FROM: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=3075874
Devastated after his dreams of pursuing university-level computer science came to a crashing halt, accused terrorist Asad Ansari found a darker new purpose in life, the Crown alleged yesterday at his trial in Superior Court.
"You had become dedicated to jihad," Crown attorney Jason Wakely suggested.
"That is not true," responded Mr. Ansari, who has told the court he fell into a deep depression upon learning his parents could not afford to send him to his program of choice at the Unversity of Waterloo. But he maintains he never contemplated turning to terrorism, and was unaware his close friends were developing a homegrown terror cell during the relevant time period in 2005 and 2006.
Mr. Ansari, 25, is one of two remaining accused to be tried in the "Toronto 18" case, which involved an alleged plot to detonate bombs in the city's core and to attack senior politicians in Ottawa.
Ringleader Fahim Ahmad pleaded guilty to terrorism charges last month.
The jury yesterday watched a video from a CD labelled "Good stuff: Islamic videos," which police found in Mr. Ansari's bedroom after his arrest.
In it, al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri heaps scorn on the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan-- a mission Mr. Ansari has testified he supported--and urges the Muslim population to seek reform through jihad.
As this would have countered the views Mr. Ansari purported to have at the time, Mr. Wakely noted, "why is it that you saved this video?"
Mr. Ansari said he often sought out controversial material for his own edification.
"If I have that, it doesn't mean I agree with it," he said, calling al-Qaeda's standpoint "completely retarded as an ideology."
The court has heard that during a winter training camp in Washago, Ont., in 2005, Ahmad likened the Toronto 18 to al-Qaeda; Mr. Ansari, who says he was unaware the camp was intended as a terrorist training ground when he attended, denies having heard such a statement, and yesterday called it a humourous concept.
Mr. Wakely challenged Mr. Ansari on the title of the CD --- "Good stuff: Islamic videos" -- containing the al-Zawahiri video and other scenes of violent jihad, including explosions and masked militants firing rocket-propelled grenades.
"This depicts warfare, killing, hatred," Mr. Wakely said. "What's good about this stuff?"
"There's nothing good about this stuff," Mr. Ansari acknowledged, noting he frequently and indiscriminately labelled CDs in that fashion: "It was not an assessment in any way."
The Crown also referred to a document called the "Terrorist Handbook" found in Mr. Ansari's possession at the time of his arrest in June 2006. But defence lawyer John Norris contended this was merely an informational document, "not for actual use."
With the defence case for Mr. Ansari now concluded, lawyer Michael Moon will open his case today for 29-year-old Steven Chand, who stands charged with participation in a terrorist group and counselling to commit fraud over $5,000 in association with that group.
Showing posts with label facing homegrown radicalization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facing homegrown radicalization. Show all posts
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
PAK STUDENT ADNAN BABAR MIRZA & THE BATTLESPACE
*** In this war - it seems all venues are battlespace. I note though this is a common defense in cases like this. Lawmakers need to work this out properly. MS ***
FROM: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100524/world/us_terror_charges
HOUSTON - A Pakistani student accused of conspiring to aid the Taliban and undergoing training to fight U.S. troops never intended to commit "battlefield Jihad" or help a terrorist group, his attorney told jurors Monday.
But a prosecutor said during opening statements in the trial of Adnan Babar Mirza that the student collected money for the Taliban and went through weapons training so he could fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Mirza, 33, was one of four men arrested in 2006, accused by authorities of taking part in paramilitary training exercises at camp sites around the Houston area so they could engage in a holy war. He was indicted on nine counts, including conspiracy to help the Taliban and federal charges related to being an illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm.
Prosecutors said Mirza was in the country illegally because he violated his student visa by working.
If convicted, Mirza faces up to 10 years in prison. His trial was to continue through the rest of this week.
Prosecutor Jim McAlister told jurors authorities learned about what Mirza and the other men were doing when one of their friends, James Coates, decided "things were getting out of hand" and became an FBI informant.
"They were training to go overseas and fight in Afghanistan and not for the Americans," McAlister said.
David Adler, Mirza's attorney, denied his client violated his student visa by working and portrayed Mirza as a caring person who collected food for Houston's homeless and promoted Islam and Muslim culture by working with Houston police and through a public access television program.
Adler told jurors Mirza went on camping trips but denied they involved paramilitary training exercises. He accused Coates of being the one who was militant and promoted violence.
An undercover officer taped conversations with Mirza and the other men in which they allegedly talked about ambushing U.S. soldiers and triggering a bomb with a cellphone, according to court documents.
FBI Special Agent John McKinley, the prosecution's first witness, told jurors Mirza can be heard on the taped conversations talking about sending money to support Taliban families. Prosecutors have said Mirza collected about $900 for Taliban fighters and their families.
But Adler said it's not against the law to send money to the families of Taliban fighters and Mirza collected money for hospitals and other groups but not specifically for the Taliban.
He also said Mirza can be heard in these taped conversations expressing anger about injustices Muslims around the world have experienced, but his client was just expressing emotion and didn't intend to act on it.
The three other men who were arrested have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Kobie Diallo Williams, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced in August to 4 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to join the Taliban and fight against U.S. forces.
Syed Maaz Shah, a former Pakistani engineering student at the University of Texas at Dallas, was sentenced in 2007 to 6 1/2 years in prison on federal firearms charges. Shiraz Syed Qazi, also a Pakistani student and Mirza's cousin, received a 10-month prison sentence in 2007 on a firearms charge.
FROM: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100524/world/us_terror_charges
HOUSTON - A Pakistani student accused of conspiring to aid the Taliban and undergoing training to fight U.S. troops never intended to commit "battlefield Jihad" or help a terrorist group, his attorney told jurors Monday.
But a prosecutor said during opening statements in the trial of Adnan Babar Mirza that the student collected money for the Taliban and went through weapons training so he could fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Mirza, 33, was one of four men arrested in 2006, accused by authorities of taking part in paramilitary training exercises at camp sites around the Houston area so they could engage in a holy war. He was indicted on nine counts, including conspiracy to help the Taliban and federal charges related to being an illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm.
Prosecutors said Mirza was in the country illegally because he violated his student visa by working.
If convicted, Mirza faces up to 10 years in prison. His trial was to continue through the rest of this week.
Prosecutor Jim McAlister told jurors authorities learned about what Mirza and the other men were doing when one of their friends, James Coates, decided "things were getting out of hand" and became an FBI informant.
"They were training to go overseas and fight in Afghanistan and not for the Americans," McAlister said.
David Adler, Mirza's attorney, denied his client violated his student visa by working and portrayed Mirza as a caring person who collected food for Houston's homeless and promoted Islam and Muslim culture by working with Houston police and through a public access television program.
Adler told jurors Mirza went on camping trips but denied they involved paramilitary training exercises. He accused Coates of being the one who was militant and promoted violence.
An undercover officer taped conversations with Mirza and the other men in which they allegedly talked about ambushing U.S. soldiers and triggering a bomb with a cellphone, according to court documents.
FBI Special Agent John McKinley, the prosecution's first witness, told jurors Mirza can be heard on the taped conversations talking about sending money to support Taliban families. Prosecutors have said Mirza collected about $900 for Taliban fighters and their families.
But Adler said it's not against the law to send money to the families of Taliban fighters and Mirza collected money for hospitals and other groups but not specifically for the Taliban.
He also said Mirza can be heard in these taped conversations expressing anger about injustices Muslims around the world have experienced, but his client was just expressing emotion and didn't intend to act on it.
The three other men who were arrested have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Kobie Diallo Williams, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced in August to 4 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to join the Taliban and fight against U.S. forces.
Syed Maaz Shah, a former Pakistani engineering student at the University of Texas at Dallas, was sentenced in 2007 to 6 1/2 years in prison on federal firearms charges. Shiraz Syed Qazi, also a Pakistani student and Mirza's cousin, received a 10-month prison sentence in 2007 on a firearms charge.
Friday, May 21, 2010
AMERICAN HOMEGROWN TERRORISM
*** Something is just not working: first it was brown bearded types - so they lost their beards. Then it was just the brown types - so they got white guys (some with beards some without). Then it was women - white women. Now do you still think grandma cannot be the next terrorist? Think again. They will adapt and devise new tactics, new strategies. COUNTER tactics, folks, COUNTER strategies. MS ***
FROM: http://www.newsweek.com/id/238296?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
In the years following the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials were focused primarily on tracking down terrorists abroad. But in recent years their targets have been increasingly closer to home. At least 25 American citizens—both born and naturalized—have been charged with serious federal terrorism violations since the beginning of 2009, according to information compiled by federal authorities.
The list of 25 U.S. citizens who have been charged with such offenses in the last 18 months was compiled and provided to NEWSWEEK by a U.S. law-enforcement official, who requested not to be identified because it is not an official government publication and is not meant to be exhaustive. "These cases clearly suggest that an increasing number of U.S. citizens, both native-born Americans and naturalized citizens, appear to be getting involved in the terrorist cause. It's not an encouraging trend," said a Justice Department official who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
The official who provided the recent information said he did not have such statistics broken down by citizenship for terrorism prosecutions during the George W. Bush administration, and a search of government and academic sources did not turn up comparable figures. By one comparison, in the 18 months before Barack Obama took office, the Department of Justice prosecuted 35 terrorism cases against all suspects—both American citizens and foreign nationals—according to DOJ information released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (PDF).
Earlier this year the Justice Department published a comprehensive listing (PDF) of more than 400 federal-court convictions on terror charges since September 11, 2001, but it did not provide the citizenship of the defendants. Over the years the Justice Department has also issued periodic summaries of terror prosecutions, such as this one and this one, which do mention earlier, well-known cases involving U.S. citizens, including those of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, the "Lackawanna Six" (a group of men from the Buffalo, N.Y., area who were arrested in 2002 for training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan before 9/11), and a Virginia imam convicted in 2005 for encouraging others to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. But at the time these cases surfaced, they appeared relatively isolated and not part of the kind of extended pattern that the latest statistics appear to show.
Counterterrorism experts from the Bush era say that the new cases represent an increased involvement by Americans in militant jihadism that began before Obama took office but has accelerated since then. The experts attribute the alarming trend both to increasing alienation among young American Muslims and to more effective enforcement and intelligence collection activities by the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.
To be sure, there are many different kinds of people, motivations, and actions represented on this list, and not every example can be attributed solely to radicalization of American Muslims. Also, the criminal cases are all at various stages, with some having pleaded not guilty. Marc Sageman, an independent terrorism expert who worked for the CIA during the 1980s, notes that some of the recent cases on the list—such as the Newburgh, N.Y., plot and the case of the man who wanted to bomb an Illinois courthouse—are less significant than others because they were the products of FBI "sting" operations and thus constitute what Sageman considers to be "entrapment," meaning a heavy government role in luring the suspects into what they thought was jihad. Also, said Sageman, a North Carolina case whose defendants are included on the list mainly involved plans to get involved in jihadist fighting overseas, not inside the U.S.
Still, the increase is troubling. The official who provided the list of 25 charged Americans emphasized that it was not necessarily comprehensive and features mainly high-profile cases involving serious charges. The list includes:
*Faisal Shahzad, the accused perpetrator of the recent failed Times Square car bombing.
*David Headley, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to charges that included helping a Pakistan-based terror group gather intelligence for November 2008 terror attacks against commercial targets in Mumbai.
*Two American women, known as "Jihad Jane" and "Jihad Jamie," who are facing charges in Philadelphia for their roles in an alleged Internet-based conspiracy to attack a Swedish artist who drew a cartoon lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.
Also on the list are Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, naturalized Americans born in Afghanistan and Bosnia, respectively, who allegedly conspired with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born permanent resident of the U.S. in a plot to bomb the New York City subway system last September. Zazi, the alleged mastermind, is not listed as one of the 25 American citizens arrested for terrorism in the last 18 months. (Zazi and Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty in the subway bombing plot; charges against Medunjanin are still pending).
The 25 U.S. citizens on the list may be only a cross-section of a larger problem, however, officials say. The "Northern Virginia Five," a group of Americans who are currently being detained by authorities in Pakistan, are not on the list, nor is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychologist accused—in the U.S. military-justice system—of killing 13 fellow soldiers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last November.
The official who provided the list noted that it does not include any of the estimated 20 Americans or U.S. residents who are alleged or reported to have traveled to Somalia to join Al Qaeda affiliates or other jihadist factions operating there. Also not on the list are a number of Americans who are believed to have gone to Yemen in recent years for suspected jihadist training. Most estimates by law-enforcement and intelligence officials put the number of Americans who may now be undergoing such training in Yemen at about a dozen, though this report (PDF) issued in January by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that "36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic"—a figure that other U.S. officials suggest is an overestimate.
Frances Fragos Townsend, White House counterterrorism adviser in the George W. Bush administration, says her recollection is that the involvement of American citizens or residents in terror plots actually began to grow while she still worked in government, with cases like that of the mainly Balkan expatriates (some of whom were illegal aliens) from Philadelphia's New Jersey suburbs who plotted to shoot up soldiers at the Fort Dix Army training base, and a 2007 domestically hatched plot (with alleged connections to Trinidad and possibly Iran) to blow up fuel lines leading to New York’s JFK airport. She says the raw statistics charting American citizens' involvement in serious terror plots is not just a "sudden spike" but rather a trend that has been tilting "precipitously up" for the last few years.
Sageman says there is still evidence of what he describes as a "very serious uptick" in American citizens' interest and involvement in jihadist activities in recent years. He attributes this alarming trend to three factors. First, he says, now that memories of 9/11 have faded, American Muslims are feeling more alarmed by growing manifestations of Islamophobia among non–Muslim Americans, and this is frightening and alienating Muslim-American youth. Second, Sageman agrees that a very important factor in drawing Americans into jihad is the increasing availability of radical Islamic messages in English on the Internet, particularly from Anwar al-Awlaki, a fiery imam associated with Hasan and Christmas Day "underpants bomber" Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Abdullah al-Faisal, a deeply anti-Western and anti-Semitic Jamaican-born imam who was imprisoned for a time in Britain on charges of incitement to murder. Before 2005, Sageman says, the main jihadist messages were available on the Web only in Arabic, but since that time, English-language militant Web sites, carrying messages from religiously credentialed figures like Awlaki, have proliferated.
Finally, Sageman says, some disillusioned young people have found themselves turning to violence when other, less violent forms of countercultural protest have proved ineffective. But as their estrangement from organized protest movements becomes deeper, Sageman says, such angry young people tend to withdraw into themselves or into very small groups, and pursue simple plots, rather than complex schemes like the 9/11 attacks. Eventually, Sageman hopes, unless the U.S. creates new grievances in the Muslim world through unwise foreign-policy moves, this proliferating but fragmented domestic jihadist trend might well burn itself out.
FROM: http://www.newsweek.com/id/238296?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
In the years following the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials were focused primarily on tracking down terrorists abroad. But in recent years their targets have been increasingly closer to home. At least 25 American citizens—both born and naturalized—have been charged with serious federal terrorism violations since the beginning of 2009, according to information compiled by federal authorities.
The list of 25 U.S. citizens who have been charged with such offenses in the last 18 months was compiled and provided to NEWSWEEK by a U.S. law-enforcement official, who requested not to be identified because it is not an official government publication and is not meant to be exhaustive. "These cases clearly suggest that an increasing number of U.S. citizens, both native-born Americans and naturalized citizens, appear to be getting involved in the terrorist cause. It's not an encouraging trend," said a Justice Department official who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
The official who provided the recent information said he did not have such statistics broken down by citizenship for terrorism prosecutions during the George W. Bush administration, and a search of government and academic sources did not turn up comparable figures. By one comparison, in the 18 months before Barack Obama took office, the Department of Justice prosecuted 35 terrorism cases against all suspects—both American citizens and foreign nationals—according to DOJ information released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (PDF).
Earlier this year the Justice Department published a comprehensive listing (PDF) of more than 400 federal-court convictions on terror charges since September 11, 2001, but it did not provide the citizenship of the defendants. Over the years the Justice Department has also issued periodic summaries of terror prosecutions, such as this one and this one, which do mention earlier, well-known cases involving U.S. citizens, including those of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, the "Lackawanna Six" (a group of men from the Buffalo, N.Y., area who were arrested in 2002 for training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan before 9/11), and a Virginia imam convicted in 2005 for encouraging others to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. But at the time these cases surfaced, they appeared relatively isolated and not part of the kind of extended pattern that the latest statistics appear to show.
Counterterrorism experts from the Bush era say that the new cases represent an increased involvement by Americans in militant jihadism that began before Obama took office but has accelerated since then. The experts attribute the alarming trend both to increasing alienation among young American Muslims and to more effective enforcement and intelligence collection activities by the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.
To be sure, there are many different kinds of people, motivations, and actions represented on this list, and not every example can be attributed solely to radicalization of American Muslims. Also, the criminal cases are all at various stages, with some having pleaded not guilty. Marc Sageman, an independent terrorism expert who worked for the CIA during the 1980s, notes that some of the recent cases on the list—such as the Newburgh, N.Y., plot and the case of the man who wanted to bomb an Illinois courthouse—are less significant than others because they were the products of FBI "sting" operations and thus constitute what Sageman considers to be "entrapment," meaning a heavy government role in luring the suspects into what they thought was jihad. Also, said Sageman, a North Carolina case whose defendants are included on the list mainly involved plans to get involved in jihadist fighting overseas, not inside the U.S.
Still, the increase is troubling. The official who provided the list of 25 charged Americans emphasized that it was not necessarily comprehensive and features mainly high-profile cases involving serious charges. The list includes:
*Faisal Shahzad, the accused perpetrator of the recent failed Times Square car bombing.
*David Headley, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to charges that included helping a Pakistan-based terror group gather intelligence for November 2008 terror attacks against commercial targets in Mumbai.
*Two American women, known as "Jihad Jane" and "Jihad Jamie," who are facing charges in Philadelphia for their roles in an alleged Internet-based conspiracy to attack a Swedish artist who drew a cartoon lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.
Also on the list are Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, naturalized Americans born in Afghanistan and Bosnia, respectively, who allegedly conspired with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born permanent resident of the U.S. in a plot to bomb the New York City subway system last September. Zazi, the alleged mastermind, is not listed as one of the 25 American citizens arrested for terrorism in the last 18 months. (Zazi and Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty in the subway bombing plot; charges against Medunjanin are still pending).
The 25 U.S. citizens on the list may be only a cross-section of a larger problem, however, officials say. The "Northern Virginia Five," a group of Americans who are currently being detained by authorities in Pakistan, are not on the list, nor is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychologist accused—in the U.S. military-justice system—of killing 13 fellow soldiers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last November.
The official who provided the list noted that it does not include any of the estimated 20 Americans or U.S. residents who are alleged or reported to have traveled to Somalia to join Al Qaeda affiliates or other jihadist factions operating there. Also not on the list are a number of Americans who are believed to have gone to Yemen in recent years for suspected jihadist training. Most estimates by law-enforcement and intelligence officials put the number of Americans who may now be undergoing such training in Yemen at about a dozen, though this report (PDF) issued in January by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that "36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic"—a figure that other U.S. officials suggest is an overestimate.
Frances Fragos Townsend, White House counterterrorism adviser in the George W. Bush administration, says her recollection is that the involvement of American citizens or residents in terror plots actually began to grow while she still worked in government, with cases like that of the mainly Balkan expatriates (some of whom were illegal aliens) from Philadelphia's New Jersey suburbs who plotted to shoot up soldiers at the Fort Dix Army training base, and a 2007 domestically hatched plot (with alleged connections to Trinidad and possibly Iran) to blow up fuel lines leading to New York’s JFK airport. She says the raw statistics charting American citizens' involvement in serious terror plots is not just a "sudden spike" but rather a trend that has been tilting "precipitously up" for the last few years.
Sageman says there is still evidence of what he describes as a "very serious uptick" in American citizens' interest and involvement in jihadist activities in recent years. He attributes this alarming trend to three factors. First, he says, now that memories of 9/11 have faded, American Muslims are feeling more alarmed by growing manifestations of Islamophobia among non–Muslim Americans, and this is frightening and alienating Muslim-American youth. Second, Sageman agrees that a very important factor in drawing Americans into jihad is the increasing availability of radical Islamic messages in English on the Internet, particularly from Anwar al-Awlaki, a fiery imam associated with Hasan and Christmas Day "underpants bomber" Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Abdullah al-Faisal, a deeply anti-Western and anti-Semitic Jamaican-born imam who was imprisoned for a time in Britain on charges of incitement to murder. Before 2005, Sageman says, the main jihadist messages were available on the Web only in Arabic, but since that time, English-language militant Web sites, carrying messages from religiously credentialed figures like Awlaki, have proliferated.
Finally, Sageman says, some disillusioned young people have found themselves turning to violence when other, less violent forms of countercultural protest have proved ineffective. But as their estrangement from organized protest movements becomes deeper, Sageman says, such angry young people tend to withdraw into themselves or into very small groups, and pursue simple plots, rather than complex schemes like the 9/11 attacks. Eventually, Sageman hopes, unless the U.S. creates new grievances in the Muslim world through unwise foreign-policy moves, this proliferating but fragmented domestic jihadist trend might well burn itself out.
CONFRONTING A RESILIENT AL QAEDA
*** Back to that Westphalian frame of reference, which resorts to conventional state vs. state responses. You are not against a state, or a political group - you are fighting an ideology and that cannot be defeated by bombs and guns but by a counter ideology. You cannot arrest them away - even more will pop up in their place. You cannot demonize the whole of Islam - it will only push people to it (counter culture syndrome). MS ***
FROM: http://counterterrorismblog.org/2010/05/confronting_a_resilient_al-qae.php
By Matthew Levitt
In the latest lecture in The Washington Institute's counterterrorism lecture series, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, spoke on "Confronting a Resilient al-Qaeda: The U.S. Strategic Response."
Ambassador Benjamin described the evolving threat and increasing resilience of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, which have been brought into stark relief by a number of recent events, including the attempted car bombing in Times Square and the December 2009 airline bomb plot. His talk focused on ways the U.S. government is refining its existing strategy to counter this evolution in dynamic threats.
The full text of his talk, and an audio link as well, can be found at:
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=528
FROM: http://counterterrorismblog.org/2010/05/confronting_a_resilient_al-qae.php
By Matthew Levitt
In the latest lecture in The Washington Institute's counterterrorism lecture series, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, spoke on "Confronting a Resilient al-Qaeda: The U.S. Strategic Response."
Ambassador Benjamin described the evolving threat and increasing resilience of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, which have been brought into stark relief by a number of recent events, including the attempted car bombing in Times Square and the December 2009 airline bomb plot. His talk focused on ways the U.S. government is refining its existing strategy to counter this evolution in dynamic threats.
The full text of his talk, and an audio link as well, can be found at:
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC07.php?CID=528
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
MC LADEN : FRANCHISED TERRORISM
*** This is no way suggests McDonalds (all rights reserved) is a terrorist organization - the "MC-something" makes for great writing. :) MS ***
FROM: http://www.kelowna.com/2010/02/02/marketing-the-al-qaida-brand-the-evolution-of-franchised-terrorism-under-osama-bin-laden-column/
Canwest News Service
It's a bleak commentary on how this conflict with the al-Qaida terrorism network has been managed that over eight and approaching nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington there is considerable dissent among western intelligence analysts and military leaders about the importance of Osama bin Laden.
Some say killing or capturing bin Laden would be the trigger that leads to the swift collapse of the international terror network he created and the various insurgencies that have spun off from it. (MS: This is totally false.)
This view is suggested by a United States Senate report published in November that looked in detail at the failure to catch bin Laden and the top al- Qaida leaders when U.S. forces led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
"The failure to finish the job" – that is to neutralize bin Laden – "represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism," said the report.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, sees bin Laden as a potent symbol whose survival "emboldens al-Qaida. I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaida until he is captured or killed," he told a Senate committee last month.
An even firmer picture of bin Laden as the essential, central ingredient for al-Qaida's survival comes from Peter Bergen, an expert on terrorism who interviewed bin Laden in 1997. "Al-Qaida is bin Laden's idea, it is his baby and 9/11 was his operation and it would psychologically be a victory for the civilized world if he was killed or captured," Bergen told the Financial Times newspaper last month. (MS: Not correct. AQ is an idea that uses long-standing Muslim desires for a utopian Islamic state. If OBL goes, another 100 are already waiting to replace him.)
The U.S. attacks with missile-armed drone aircraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership are believed to be hiding, has eliminated a large number of the organization's leaders, Bergen said. "There is nobody who could replace him as head of this network," Bergen said.
I could continue quoting people who believe killing or capturing bin Laden would be the key to defeating this wave of radical Islamic terrorism. But it is far from being a universal view. There is a significant school of thought that argues that Islamic terrorism is no longer a monopoly of al-Qaida core leaders and bin Laden. Indeed, major terrorist attacks may not even be under their control and direction.
David Livingstone, a security expert at Chatham House, Britain's premier think-tank on international affairs, said recently he doesn't believe removing bin Laden from the equation will have much effect because al-Qaida has become a brand name. The al-Qaida product of Islamic terrorism is now so well established it will survive with or without bin Laden.
The most persistent and in many ways the most persuasive proponent of this view is Marc Sageman. Sageman is an interesting man whose qualifications make it clear he is well worth listening to. Sageman has a doctorate in political sociology and is a practising psychiatrist. He served in the U.S. Navy as a flight surgeon and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. In the late 1980s he was based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, liaising with the Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In 2004, Sageman produced an important book called Understanding Terrorism, which was based on detailed dissection of the lives of the approximately 400 al- Qaida members then in captivity. It is a book full of fascinating and significant information – for example, that about half the known al-Qaida terrorists attended only 20 mosques worldwide and that most of them were intelligent and privileged middle class young men, not brainwashed, ill- educated cannon fodder.
In his latest book published in 2008, Leaderless Jihad, Sageman argues that al-Qaida is not an organization that can be systematically destroyed, because it has evolved into a social network that has to be disrupted by undermining the relationships that sustain it. This is what he says:
"The present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaida masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal local groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing operations from the bottom up. These homegrown wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad."
Sageman argues that al-Qaida has ceased to exist as an organizational entity and that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, he says, the main terrorism threat today is from low-level groups that are self-recruiting and have adopted the al-Qaida brand, largely from the Internet.
This analysis, as you can imagine, is at some odds with the official view in Washington. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate presented by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell is an example. In the publicly released portions of his evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he said:
"[Al-Qaida] is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni [Muslim] communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities."
More recently in Senate evidence McConnell said that while al-Qaida "has lost many of its senior operational planners of the years, the group's adaptable decision-making process and bench of skilled operatives have enabled it to identify effective replacements."
This characterization of al-Qaida as a resourceful adversary that is highly disciplined and in full control of its network is dramatically different from the amorphous and fluid picture of al-Qaida presented by Sageman and others who view this terror campaign more as a social phenomenon than an evil conspiracy. But such a characterization has few appeals to politicians and administrations that much prefer to be able to draw the threats facing their citizens with clear and distinct lines. The enemy must have a face.
While I do not buy Sageman's arguments entirely, I think that what he has identified is an aspect of the insurgencies and terrorist campaign that is new to the world. The Internet as a source of information, a provider of instant communication and access among both associates and strangers, and a facilitator for the swift construction of global networks has undoubtedly sustained al- Qaida. And it is, of course, deeply ironic that an organization whose proclaimed aim is to gather the Middle East and, given a chance, the rest of the world under a regime of early medieval puritanical theocracy should be relying heavily on 21st century technological wizardry to do it.
Jihadi kit on Web
The full kit for becoming a jihadi is available on the Web. By some estimates there are tens of thousands of sites either aimed at, involving or somehow of benefit to people vulnerable to the call of militant Islam. At the most basic level is propaganda, which feeds and reinforces already well entrenched suspicions among very many Muslim people that the West in the broadest sense is out to destroy them. The pictures of American mistreatment of prisoners amounting to torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad must have been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida beyond bin Laden's dreams. If you want to get an idea of what's out there, influencing young Muslims every day, just go to Google Image and type in Abu Ghraib. I'm sure I don't need to warn you, many of the pictures were not printed in western media and are even more troubling than those that were.
The Abu Ghraib pictures are an extreme and lasting example of the kind of material that can and does inflame the passions of susceptible Muslims, especially in this context restless young men unsure of their own identity and purpose. But there's plenty more incitement and it's up there on the Internet on a daily basis. It may be pictures or video of the aftermath of attacks with missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft on houses or villages in Pakistan's tribal border region with Afghanistan. Or the pictures may be of villages in Afghanistan or Iraq, and now Somalia and Yemen after attacks by drones or regular American bomber aircraft. I'm sure the Americans try to be as meticulous as they can be in assessing intelligence information before striking a house where a militant is believed to be staying. But there is no doubt a lot of wives, children and other innocent civilians get killed in these attacks.
Then, of course, there are the pictures and videos from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Israel responds, often with a heavy hand, to attacks by the followers of Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This daily diet of pictures of the ruins and the dead reinforces the feeling among some young Muslims that they are powerless against what they see as the hatred of the West and instant death from the skies.
For many young Muslims, even the most angry, that is where the trail ends. Indeed, some try to turn their anger into a positive force to attack the problems within their own societies or to come to grips with the divisions between Islam and West. But some, a few, have the misfortune to be spotted by the lurking recruiters for al-Qaida.
Others are self-recruiting. A good example is the five young American Muslims from West Virginia now under arrest in Pakistan. From sites they found on the Internet they adopted radical Islamic views and decided they wanted to go to fight with the Taliban against their countrymen in Afghanistan. They had some sort of preliminary contact with people in Pakistan claiming to be radicals. But from what we know now, the real radicals were suspicious of them and Pakistani police arrested them soon after their arrival.
But any diligent search of the Web can reveal enough training information on how to be a jihadi, from religious justification of terrorism to making car bombs with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Most of those thousands of websites useful to the would-be jihadi are in Arabic, but I think of particular interest to us are the Canadian, American, British or other western young men of Muslim heritage who have tried, some successfully, to become terrorists.
Men lured to terrorism
Only this week, for example, we have had the sentencing of some members of the so-called Toronto 18 who planned in 2004 to make massive truck bombs and attack the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Toronto.
Their families came from Somalia, Egypt and Jamaica, but to any casual observer they were normal immigrant Canadian kids.
The young men who launched the July 2005 attack on the London Underground subway system were even more acclimatized. They were Britishborn.
In both cases the groups first got involved in radical Muslim online chat rooms, which are watched by fundamentalist Muslim imams for potential recruits. The process of luring these young men towards terrorism is not unlike the way pedophiles lure young girls or boys towards meetings.
In the case of both the Toronto 18 and the London subway bombers there was one main radical Muslim cleric who latched on to them and changed them from being the awkward, unsure and emotional youths, of which we've all had experience, into dedicated killers.
That cleric's name is Anwar al Awlaki and he's an American of Yemeni background. Awlaki was involved with two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the Toronto and London groups. There's evidence he radicalized Major Nidal Hasan, the American army psychiatrist who massacred 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last year, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, the young Nigerian who nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
Awlaki was born in New Mexico 38 years ago, but his family returned to Yemen with him when he was young. He came back to the United States in 1991 to attend Colorado State University, received his master's degree in education at San Diego and later enrolled in a PhD program at George Washington University. Awlaki has been an active Muslim cleric since his postgraduate years when he was an imam at San Diego's Rabat mosque. Then he was a Muslim chaplain at the Hijrah Islamic Centre in Virginia outside Washington. Somewhere along the way he became a radical and turned up on the FBI's radar following the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was interviewed then about his association with two of the hijackers and has been high on the FBI and CIA's lists of persons of interest ever since.
Doubtless fearing pursuers on his trail, in 2002 he moved to London and two years later he returned to Yemen, where he has been ever since, so far as is known.
He has spent some time in prison in Yemen for unspecified crimes and since then he has become more radical and more of a presence on the Internet both on his own Web page and as a blogger. In December, for example, he wrote a blog praising al Shabaab, the militant group linked to al-Qaida in neighbouring Somalia, for the rape and stoning to death of a young woman accused of theft. Al Shabaab, Awlaki said, should take no notice of malicious stories in the western press that the girl was only 13 years old. Well, I can tell you that those stories in the western press were true.
Awlaki has now found his calling as an online preacher of hatred and terrorism. You can find his sermons easily on You-Tube. His value to al-Qaida is that he is, of course, fluent in English, has an undeniable understanding of American and contemporary youth culture, and has an engaging sense of humour. His Facebook page has nearly 5,000 fans.
But like all good salesmen and con artists, Awlaki's most important talent is that he can take very complex ideological and religious thoughts and make them very simple. He has the ability to make impressionable young men believe that slaughtering as many people as possible is not only an affirmative political statement, but is a religious duty. If you look at his YouTube sermons you'll see he has the glib ability to construct verbal fantasy worlds and make his young acolytes believe them.
And once he has cast his spell over his targets it seems that he constantly reinforces the indoctrination. We know, for example, that he kept buttressing the resolve of the two 9/11 hijackers he knew right up to the moment they set out on their mission.
Killer praised as a hero
The same happened with Hasan at Fort Hood with whom Awlaki kept up an e-mail correspondence intended to sustain the major's resolve. Among those 21 e-mails are several instances of Hasan asking for religious validation for what he was about to do, and Awlaki replied with comforting interpretations of Islam.
Soon after the attack Awlaki praised Hasan as a hero. On his website he reacted angrily to condemnation of Hasan by U.S. Muslim groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Their rejection of Hasan's killings was, he said, treason against the Muslim community.
It was also, of course, a significant political blow at Awlaki, which soiled his reputation among American Muslims. Manipulating Abdulmutalab and sending him off as a plane bomber seems, by some perverted logic, to have been an attempt to re-establish Awlaki's reputation as the indispensable mentor for English-speaking would-be jihadis.
And by late December last year Awlaki had a personal reason for wanting to down an American airliner. Shortly before the attempted Christmas Day attack, an American drone made a missile attack on a compound in Yemen where several local al-Qaida leaders, including Awlaki, were believed to be staying. It seems Awlaki missed retribution that time, but I suspect he is a man with a very short life expectancy. Indeed, he seems to have been a target of another air attack in Yemen earlier this week.
But we need to constantly remind ourselves that Awlaki, bin Laden and al- Qaida are not superhuman evil geniuses. Far from it. Bin Laden's objective was to inspire and lead a spreading revolution that would recreate the old Middle Eastern caliphate, bringing Muslim people under the administration of a state governed by purist and puritan Shariah law. Instead, 12 years after bin Laden began his campaign with the truck bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and a decade after his followup attack on the USS Cole while it was anchored in Aden Port in Yemen, he and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding out somewhere along the Pakistan border with Afghanistan. Or they might be in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, or perhaps Somalia or even bin Laden's ancestral homeland of Yemen.
At any rate, they have only a few dozen hard core supporters left with them and the worldwide army of true believers is no more than a few thousand. Al- Qaida in Iraq, which once had the U.S. military tied up in knots, has ceased to exist. Bin Laden's relations with the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier are far from secure. He has achieved no sound political base as has been done by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and even Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, all the indications are that more and more of the world's 112 billion Muslims are increasingly disgusted by his strategy of murdering civilians of any race, creed or religion, as well as with his puritanical and brutal interpretations of Islam.
That said, al-Qaida is not yet defeated and it or its adherents – self- recruited from the Internet or otherwise -will doubtless be a danger for some years to come.
But I always think one is approaching a breaking point of some kind when history starts getting played as farce.
And with al-Qaida, we are now in the realms of Monty Python. For even among the most troubled and impressionable would-be jihadis there must be a very limited supply of young men willing to believe there will be 47 virgins waiting in Paradise for a willing martyr who goes into battle armed only with a pair of exploding underpants.
FROM: http://www.kelowna.com/2010/02/02/marketing-the-al-qaida-brand-the-evolution-of-franchised-terrorism-under-osama-bin-laden-column/
Canwest News Service
It's a bleak commentary on how this conflict with the al-Qaida terrorism network has been managed that over eight and approaching nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington there is considerable dissent among western intelligence analysts and military leaders about the importance of Osama bin Laden.
Some say killing or capturing bin Laden would be the trigger that leads to the swift collapse of the international terror network he created and the various insurgencies that have spun off from it. (MS: This is totally false.)
This view is suggested by a United States Senate report published in November that looked in detail at the failure to catch bin Laden and the top al- Qaida leaders when U.S. forces led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
"The failure to finish the job" – that is to neutralize bin Laden – "represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism," said the report.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, sees bin Laden as a potent symbol whose survival "emboldens al-Qaida. I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaida until he is captured or killed," he told a Senate committee last month.
An even firmer picture of bin Laden as the essential, central ingredient for al-Qaida's survival comes from Peter Bergen, an expert on terrorism who interviewed bin Laden in 1997. "Al-Qaida is bin Laden's idea, it is his baby and 9/11 was his operation and it would psychologically be a victory for the civilized world if he was killed or captured," Bergen told the Financial Times newspaper last month. (MS: Not correct. AQ is an idea that uses long-standing Muslim desires for a utopian Islamic state. If OBL goes, another 100 are already waiting to replace him.)
The U.S. attacks with missile-armed drone aircraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership are believed to be hiding, has eliminated a large number of the organization's leaders, Bergen said. "There is nobody who could replace him as head of this network," Bergen said.
I could continue quoting people who believe killing or capturing bin Laden would be the key to defeating this wave of radical Islamic terrorism. But it is far from being a universal view. There is a significant school of thought that argues that Islamic terrorism is no longer a monopoly of al-Qaida core leaders and bin Laden. Indeed, major terrorist attacks may not even be under their control and direction.
David Livingstone, a security expert at Chatham House, Britain's premier think-tank on international affairs, said recently he doesn't believe removing bin Laden from the equation will have much effect because al-Qaida has become a brand name. The al-Qaida product of Islamic terrorism is now so well established it will survive with or without bin Laden.
The most persistent and in many ways the most persuasive proponent of this view is Marc Sageman. Sageman is an interesting man whose qualifications make it clear he is well worth listening to. Sageman has a doctorate in political sociology and is a practising psychiatrist. He served in the U.S. Navy as a flight surgeon and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. In the late 1980s he was based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, liaising with the Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In 2004, Sageman produced an important book called Understanding Terrorism, which was based on detailed dissection of the lives of the approximately 400 al- Qaida members then in captivity. It is a book full of fascinating and significant information – for example, that about half the known al-Qaida terrorists attended only 20 mosques worldwide and that most of them were intelligent and privileged middle class young men, not brainwashed, ill- educated cannon fodder.
In his latest book published in 2008, Leaderless Jihad, Sageman argues that al-Qaida is not an organization that can be systematically destroyed, because it has evolved into a social network that has to be disrupted by undermining the relationships that sustain it. This is what he says:
"The present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaida masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal local groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing operations from the bottom up. These homegrown wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad."
Sageman argues that al-Qaida has ceased to exist as an organizational entity and that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, he says, the main terrorism threat today is from low-level groups that are self-recruiting and have adopted the al-Qaida brand, largely from the Internet.
This analysis, as you can imagine, is at some odds with the official view in Washington. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate presented by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell is an example. In the publicly released portions of his evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he said:
"[Al-Qaida] is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni [Muslim] communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities."
More recently in Senate evidence McConnell said that while al-Qaida "has lost many of its senior operational planners of the years, the group's adaptable decision-making process and bench of skilled operatives have enabled it to identify effective replacements."
This characterization of al-Qaida as a resourceful adversary that is highly disciplined and in full control of its network is dramatically different from the amorphous and fluid picture of al-Qaida presented by Sageman and others who view this terror campaign more as a social phenomenon than an evil conspiracy. But such a characterization has few appeals to politicians and administrations that much prefer to be able to draw the threats facing their citizens with clear and distinct lines. The enemy must have a face.
While I do not buy Sageman's arguments entirely, I think that what he has identified is an aspect of the insurgencies and terrorist campaign that is new to the world. The Internet as a source of information, a provider of instant communication and access among both associates and strangers, and a facilitator for the swift construction of global networks has undoubtedly sustained al- Qaida. And it is, of course, deeply ironic that an organization whose proclaimed aim is to gather the Middle East and, given a chance, the rest of the world under a regime of early medieval puritanical theocracy should be relying heavily on 21st century technological wizardry to do it.
Jihadi kit on Web
The full kit for becoming a jihadi is available on the Web. By some estimates there are tens of thousands of sites either aimed at, involving or somehow of benefit to people vulnerable to the call of militant Islam. At the most basic level is propaganda, which feeds and reinforces already well entrenched suspicions among very many Muslim people that the West in the broadest sense is out to destroy them. The pictures of American mistreatment of prisoners amounting to torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad must have been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida beyond bin Laden's dreams. If you want to get an idea of what's out there, influencing young Muslims every day, just go to Google Image and type in Abu Ghraib. I'm sure I don't need to warn you, many of the pictures were not printed in western media and are even more troubling than those that were.
The Abu Ghraib pictures are an extreme and lasting example of the kind of material that can and does inflame the passions of susceptible Muslims, especially in this context restless young men unsure of their own identity and purpose. But there's plenty more incitement and it's up there on the Internet on a daily basis. It may be pictures or video of the aftermath of attacks with missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft on houses or villages in Pakistan's tribal border region with Afghanistan. Or the pictures may be of villages in Afghanistan or Iraq, and now Somalia and Yemen after attacks by drones or regular American bomber aircraft. I'm sure the Americans try to be as meticulous as they can be in assessing intelligence information before striking a house where a militant is believed to be staying. But there is no doubt a lot of wives, children and other innocent civilians get killed in these attacks.
Then, of course, there are the pictures and videos from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Israel responds, often with a heavy hand, to attacks by the followers of Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This daily diet of pictures of the ruins and the dead reinforces the feeling among some young Muslims that they are powerless against what they see as the hatred of the West and instant death from the skies.
For many young Muslims, even the most angry, that is where the trail ends. Indeed, some try to turn their anger into a positive force to attack the problems within their own societies or to come to grips with the divisions between Islam and West. But some, a few, have the misfortune to be spotted by the lurking recruiters for al-Qaida.
Others are self-recruiting. A good example is the five young American Muslims from West Virginia now under arrest in Pakistan. From sites they found on the Internet they adopted radical Islamic views and decided they wanted to go to fight with the Taliban against their countrymen in Afghanistan. They had some sort of preliminary contact with people in Pakistan claiming to be radicals. But from what we know now, the real radicals were suspicious of them and Pakistani police arrested them soon after their arrival.
But any diligent search of the Web can reveal enough training information on how to be a jihadi, from religious justification of terrorism to making car bombs with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Most of those thousands of websites useful to the would-be jihadi are in Arabic, but I think of particular interest to us are the Canadian, American, British or other western young men of Muslim heritage who have tried, some successfully, to become terrorists.
Men lured to terrorism
Only this week, for example, we have had the sentencing of some members of the so-called Toronto 18 who planned in 2004 to make massive truck bombs and attack the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Toronto.
Their families came from Somalia, Egypt and Jamaica, but to any casual observer they were normal immigrant Canadian kids.
The young men who launched the July 2005 attack on the London Underground subway system were even more acclimatized. They were Britishborn.
In both cases the groups first got involved in radical Muslim online chat rooms, which are watched by fundamentalist Muslim imams for potential recruits. The process of luring these young men towards terrorism is not unlike the way pedophiles lure young girls or boys towards meetings.
In the case of both the Toronto 18 and the London subway bombers there was one main radical Muslim cleric who latched on to them and changed them from being the awkward, unsure and emotional youths, of which we've all had experience, into dedicated killers.
That cleric's name is Anwar al Awlaki and he's an American of Yemeni background. Awlaki was involved with two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the Toronto and London groups. There's evidence he radicalized Major Nidal Hasan, the American army psychiatrist who massacred 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last year, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, the young Nigerian who nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
Awlaki was born in New Mexico 38 years ago, but his family returned to Yemen with him when he was young. He came back to the United States in 1991 to attend Colorado State University, received his master's degree in education at San Diego and later enrolled in a PhD program at George Washington University. Awlaki has been an active Muslim cleric since his postgraduate years when he was an imam at San Diego's Rabat mosque. Then he was a Muslim chaplain at the Hijrah Islamic Centre in Virginia outside Washington. Somewhere along the way he became a radical and turned up on the FBI's radar following the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was interviewed then about his association with two of the hijackers and has been high on the FBI and CIA's lists of persons of interest ever since.
Doubtless fearing pursuers on his trail, in 2002 he moved to London and two years later he returned to Yemen, where he has been ever since, so far as is known.
He has spent some time in prison in Yemen for unspecified crimes and since then he has become more radical and more of a presence on the Internet both on his own Web page and as a blogger. In December, for example, he wrote a blog praising al Shabaab, the militant group linked to al-Qaida in neighbouring Somalia, for the rape and stoning to death of a young woman accused of theft. Al Shabaab, Awlaki said, should take no notice of malicious stories in the western press that the girl was only 13 years old. Well, I can tell you that those stories in the western press were true.
Awlaki has now found his calling as an online preacher of hatred and terrorism. You can find his sermons easily on You-Tube. His value to al-Qaida is that he is, of course, fluent in English, has an undeniable understanding of American and contemporary youth culture, and has an engaging sense of humour. His Facebook page has nearly 5,000 fans.
But like all good salesmen and con artists, Awlaki's most important talent is that he can take very complex ideological and religious thoughts and make them very simple. He has the ability to make impressionable young men believe that slaughtering as many people as possible is not only an affirmative political statement, but is a religious duty. If you look at his YouTube sermons you'll see he has the glib ability to construct verbal fantasy worlds and make his young acolytes believe them.
And once he has cast his spell over his targets it seems that he constantly reinforces the indoctrination. We know, for example, that he kept buttressing the resolve of the two 9/11 hijackers he knew right up to the moment they set out on their mission.
Killer praised as a hero
The same happened with Hasan at Fort Hood with whom Awlaki kept up an e-mail correspondence intended to sustain the major's resolve. Among those 21 e-mails are several instances of Hasan asking for religious validation for what he was about to do, and Awlaki replied with comforting interpretations of Islam.
Soon after the attack Awlaki praised Hasan as a hero. On his website he reacted angrily to condemnation of Hasan by U.S. Muslim groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Their rejection of Hasan's killings was, he said, treason against the Muslim community.
It was also, of course, a significant political blow at Awlaki, which soiled his reputation among American Muslims. Manipulating Abdulmutalab and sending him off as a plane bomber seems, by some perverted logic, to have been an attempt to re-establish Awlaki's reputation as the indispensable mentor for English-speaking would-be jihadis.
And by late December last year Awlaki had a personal reason for wanting to down an American airliner. Shortly before the attempted Christmas Day attack, an American drone made a missile attack on a compound in Yemen where several local al-Qaida leaders, including Awlaki, were believed to be staying. It seems Awlaki missed retribution that time, but I suspect he is a man with a very short life expectancy. Indeed, he seems to have been a target of another air attack in Yemen earlier this week.
But we need to constantly remind ourselves that Awlaki, bin Laden and al- Qaida are not superhuman evil geniuses. Far from it. Bin Laden's objective was to inspire and lead a spreading revolution that would recreate the old Middle Eastern caliphate, bringing Muslim people under the administration of a state governed by purist and puritan Shariah law. Instead, 12 years after bin Laden began his campaign with the truck bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and a decade after his followup attack on the USS Cole while it was anchored in Aden Port in Yemen, he and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding out somewhere along the Pakistan border with Afghanistan. Or they might be in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, or perhaps Somalia or even bin Laden's ancestral homeland of Yemen.
At any rate, they have only a few dozen hard core supporters left with them and the worldwide army of true believers is no more than a few thousand. Al- Qaida in Iraq, which once had the U.S. military tied up in knots, has ceased to exist. Bin Laden's relations with the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier are far from secure. He has achieved no sound political base as has been done by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and even Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, all the indications are that more and more of the world's 112 billion Muslims are increasingly disgusted by his strategy of murdering civilians of any race, creed or religion, as well as with his puritanical and brutal interpretations of Islam.
That said, al-Qaida is not yet defeated and it or its adherents – self- recruited from the Internet or otherwise -will doubtless be a danger for some years to come.
But I always think one is approaching a breaking point of some kind when history starts getting played as farce.
And with al-Qaida, we are now in the realms of Monty Python. For even among the most troubled and impressionable would-be jihadis there must be a very limited supply of young men willing to believe there will be 47 virgins waiting in Paradise for a willing martyr who goes into battle armed only with a pair of exploding underpants.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
FACING HOMEGROWN RADICALIZATION
FROM: http://www.thewashingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3113
By Myriam Benraad
September 3, 2009
Last month, Kamal Hassan, a Somali-American living in Minnesota, pled guilty to training and fighting with al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group in Somalia. In July, two other Somali-Americans in Minnesota pled guilty to similar charges, with the FBI continuing to investigate more than a dozen others who may have traveled from the United States to Somalia. The FBI also recently arrested seven individuals in North Carolina on terrorism-related charges, including one who had spent time in Afghan training camps. These and other recent events have raised new concerns in the United States about the threat of homegrown radicalization. As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder acknowledged in a July speech, the "whole notion of radicalization is something that did not loom as large a few months ago...as it does now." While the U.S. government has focused primarily on Europe as a source of potential terrorists, Washington should also look to the continent as a model in confronting homegrown radicalization.
A Troubling Phenomenon
During his first major speech in July, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan provided an overview of the current administration's approach to protecting American citizens from violent extremism and terrorism. Although Brennan emphasized President Barack Obama's new partnership with Muslim communities and the administration's commitment to defeating al-Qaeda's capacities overseas, little was said about homegrown Islamist radicalization. This fundamental issue has long been downplayed by U.S. federal authorities and counterterrorism experts, who believe that Muslims and Arabs are generally better integrated into U.S. society -- as opposed to their counterparts in European society -- and are thus less vulnerable to the al-Qaeda narrative.
Homegrown radicalization has now returned to the spotlight after the watershed Somali cases. Court hearings have revealed that Islamist leaders approached most of the Minneapolis recruits and urged them to attend clandestine meetings where they were persuaded to travel to Somalia and become part of the local armed insurgency. Most troublingly, however, is that a number of the Somali-Americans who joined al-Shabab suffer from identity and integration issues similar to those of radicalized youth in Europe. Until now, the United States had seemingly been immune from this particular phenomenon.
Building on Europe's Lessons
Although American policymakers have long worried that Islamists radicalized in Europe would attack the United States, Washington can learn valuable lessons from Europe in addressing the challenge of homegrown radicalization. Consider, for example, some of the measures undertaken in France. Although the internal dynamics nurturing radicalization in France and the United States differ significantly, comparable trends exist. The impact of socioeconomic deprivation, political alienation, and identity issues as vehicles of radical narratives -- a factor that looms large in the Somali-American cases -- appears to be a common pattern. The malaise experienced by nonintegrated second- and third-generation immigrants, as well as the lack of educational and professional prospects for young people, has nurtured homegrown radicalization in France. While this phenomenon is far less widespread in the United States, the recent Somali cases indicate that it is occurring, at least to some extent.
France's law enforcement and intelligence efforts have been fairly far reaching and certainly go beyond what might be politically acceptable in the United States. French counterterrorism magistrates have frequently used their preventive detention powers to target individuals suspected of inciting violence, incarcerating some and deporting others. In 2004, for example, a wave of French prosecutions targeted radical imams and included the deportation of Chelali Benchellali, the Salafist imam of Venissieux's now famous mosque -- an act that would certainly have been more controversial in the United States. (MS: Why would it be controversial, I don't understand.)
France has also prosecuted a number of its citizens after they returned home from jihadist activities overseas -- a move the United States is now taking in the Somali cases as well. In May 2008, for instance, France condemned and jailed members of a Parisian network of jihadists recruited by young Salafi imam Farid Benyettou to fight in Iraq. Court hearings showed how Benyettou, a French citizen of Algerian background, managed to radicalize a group of men in 2003 through private readings of online Islamist propaganda and vehement anti-American rhetoric.
Following the massive riots of 2005 -- which witnessed the uprising of deprived multiethnic youth in French suburbs -- France has been forced to acknowledge the necessity of coupling its often harsh police methods with greater social dialogue and political engagement. After his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy made ethnoreligious discrimination one of his top priorities. As such, he appointed Rachida Dati as the minister of justice, the first individual of North African/Muslim origin to access a top cabinet position.
In addition, France has undertaken efforts to better understand the ideological motivations of Islamists. Monitoring and counterradicalization programs have been implemented in the French prison system, historically a crucible for radical ideology and recruitment. Interestingly, official sources indicate that many American homegrown Islamists have also been radicalized while incarcerated, including the members of the prison-formed Jamiyat al-Islam al-Sahih cell in California that was convicted in 2007 for its plans to attack not only synagogues but also the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. Indeed, prisons provide an ideal place for radicalizing the young and disenchanted in search of a sense of belonging and importance. Within the prison setting, Islam has the added appeal of addressing feelings of inequality and injustice. Fresh converts are protected by fellow inmates and accepted into a new world where the slate is wiped clean. Radicalization often occurs very quickly in this setting, and it is only recently that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has pushed for an increased and systematic monitoring of radical material in U.S. prisons. To their credit, however, U.S. authorities have lately engaged in enhanced cooperation with France regarding prison issues, such as the training of Muslim chaplains.
Conclusion
Information regarding Islamist radicalization in America currently remains limited, and recent developments should therefore serve as a clear warning. Already, the Obama administration is favoring a new approach that shifts from exclusively military options to increased law enforcement and intelligence efforts. Much remains to be done, however, and while U.S. policies are still mainly focused on defeating al-Qaeda's narrative and capacities overseas, dealing with radicals at home might prove all the more critical. Since al-Qaeda is evolving into a "franchise" operation, homegrown recruits could become the most serious threat to the United States. The phenomenon has become all the more worrying in light of many recent attempts by U.S. extremists to link up with foreign Islamist movements and inscribe their struggle at a global level.
In addressing homegrown radicalization, the French experience could provide the Obama administration with policy inspiration. France, although not a parallel model -- especially since it is still addressing the pervasive discontent of poorly integrated Muslim populations -- has witnessed no terrorist attack since the 1990s. Its success in handling the grassroots Islamist phenomenon has resulted from effective interagency coordination and the establishment of specific legal provisions and structures charged with the antiterrorist struggle. Figuring out ways to replicate this in the United States, including the possibility of establishing separate counterterrorism courts, would be an important step forward.
Myriam Benraad is the Keston Family scholar for The Washington Institute's Project Fikra, focusing on radicalization and counterradicalization in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States.
By Myriam Benraad
September 3, 2009
Last month, Kamal Hassan, a Somali-American living in Minnesota, pled guilty to training and fighting with al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group in Somalia. In July, two other Somali-Americans in Minnesota pled guilty to similar charges, with the FBI continuing to investigate more than a dozen others who may have traveled from the United States to Somalia. The FBI also recently arrested seven individuals in North Carolina on terrorism-related charges, including one who had spent time in Afghan training camps. These and other recent events have raised new concerns in the United States about the threat of homegrown radicalization. As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder acknowledged in a July speech, the "whole notion of radicalization is something that did not loom as large a few months ago...as it does now." While the U.S. government has focused primarily on Europe as a source of potential terrorists, Washington should also look to the continent as a model in confronting homegrown radicalization.
A Troubling Phenomenon
During his first major speech in July, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan provided an overview of the current administration's approach to protecting American citizens from violent extremism and terrorism. Although Brennan emphasized President Barack Obama's new partnership with Muslim communities and the administration's commitment to defeating al-Qaeda's capacities overseas, little was said about homegrown Islamist radicalization. This fundamental issue has long been downplayed by U.S. federal authorities and counterterrorism experts, who believe that Muslims and Arabs are generally better integrated into U.S. society -- as opposed to their counterparts in European society -- and are thus less vulnerable to the al-Qaeda narrative.
Homegrown radicalization has now returned to the spotlight after the watershed Somali cases. Court hearings have revealed that Islamist leaders approached most of the Minneapolis recruits and urged them to attend clandestine meetings where they were persuaded to travel to Somalia and become part of the local armed insurgency. Most troublingly, however, is that a number of the Somali-Americans who joined al-Shabab suffer from identity and integration issues similar to those of radicalized youth in Europe. Until now, the United States had seemingly been immune from this particular phenomenon.
Building on Europe's Lessons
Although American policymakers have long worried that Islamists radicalized in Europe would attack the United States, Washington can learn valuable lessons from Europe in addressing the challenge of homegrown radicalization. Consider, for example, some of the measures undertaken in France. Although the internal dynamics nurturing radicalization in France and the United States differ significantly, comparable trends exist. The impact of socioeconomic deprivation, political alienation, and identity issues as vehicles of radical narratives -- a factor that looms large in the Somali-American cases -- appears to be a common pattern. The malaise experienced by nonintegrated second- and third-generation immigrants, as well as the lack of educational and professional prospects for young people, has nurtured homegrown radicalization in France. While this phenomenon is far less widespread in the United States, the recent Somali cases indicate that it is occurring, at least to some extent.
France's law enforcement and intelligence efforts have been fairly far reaching and certainly go beyond what might be politically acceptable in the United States. French counterterrorism magistrates have frequently used their preventive detention powers to target individuals suspected of inciting violence, incarcerating some and deporting others. In 2004, for example, a wave of French prosecutions targeted radical imams and included the deportation of Chelali Benchellali, the Salafist imam of Venissieux's now famous mosque -- an act that would certainly have been more controversial in the United States. (MS: Why would it be controversial, I don't understand.)
France has also prosecuted a number of its citizens after they returned home from jihadist activities overseas -- a move the United States is now taking in the Somali cases as well. In May 2008, for instance, France condemned and jailed members of a Parisian network of jihadists recruited by young Salafi imam Farid Benyettou to fight in Iraq. Court hearings showed how Benyettou, a French citizen of Algerian background, managed to radicalize a group of men in 2003 through private readings of online Islamist propaganda and vehement anti-American rhetoric.
Following the massive riots of 2005 -- which witnessed the uprising of deprived multiethnic youth in French suburbs -- France has been forced to acknowledge the necessity of coupling its often harsh police methods with greater social dialogue and political engagement. After his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy made ethnoreligious discrimination one of his top priorities. As such, he appointed Rachida Dati as the minister of justice, the first individual of North African/Muslim origin to access a top cabinet position.
In addition, France has undertaken efforts to better understand the ideological motivations of Islamists. Monitoring and counterradicalization programs have been implemented in the French prison system, historically a crucible for radical ideology and recruitment. Interestingly, official sources indicate that many American homegrown Islamists have also been radicalized while incarcerated, including the members of the prison-formed Jamiyat al-Islam al-Sahih cell in California that was convicted in 2007 for its plans to attack not only synagogues but also the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. Indeed, prisons provide an ideal place for radicalizing the young and disenchanted in search of a sense of belonging and importance. Within the prison setting, Islam has the added appeal of addressing feelings of inequality and injustice. Fresh converts are protected by fellow inmates and accepted into a new world where the slate is wiped clean. Radicalization often occurs very quickly in this setting, and it is only recently that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has pushed for an increased and systematic monitoring of radical material in U.S. prisons. To their credit, however, U.S. authorities have lately engaged in enhanced cooperation with France regarding prison issues, such as the training of Muslim chaplains.
Conclusion
Information regarding Islamist radicalization in America currently remains limited, and recent developments should therefore serve as a clear warning. Already, the Obama administration is favoring a new approach that shifts from exclusively military options to increased law enforcement and intelligence efforts. Much remains to be done, however, and while U.S. policies are still mainly focused on defeating al-Qaeda's narrative and capacities overseas, dealing with radicals at home might prove all the more critical. Since al-Qaeda is evolving into a "franchise" operation, homegrown recruits could become the most serious threat to the United States. The phenomenon has become all the more worrying in light of many recent attempts by U.S. extremists to link up with foreign Islamist movements and inscribe their struggle at a global level.
In addressing homegrown radicalization, the French experience could provide the Obama administration with policy inspiration. France, although not a parallel model -- especially since it is still addressing the pervasive discontent of poorly integrated Muslim populations -- has witnessed no terrorist attack since the 1990s. Its success in handling the grassroots Islamist phenomenon has resulted from effective interagency coordination and the establishment of specific legal provisions and structures charged with the antiterrorist struggle. Figuring out ways to replicate this in the United States, including the possibility of establishing separate counterterrorism courts, would be an important step forward.
Myriam Benraad is the Keston Family scholar for The Washington Institute's Project Fikra, focusing on radicalization and counterradicalization in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States.
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