Another part of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division is the Analytic Unit, headed until recently by Mitchell Silber, who coauthored the NYPD’s radicalization study. It consists of a team of two dozen civilian analysts who are responsible for the cultural analysis of Muslim communities in the US and abroad.35 The NYPD Intelligence Division also has a program for international efforts, the International Liaison Program, with offices in eleven foreign capitals. The NYPD’s 2010 budget for counterterrorism and intelligence was over $100 million, with a thousand officers reportedly employed.36
Central to the NYPD’s counterradicalization strategy has been the use of informants. In 2012, a Muslim-American student decided to end his relationship with the department and speak publicly. He told the Associated Press that he had been instructed to take photographs inside mosques, collect the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, and to “bait” Muslims into making inflammatory statements. Shamiur Rahman, aged nineteen, said he had followed a police strategy called “create and capture,” which involved initiating conversations about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response and sending it to the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit. He had earned as much as one thousand dollars a month for his work. He had begun working for the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests; an NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in a Queens jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around. Among his assignments was spying on the Muslim Student Association at John Jay College in Manhattan, where he was asked to note down “radical rhetoric.” Rahman said he never witnessed any criminal activity or saw anybody do anything wrong. He eventually felt his work for the NYPD was “detrimental to the constitution.”37 According to the Associated Press investigation, by 2006 the police had identified thirty-one Muslim student associations and labeled seven of them “of concern,” including branches at Brooklyn College, Baruch College, City College, Hunter College, La Guardia Community College, and Queens College.38 Many of the colleges had informants or undercover agents operating among the student population. In another case, the NYPD sent an undercover officer to student rallies protesting against Israel’s Operation Cast Lead attack on Gaza in 2009. The officer pretended to be a fervent sympathizer with the Palestinian cause and sought to ingratiate himself with activists. He constantly used violent and provocative rhetoric, in an attempt to incriminate those around him, but ended up producing no tangible cases. Then the agent came across Algerian-born Ahmed Ferhani, a twenty-seven-year-old with a history of mental health problems: he had been involuntarily committed to psychiatric wards thirty times during the previous ten years. Over a six-month period Ferhani was pressured by the undercover agent to buy weapons. Eventually he agreed and was prosecuted for a supposed plot to blow up Manhattan’s largest synagogue.39 Ferhani was sentenced to ten years in prison and faces deportation to Algeria upon his release. His conviction was the first under a New York State antiterrorism law that was passed in response to 9/11.40
Once these tactics have become commonplace in relation to Muslims, they can easily be extended to others. The NYPD monitors nonviolent political groups, such as African-American community groups protesting against police racism and pro-Palestinian groups.41 The New York Review of Books has reported strong evidence that the Intelligence Division infiltrated, spied on, and aggressively harassed organizers of Occupy Wall Street. In doing so, the NYPD is renewing its long history of spying on nonviolent political activists. During the cold war, its Red Squads targeted communists, trade unionists, civil rights organizations, and black radicals. By 1970 it had collected dossiers on over 1.2 million New Yorkers, which it shared with private investigators, academic officials, and prospective employers.42 Activists filed a class-action lawsuit the following year, which became known as Handschu v. Special Services Division, challenging the NYPD’s harassment of political groups. The Handschu guidelines, agreed to in a settlement fourteen years later, required the NYPD to restrict its investigations of political activity to cases in which there was specific information that criminal conduct was afoot.
A year after 9/11, the new head of NYPD Intelligence, David Cohen, told a federal court:
The counterproductive restrictions imposed on the NYPD by the Handschu Guidelines in this changed world hamper our efforts every day, [making it] virtually impossible to detect plans for attack [and placing] this City, our nation and its people at heightened and unjustifiable risk.43
The guidelines were rewritten, watering down the requirement that investigations be linked to specific criminal activity. The tactics of the old Red Squads were then revived, this time directed primarily at New York’s Muslim populations. Moreover, there was no body with significant oversight powers to check whether the NYPD’s counterterrorism and intelligence activities were violating civil rights (although New York City Council voted in August 2013 to appoint an inspector general as a potential remedy). An e-mail from a senior FBI official to the private intelligence firm Stratfor that was released by WikiLeaks in 2012 reveals an awareness that the NYPD’s counterterrorism activities are unlawful and continue earlier histories of political policing:
I keep telling you, you and I are going to laugh and raise a beer one day, when everything Intel [NYPD’s Intelligence Division] has been involved in during the last 10 years comes out—it always eventually comes out. They are going to make [former FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover, COINTEL, Red Squads, etc look like rank amatures [sic] compared to some of the damn right felonious activity, and violations of US citizen’s rights they have been engaged in.44
Ironically, the FBI, which follows a model of radicalization similar to that outlined in the NYPD’s report, uses the same “felonious” activities itself.45
The Primacy of Politics
Radicalization models, whether based solely on theology or including a social psychological component, have encouraged national security establishments to believe they can preempt future terrorist attacks through intensive surveillance of the spiritual and mental lives of Muslims. As noted earlier, radical religious ideology has been defined as a kind of virus infecting those with whom it comes into contact, either by itself or in combination with psychological processes. But we have seen that the radicalization literature fails to offer a convincing demonstration of any causal relationship between theology and violence, and there is no evidence of any significant statistical correlation between the supposed indicators of radicalization and terrorist violence. Moreover, the concept of radicalization tends to confuse a propensity for violence with an interest in radical ideas, leading the question of what causes violence to be insufficiently isolated from the question of how belief systems and ideologies come to be adopted.
In a paper that is less widely read than his better known books on Islam, the French sociologist Olivier Roy, a widely respected authority on European Muslims, argues that it makes more sense to separate theology from violence: “The process of violent radicalisation has little to do with religious practice, while radical theology, as salafism, does not necessarily lead to violence.”46 The “leap into terrorism” is not religiously inspired but better seen as sharing “many factors with other forms of dissent, either political (the ultra-left), or behavioural: the fascination for sudden suicidal violence as illustrated by the paradigm of random shootings in schools (the ‘Columbine syndrome’).”47 While a Salafi vocabulary is used by certain groups to articulate their narratives, this by itself is not evidence that religious ideology is causing violence, merely that, within this milieu, theological references provide a veneer of legitimacy. Religious ideology seems to play at most an enabling role in cohering a group rather than being the underlying driver of terrorism.
In spite of its analytical problems, the radicalization concept continues to be popular among policy makers in Europe and the US. And the alternative possibilities of conceiving of terrorism, particularly of viewing it as a mode of political action, are neglected. While policing agencies search for scholarship that can give them a magical formula
to predict who will be a future terrorist, the microlevel question of what causes one person rather than another in the same political context to engage in violence is probably beyond analysis and best seen as unpredictable.48 Sizable resources have been allocated to finding a general formula of radicalization, yet no plausible one has been offered. At best, the path to becoming a terrorist can be reconstructed on an individual basis after the event. For law enforcement agencies, the best approach is therefore to investigate the active incitement, financing, or preparation of terrorist violence rather than wider belief systems which are wrongly assumed to be its precursors. On the other hand, the mesolevel question of what conditions are likely to increase or decrease its legitimacy for a particular political actor (either a social movement or a state) is amenable to productive analysis. So too is the macrolevel question of how particular social movements and states are constituted to be in conflict with each other, and how the interaction between these different political actors produces a context in which violence becomes seen as a legitimate tactic.49 An objective study would examine how state and nonstate actors mutually constitute themselves as combatants in a global conflict between the West and radical Islam and address under what conditions each chooses to adopt tactics of violence, paying close attention to the relationships between their legitimizing frameworks.
Such an approach has the advantage of being consistent with what is known about the biographies, actions, and self-descriptions of terrorists themselves and those who publicly support terrorist violence. Consider, for example, Anwar al-Awlaki. From 2009 until his extrajudicial killing in a US drone strike in September 2011, he was regarded by the US and UK governments as constituting one of the foremost terrorist threats to their countries, and accused of radicalizing American and British Muslims via his use of YouTube, Facebook, and e-mail correspondence. Al-Awlaki was a US citizen who was born in New Mexico, attended school in Yemen, and then returned to the US in 1991, where he lived for twelve years before spending two years in the UK and then returning to Yemen. According to security officials, his familiarity with both Western and Arab cultures made him particularly influential among Western Muslims. Beginning in 2008, he was seen as a figure who could, while based in southern Yemen, drive Western Muslims on a path toward terrorism, using his Internet communications to provide the theological and psychological underpinnings thought necessary for radicalization—a new bin Laden, all the more dangerous for his ability to appeal to disaffected Western Muslims. During this time, FBI agents closely monitored his Internet traffic, including an average of seventy e-mails a day.50 The Obama administration seems to have placed al-Awlaki on its extrajudicial kill list in January 2010.51 When al-Awlaki’s father challenged the US government’s targeted killings policy in the courts in September 2010, government officials stopped describing al-Awlaki as a propagandist and began referring to him as an active terrorist. As evidence for this, the administration cited an interrogation with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, following his failed attempt to blow up a plane traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. During the questioning, Abdulmutallab was said to have revealed al-Awlaki’s involvement in the plot at an operational level. This claim was never tested in court but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said al-Awlaki was actively involved in planning attacks.52 And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said al-Awlaki had joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was playing a “key role in setting the strategic direction” of the group. In Britain, al-Awlaki was accused of operational involvement in a plot to exploit weaknesses in airport security via e-mail correspondence with Rajib Karim, an employee of British Airways.53 Both Nidal Hasan, who carried out the Fort Hood attack in Texas in November 2009, and Faisal Shahzad, who attempted a car bombing in New York’s Times Square in May 2010, were among the thousands of people to have reached out to al-Awlaki by e-mail, but there was no evidence that he directly instructed either of them to engage in violent acts. What is beyond doubt is that by this time al-Awlaki was publishing online material that advocated violence against the West. He praised Nidal Hasan as a “hero” for the attack at Fort Hood that left thirteen people dead, and his document “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad,” published in January 2009, suggested various ways of aiding the “mujahideen,” such as financial support, advocacy, and training. The text was vague about who the mujahideen are and whom they are fighting, but it was clear that their struggle is global in scope and directed against “the West” as a whole, seen as a cultural system pitted against Islam. He concluded that anyone who thinks clearly can easily work out which groups are truly fighting for Islam today.54
A decade earlier, al-Awlaki’s ideology had been quite different. Beginning in 2000, he had begun to record a series of lectures on the lives of Muhammad, other prophets, and their companions. These English-language recordings proved immensely popular and brought him a substantial following. Al-Awlaki was confident, eloquent, and witty, able to relate classical Islamic stories to life in the West today. Though he lacked credentials as a religious scholar, he was regarded as a charismatic popularizer with a talent for engaging commentary. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, he told journalists: “There is no way that the people who did this could be Muslim, and if they claim to be Muslim, then they have perverted their religion.” He condemned attacks on civilians, irrespective of the oppression their governments were responsible for—on this basis, he opposed the US war on Afghanistan as much as the 9/11 attacks. He said that while America was responsible for propping up repressive governments in the Middle East, it was not a military enemy, and he hoped bin Laden’s views would not win support. In speaking of the concept of jihad, he made the now commonplace distinction between its “greater” form of spiritual struggle and its “lesser” form of physical force in self-defense. Jihad was, he said, first a personal struggle to be a better person and the struggle of a community to rid itself of corruption. He also told journalists:
And if there is an invading force from outside, then we would, too, struggle to defend ourselves, and that is where armed combat occurs. So actually, fighting is only a part of the jihad, and it’s considered to be a defensive force in order to protect the religion.55
He drew a distinction between terrorism that targets civilians, which he opposed, and insurgencies within specific local contexts that aimed to defend Muslims against military occupations, which he might support. As a teenager at college in the late 1980s he had spent a summer visiting Afghanistan, including spending time with the anti-Soviet mujahideen, who were then supported by the US government. And in the 1990s he seems to have supported the Chechen insurgency against the Russian army. Certainly the US government, which investigated him thoroughly after 9/11, viewed al-Awlaki as a moderate. Indeed, as the imam at the largest mosque in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, he was invited to a lunch event at the Pentagon, in an attempt by the US Army to reach out to mainstream American Muslims, and he gave a Friday sermon on Capitol Hill.56
The following year the FBI conducted a series of antiterrorist raids on Muslim educational, research, business, and charitable organizations in northern Virginia, where al-Awlaki was based. Angered at the raids, which seemed to target organizations just because they were Islamic, al-Awlaki told his congregation how agents had held women and children at gunpoint and handcuffed them for hours. “If you don’t struggle for your rights,” he said, “you will be stripped away from them, step by step, until you have nothing left.” He called on American Muslims to unite and work with “Islamic organizations with a political orientation and a civil rights orientation” to challenge the war on terror, which had become, he said, a “war against Muslims.”57 The raids had led al-Awlaki to make radical criticisms of the war on terror and to view it as an attack on his religion. But his objections were framed in the language of civil rights and the need to organize politically to defend the community. His references to Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown suggested that the right strategy for American Muslims w
as to draw on the history of black political radicalism and community struggle. “Their rights were not handed to them,” he said, but were won through political activism. However, al-Awlaki himself told friends he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the US’s criminalization of Muslims and aggressive foreign policy, and that he planned to leave the country. In March 2002, he moved to the UK, where he continued to call for Muslim political activism to defend civil rights and oppose the foreign policy of the war on terror. Two years later he settled in Yemen’s southern province of Shabwa.58
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 17