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Kirk: Passports Enable Homegrown Terrorist To Travel Freely

(CBS) --Douglas McCain, the Chicago-born ISIS fighter killed in Syria, apparently wasn't alone.

There are apparently so many more like him that President Obama will convene a UN Security Council session on foreign fighters next month.

CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine reports homegrown terrorists are not new. The Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN was in Chicago in the 60's and 70's. In 2002, Jose Padilla returned from Pakistan and Afghanistan, with plans to build a so-called dirty bomb.

The only difference now is that the internet makes it a whole lot easier for Americans to make terrorist connections, and that's the story of Douglas McArthur McCain.

McCain was born here in Chicago, went to high school in suburban Minneapolis, with its Somali immigrant community infested with terrorist sympathizers, though it wasn't moving to San Diego that the tone of his Facebook and Twitter feed started changing.

"What a tragedy to have a young man so lost that he embraces the most toxic ideology on earth," said U.S. Senator Mark Kirk.

Senator Kirk, a longtime naval intelligence officer, says monitoring the internet is critical.

"Ever alert FBI focused on social media, watching for Americans who might have ties to ISIS and feel a radical need to kill their fellow Americans," Kirk said.

McCain was issued a passport in November of last year. By May of this year, he was overseas tweeting from his account @iamthetooth under the name Duale Khalid.

How he hooked up with the ISIS terrorists isn't clear, but he may have been predicting his fate when he tweeted.

"Ya Allah when it's my time to go have mercy on my soul have mercy on my bros."

But it is clear that he and James Foley's executioner, with his distinctive British accent, aren't alone among westerners over there, westerners with passports which give them the right to come and go, making that tweet of a note in Arabic photographed along Michigan Avenue frightening.

"Once you have that passport you can come and go from the United States at will," said Kirk.

And that's the scary part, Westerners, Americans, Chicagoans, integral part of terrorist organizations overseas, free to come home to wreak the same kind of havoc which has turned parts of the worst into a continuous warzone.

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