer count on them to be focused exclusively on the near enemy – on the governments in their own countries. . . . .

. . . .Second, for years, we have known about al-Qa’ida’s desire to recruit militants with clean records to deploy against the United States. But we had not experienced any really eye-catching efforts to slip into the country in some time, leading some to speculate that the United States has successfully deterred such operatives from entering our borders. But as a number of recent events have made clear, we cannot afford to have any sense of false security. As we’ve seen in the last few months in two high-profile law-enforcement cases, individuals who appear to have been trained and handled from the badlands of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan have been operating within our borders. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed in Chicago in December portrays an American citizen–David Headley–allegedly playing a pivotal role in the 2008 attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. . . .

. . . A third myth has also been dispelled: Americans are immune to al-Qa’ida’s ideology. . . .