for four years now at the advice of the fbi because she was doing some of the drawings herself. i think most of the americans would be surprised this would happen here in this country. but the fact is this was less of a surprise than it should have been. was it a propaganda win for isis. now they can boast they even hit texas in the united states. i think that s true. we look at this as americans paz a blund are. they never made it anywhere. i think if you re an isis individual you step back and say, we re trying to lead people to believe that if they don t act they re cowards. people around who are affiliated with ie sies might look at that they ve given me a message that i ve got to go out and do the same thing. otherwise i have to step back and say don t have the courage in any convictions. people might say shoot, i better go out and do the same thing otherwise i m not acting on my beliefs. but all over social media,
inspiration. say the gunmen read something online and carried out the attack on his own all the way up to isis calling the shots, orchestrating it. no evidence of that. but there is communication. there is back and forth there is an awareness here which is why one official said to me that in this case it s clear that it was more than just inspiration. it s early days in this investigation. and as they turn out more they re going to come to better answers to how much connectivity there was, how many connections between him and isis overseas. and jim the u.s. also announced today a multimillion-dollar reward for four isis terrorists. what do we know about these individuals, and why announce a reward today? well, this is look as we look at them now, really a rogue s gallery of isis suspects here. you have mustafa al kaduli. he goes way back to the days of al qaeda in iraq. abu muse sack al zarqawi more than ten years ago. the bounty on his head $7
its embassy there s as well. both broken states very similar to somalia. uncontrollable. difficult to get on the ground information out of if there. and all three of the countryious mentioned are really at the bottom of the list of where you can actually make progress. we ve got other things going on that we really need to pay attention to that i think are a bit higher than that. closer to home let s talk than terror attack in texas over the weekend. isis now claiming responsibilities responsibility for it. i know you ve been briefed. what can you tell us? well probably not much more than what your people have said already. and that is in a very general sense, there is no question that isis is responsible. now, was it from a direction telling these two people this is what you should do this is the event we want you to target, this is what time we want you to show up, this is what we want you to do. so far there has been no
and another person tied to the somali based terror group. i don t know that you can say that isis said go to garland, texas and attack that location and that activity. but they re certainly part of the psychological approach of this that causes people to be radicalized. those who knew simpson and his fellow gunman tell cnn they never suspected they were terrorists. they didn t show any signs of radicalization or any signs of even thinking about those things in that manner. so when that happens, it just shocks you. today the head of counter terror at the fbi confirmed that the kwib opened a new investigation into simpson just in recent months adding that social media postings usually a part of neither roar investigation. what s clear here is there were connections, there was communication between the gunmen and isis overseas. doesn t mean that isis was telling them exactly what to do or when. but that communication is
vests and with assault rifles at the same time and could have obviously been a whole lot worse. joining us now is a key voice on national security senator angus king. he s the independent senator from maine, serves on the intelligence and armed services committees. would you agree this was the first, i guess it s successful. they actually managed to start firing their assault weapons. the first successful isis attack on u.s. soil senator? well i think that may be a slight overstatement because we don t have yet any data that connects them to this attack but it s pretty darn close. we know that isis and there are other supporter, al shabaab and others were tweeting about the conference in texas and urging people to take up arms. i don t know if they contacted this guy in phoenix directly and said you should go. but you know we re splitting hairs here. i think the reality is this is what happened. isis was urging an attack. these guys responded.