Al Qaeda Running or on the Rise in U.S.?
Two U.S. citizens were in federal court Thursday to answer charges that they helped plan terror attacks overseas. As CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford reports, these cases are part of a disturbing trend of Americans joining forces with Muslim extremists.
She is a blond American who converted to Islam and allegedly called herself "Jihad Jane."
In Philadelphia Thursday, Colleen LaRose pleaded not guilty to conspiring with Muslim extremists to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had sketched Mohammed with the head of a dog. She is said to be cooperating with investigators.
Hours later in Chicago, another American, David Coleman Headley, pleaded guilty to helping plan the deadly terror attacks in Mumbai, India.
Headley admitted attending terrorist training camps in Pakistan and making five trips to India to videotape locations for the December 2008 attacks, in which 170 people were killed.
Although CIA Director Leon Panetta told the Washington Post this week that al Qaeda is "on the run" overseas, the recent arrests of Americans shows Islamic extremists still have tentacles in the United States.
"Unfortunately what you have seen over time is the number of Americans falling into the orbits of al Qaeda or other extremist groups," said CBS News national security analyst Juan Zarate.
In addition to the LaRose and Headley cases:
• Five students from the Washington DC area were charged in Pakistan with terrorism Wednesday;
• In Yemen, a New Jersey man, Sharif Mobley, is in custody with suspected ties to al Qaeda;
• Najibullah Zazi, a U.S. resident, pleaded guilty last month to plotting to explode bombs on NYC subways, and,
• Army Major Nidal Hasan, an American doctor, killed 13 colleagues in Ft. Hood Texas.
Hasan had Internet communications with radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who last night released an audio tape that seemed to call for more attacks.
"How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brother and sisters?" Awlaki said on the tape.
National Security experts say the Internet is emerging as a key recruiting tool - and one very difficult to police.