WASHINGTON, D.C. - Foreign terrorist groups have developed sophisticated Internet recruitment and marketing campaigns, increasing the threat of home-grown terrorism, a Senate committee said in a report released Thursday.

“The use of the Internet by al-Qaeda and other violent Islamist extremist groups has expanded the terrorist threat to our homeland,” the report said. “No longer is the threat just from abroad … the threat is now increasingly from within.”

The bipartisan report, written by the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, recommended that the U.S. government develop a comprehensive outreach and communications strategy to isolate and discredit the “violent Islamist ideology as a cause worth supporting, let alone a cause worth advancing by attacking and killing one’s neighbors and fellow citizens.”

The U.S. government has some programs with narrow missions to combat al-Qaeda’s use of the Internet, but they are “disjointed or uncoordinated, and insufficient,” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and the committee chairman, told reporters on Thursday.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the senior Republican on the committee, said that the report shows there is “a highly coordinated effort by al-Qaeda and like-minded groups to spread their message of hate and violence over the Internet.”

There are “thousands” of Web sites and al-Qaeda even has a “clearing house” to give anti-American Web sites and messages its stamp of approval so that viewers know the site is legitimate, Lieberman said.

The senators showed a video with clips from several anti-American Web sites, showing American troops being killed in Iraq, how to make weapons and bombs, and terrorists displaying their weapons and propaganda.

Lieberman and Collins have held several hearings on this issue during the past year and argued that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security should coordinate programs to stem the threat of home-grown terror.