Brown: Terrorism, Iran's nuclear hopes still threaten US

By Jonathan Saltzman, GLOBE STAFF

CHELMSFORD -- Senator Scott Brown said today that intelligence briefings he has received over the past seven months have driven home to him that terrorists remain determined to attack the United States, but he believes the greatest threat to global security would be an Iran with nuclear weapons.

Addressing about two dozen journalists at a conference here in between Boston events marking the ninth anniversary of 9/11, Brown said that briefings he has received as a member of the Armed Services and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees since he took office have underscored that al-Qaeda affiliates and state-sponsored terrorists ``want to hurt us.''

``I wish I could kind of make it flowery,'' Brown said of the message he was delivering at the New England Associated Press News Executives Association. The unfortunate truth, he said, was that America's enemies ``have survived over the last nine years by adapting.''

``The goal remains global for them,'' he said. ``They work behind the scenes....They're recruiting American citizens now.''

The bungled attempts to detonate a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009 and to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square on May 1 are merely the terrorist plots Americans have heard about, he said.

``There are others that have been foiled, that you would not hear of,'' Brown said at the Radisson Hotel & Suites, declining to elaborate.

Nonetheless, Brown, who recently returned from a 10-day congressional tour of Israel and Jordan, said he was convinced that the greatest threat to international security is Iran. He said it was obvious that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons, which he added would start a catastrophic nuclear arms race in the Middle East reminiscent of the rivalry between the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War.