Michael Morell

Michael Morell was the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency and served as acting director twice in 2011 and from 2012 to 2013.

On Threats of Terrorism Against the U.S.

Morell said the following about warnings of threats of terrorism against the U.S. over the 2015 fourth of July weekend. "I wouldn't be surprised if we're sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States. That's how serious this is." [[1]]

There's been about 50 people in the last 12 months who have been arrested in the United States for being radicalized by ISIS, wanting to go fight there or wanting to conduct an attack here," Morell said. [[2]]

However, the quote above is misleading, as Adam Johnson of FAIR pointed out. He wrote of Morell's assertion that 50 people have been arrested for ISIS related activites in the last 12 months: "But one key detail is missing from this graphic: None of these “ISIS arrests” involved any actual members of ISIS, only members of the FBI—and their network of informants—posing as such. (The one exception being the man arrested in Arizona, who, while having no contact with ISIS, was also not prompted by the FBI.) So even if one thinks the threat of “lone wolf” attacks is a serious one, it cannot be said these are really “ISIS arrests.” Perhaps on some meta-level, it shows an increase of “radicalization,” but it’s impossible to distinguish between this and simply more aggressive sting operations by the FBI. In any event, this nuance gets left out entirely. As I’ve previously shown, in the media’s rush to hype the threat, the fact of FBI-manufactured—or at least “assisted”—terror plots is left out as a complicating factor altogether, and the viewer is left thinking the FBI arrested 50 actual ISIS sleeper cells." [[3]]