by David Clarke
If you are puzzled about the differences of responsibility among the CIA, the FBI, DHS, and local police, you aren’t alone. Nobody else can make sense of this dysfunctional bureaucracy. The 9/11 Commission report recommended the FBI take on the added responsibility of domestic terrorism. While the FBI has had its successes, it’s not ideal to put a law enforcement entity as the lead agency responsible for acts of war within our borders. The FBI’s culture and design are to gather evidence for arrest and prosecution, not ongoing intelligence production. The FBI has a cultural tendency to err on the side of doing everything by the book, which is advantageous in many respects. For example, their respect for compliance with the law safeguards our privacy and civil liberties. But that tendency, coupled with the lack of a formal mechanism to share information among agencies, has caused critical problems. Stovepiping is the term used to describe the phenomenon by which information travels up and down within an organization but shares little horizontally among organizations. It’s hard to break down stovepipes when there are so many stoves that are legally and politically entitled to have cast iron pipes of their own. Sad to say, this frustrates the objective of the 9/11 Commission to replace a “need to know” culture with a “need to share” culture.
The sheer number of attacks on American soil exposes a central problem with our domestic counterterrorism efforts: the wrong agency is handling our domestic intelligence. A true intelligence mind-set warns decision makers about the ones threatening us, their capabilities, and whether they are planning an attack. The arrest of the suspect is secondary. This has nothing to do with the fine work of FBI agents, but this organization is designed around building cases to prosecute rather than producing pure intelligence to detect and prevent large-scale terror planning.
In organizing its counterterrorism efforts domestically through the FBI, the US government continues to use a law-enforcement model organized around not taking action until evidence exists to make an arrest for prosecution. That is inefficient and ineffective. It has proven dangerous in its inability to stop terrorism on our home soil. We are at war. Homegrown radicalization has the enemy inside our borders. Islamist-radicalized Americans are not criminals. They are enemy combatants. Our criminal justice system should not prosecute them. Military tribunals should process them.
Since the September 11 attacks, we’ve had more than our share of these attacks.
Timeline of Attacks
YEAR: 2002
LOCATION: Los Angeles Airport
KILLED: 2
WOUNDED: 4
TERRORIST: Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian national
WHAT HAPPENED: The Fourth of July was Hesham Mohamed Hadayet’s birthday. On that day, he walked into the Los Angeles International Airport and found the El Al ticket counter. There, Hadayet killed two Israelis and wounded four others before the Israeli airline’s security guard managed to shoot and kill him. He didn’t seem to be formally connected to a specific terrorist group, but he had expressed opposition to America’s policy in the Middle East, declared anti-Jewish sentiment, and hoped his actions would influence our government to become more pro-Palestinian.4
YEAR: 2006
LOCATION: Seattle, Washington
KILLED: 1
WOUNDED: 5
TERRORIST: Naveed Haq, a Pakistani-American
WHAT HAPPENED: Haq walked into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, a group that raises money for social welfare initiatives, supports Israel, and runs educational programs for the local community. Witnesses say he was complaining about American policies toward Israel and Jews as he opened fire on the victims. He surrendered only after talking with a 911 operator who explained to him that she could not connect him with CNN.5
YEAR: 2009
LOCATION: Little Rock, Arkansas
KILLED: 1
WOUNDED: 1
TERRORIST: Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Bledsoe), a US citizen
WHAT HAPPENED: Bledsoe lived in Memphis when he converted to Islam at a Tennessee mosque. After changing his name and traveling in the Middle East, he became radicalized. On June 1, 2009, Muhammad drove his black Ford Explorer Sport Trac by a military recruitment office and opened fire with a rifle, hoping to kill as many military personnel as possible. (He managed to kill one soldier and wound another.) He said he was “mad at the U.S. military because of what they had done to Muslims in the past.”6
YEAR: 2009
LOCATION: Fort Hood, Texas
KILLED: 13
WOUNDED: 32
TERRORIST: Maj. Nidal Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist
WHAT HAPPENED: On November 5, 2009, Hasan shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” in a medical facility at the Fort Hood military base as he opened fire with a high-powered, high-capacity handgun. Military police shot him and paralyzed him from the waist down, but not before he fired more than two hundred rounds.7
YEAR: 2013
LOCATION: Boston Marathon
KILLED: 3
WOUNDED: 2648
TERRORISTS: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Chechen brothers
WHAT HAPPENED: On April 15, 2013, two pressure cooker bombs detonated twelve seconds apart near the Boylston Street finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three days later, investigators identified the two suspects and released their photos to the public. The two shot and killed police officer Sean Collier on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hijacked a car, and led the police on a chase. Eventually, police shot and killed Tamerlan and later arrested Dzhokhar.
YEAR: 2014
LOCATION: Vaughan Foods in Oklahoma
KILLED: 1
WOUNDED: 1
TERRORIST: Alton Nolen
WHAT HAPPENED: On September 25, 2014, an employee at Vaughan Foods named Alton Nolen was suspended from his job. He went back into the plant and beheaded a fifty-four-year-old woman with a knife and injured another woman. (According to police, Nolen admitted this.) His Facebook page’s jihadist images and his desire to convert coworkers to Islam spurred an FBI investigation. (Nolen had recently converted to Islam.)9 Greg Mashburn, the district attorney for Cleveland County, said Nolen used “some Arabic terms during the attack.”
Mashburn addressed the issue of what the state could do in this case: “There is not a terrorism statute in the state of Oklahoma.” Then he pointed out that the federal authorities would have to be the ones to deal with it.”
YEAR: 2014
LOCATION: Washington and New Jersey
KILLED: 4
WOUNDED: 0
TERRORIST: Ali Muhammad Brown
WHAT HAPPENED: The Seattle man confessed to the murder of three men in Washington state and the murder of a college student in New Jersey to seek revenge for America’s Middle East policy.
“My mission is my mission between me and my lord.That’s it,” Brown said. “My mission is vengeance, for the lives, millions of lives are lost every day.”
YEAR: 2015
LOCATION: Chattanooga, Tennessee
KILLED: 5
WOUNDED: 2
TERRORIST: Mohammad Abdulazeez
WHAT HAPPENED: On July 16, 2015, Abdulazeez did a drive-by shooting at a recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Then he drove to a US Navy Reserve center and continued the mayhem. Four marines died right there, while a sailor, a marine recruiter, and a police officer were wounded and taken to the hospital. The sailor died two days later.
Following an FBI investigation, Director James B. Comey said Abdulazeez committed these atrocious killings because he was “motivated by foreign terrorist organization propaganda.”
YEAR: 2015
LOCATION: Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California
KILLED: 14
WOUNDED: 21
TERRORISTS: Syed Rizwan Farook (American citizen of Pakistani descent), his wife Tashfeen Malik (who entered on a K-1 visa), and Enrique Marquez Jr. (Farook’s former neighbor, who converted to Islam).
WHAT HAPPENED: On December 2, 201
5, American-born Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, went on a shooting spree at the county health department Christmas party being held in a rented banquet room for about eighty employees. Farook worked at the department, and his wife accompanied him to the event. She had posted a pledge of allegiance to ISIS on Facebook the day of the attack. After the attack, they left in a rented SUV. Four hours later, police killed them in a shootout. FBI Director James B. Comey said that their investigation revealed that the perpetrators were “homegrown violent extremists” inspired by foreign terrorist groups.
YEAR: 2016
LOCATION: Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida
KILLED: 49
WOUNDED: 53
TERRORIST: Omar Mateen, a New York-born American citizen
WHAT HAPPENED: It was almost last call at the gay nightclub called Pulse when a gunman opened fire on the crowd. The shooting lasted as long as the duration of a song. But by the time it was over, forty-nine people were dead, and fifty-three were wounded in the worst mass shooting in American history. FBI agent Ronald Hopper said, “We do have suggestions that that individual may have leanings towards that, that particular ideology.” The “particular ideology” was jihadism. Mateen called 911 while holding the hostages and pledged allegiance to ISIS, so that should be a pretty good clue as to his motivation.
YEAR: 2016
LOCATION: Chelsea neighborhood in New York and Seaside Park, New Jersey
KILLED: 0
WOUNDED: 29
TERRORIST: Ahmad Khan Rahami, a naturalized citizen born in Afghanistan
WHAT HAPPENED: Two bombs, planted in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, were made with pressure cookers, flip phones, and Christmas lights. One went off, injuring twenty-nine, but the other didn’t detonate. Meanwhile, in Seaside, New Jersey, a bomb went off in a garbage can near a Marine Corps charity run. It was set to go off during the race, but logistical problems delayed the start of the race. No one was injured, but had the bomb gone off just a few minutes later, marines would’ve been running by the garbage can. Investigators found three rudimentary pipe bomb–type devices, but only one detonated. Rahami faces charges in both New York and New Jersey in connection with these incidents.
Steps for Protecting Ourselves
All the incidents mentioned above are intelligence failures that should be evaluated further to make sure they don’t happen again. Though I don’t want to offer a comprehensive domestic terror plan in this book, we can make seven behavior changes that will go a long way in protecting us.
1. Stop ignoring the vivid flashing signs of trouble. The FBI admitted that Omar Mateen was on the radar as a person of interest well before the Pulse nightclub shootings. In 2013, the agency questioned him after his coworkers reported Mateen made comments that seemed too sympathetic to terrorists. In 2014, agents learned he’d been communicating with an American who later died in a Syrian suicide bombing. In both cases, the agency shut down the investigations because no laws were broken.
The Boston attack by the Tsarnaev brothers occurred because national security agencies failed to connect the dots. There were several signs: Russian intelligence agencies notified their American counterparts that one of the brothers had visited Chechnya, a hotbed of terror training camps; the brothers were visiting jihadist websites and spewing jihadist rhetoric; and they used a credit card to purchase bomb-making materials. These red flags occurred long before the bombing. To top it off, federal agencies responsible for preventing terror attacks didn’t share any of this information with local police, believing this information didn’t rise to the level of suspicion. They should have shared it with the Boston Police Department and let them determine its credibility and likelihood. However, the Tsarnaev brothers were able to openly plan and execute their terror attack in Boston with no fear of being watched. This included traveling to a hotbed of terror training camps in Chechnya, a country from which they fled for their lives and sought and were granted asylum here in America.
We also should’ve seen the looming threat of Nidal Hasan before he killed thirteen at Fort Hood. Did you know he once was asked to give a lecture about a medical issue but proceeded to present to the other doctors an extremist interpretation of the Koran? In his speech, he said all non-Muslims were “non-believers” and so should be set on fire and sent to hell. He also said they should be decapitated and have boiling oil poured down their throats. His fellow doctors reported that Hasan attempted to convert them, and he said he was a “Muslim first and American second.”10 Others reported that he viewed his postgraduate classes at the Uniformed Service University in Bethesda, Maryland, as opportunities to convert people to Islam.
Others were said to be too afraid to offend Hasan by speaking out, but at least one of his fellow doctors reported Hasan for his “anti-American rants.” Dr. Val Finnell said, “The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do. He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, ordered to cease and desist, and told to shape up or ship out. I really questioned his loyalty.”
There were literally signs that no one heeded, including a note on his business card that described him as “SOA” or “slave,” or another interpretation was “soldier of Allah.”
Military activist Hasan had been communicating with bomb maker Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric known for his incendiary anti-American ideology and his support of al-Qaeda. Intelligence agencies had intercepted their messages but determined there was nothing to worry about. No one batted an eye when Hasan described the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda in Iraq as “a war on Islam.”11 Or even when he often said he should quit the military since the Koran forbids alliances with Jews or Christians. He believed if he were killed while fighting against Muslims, he would go to hell.
As political activist Selena Coppa, said, “This man was a psychiatrist and was working with other psychiatrists every day and they failed to notice how deeply disturbed someone right in their midst was.” I believe a more accurate statement would be that people saw the warning signs but were too afraid to commit a sin against political correctness.
Perhaps the biggest flashing indication that the system is broken is the Phoenix memo. On July 10, 2001, a Phoenix FBI agent wrote a memo about Middle Eastern men who were attending flight school. The memo warned of a possible “effort by Usama bin Laden to send students to the U.S. to attend civil aviation universities and colleges.” The agent was concerned because men in an Arizona flight school were learning only how to land the plane, not to take off. That seemed suspicious, but even though the memo was circulated to about a dozen FBI agents, it was promptly ignored. FBI Director Robert Mueller saw it after September 11 after these men had become some of the hijackers on that fateful day that changed our nation forever.
We cannot refuse to see the signs right in front of our eyes, and we need a way to easily share information among law-enforcement groups to prevent further disasters.
2. No longer accept the FBI’s lame excuse. When that rudimentary bomb went off in Chelsea, local politicians rushed to calm fears by parsing over whether it was an act of international terror or a lone-wolf attack. As if that matters. In short order the FBI announced that an arrest had been made, which signaled to someone like me in law enforcement that we would learn the suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami was previously known to the FBI.
Sure enough. He was.
We’re told that no probable cause existed to arrest Rahami before he attacked. We have seen this response again and again. There comes a point when we have to ask for accountability from those tasked with this job. Right now, the FBI is the lead domestic security agency. We learned, as in nearly every other attack, the agency looked but found no probable cause to arrest and turned away.
Continuing to ask the FBI to handle domestic security is wrong-headed and dangerous because the FBI is culturally structured to investigate law violations, not produce intelligence. The FBI reports directly to the Department of Justice (DOJ)—a highly politicized e
ntity—and must establish the high standard of probable cause as part of the investigative approach to domestic security. If there’s no viable case early on, as DOJ officials instruct, the scrutiny of a potential terrorist wastes resources. Dangerous men and women fall off watch lists, and more Americans live in fear, waiting for the next attack.
In the wake of attacks on American soil, from Orlando to San Bernardino to Minnesota and New York City, it is clear the FBI’s law enforcement approach is unable to disrupt enough fatal and dangerous attacks against our domestic targets before they happen.
We have to demand that the FBI stop lying to us. They go to the members of Congress, who don’t know what questions to ask and just blow smoke. It would be refreshing if someone looked at FBI Director James Comey and said, “You guys might be working hard, but you’re ineffective. The system isn’t working and you aren’t good at it.” That’s what I would say if given the chance.
After so many of the terror attacks just described, the FBI said that the terrorists were known to the agency. Well, if they were known to the FBI, the terrorists should’ve been stopped.
No one ever loses a job over these gross errors. I don’t mean some agent—you can’t drop it down to the lower levels of government. Who was alerted about the Phoenix memo in the FBI? We don’t know their names. But I can guarantee that if something happens within the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, people say, “Sheriff Clarke let this happen” or “Sheriff Clarke did this.” That’s because I am accountable. And the FBI should be held accountable to the American public instead of operating in the dark shadows of anonymity.