The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  I do hope that you will tell me about persons, of whatever age, you think may have been radicalised or be vulnerable to radicalisation … Evidence suggests that radicalisation can take place from the age of four.

  Those on the Channel project would receive

  sessions with learned scholars of Islam who can refute the messages the radicalisers are giving out to people and show them the context of lines they may have been given from the Qur’an.60

  I telephoned the officer who sent out the e-mail and asked him how a four-year-old might be identified as radicalizing. He told me that they might draw pictures of bombs on their exercise books or say things like, “All Christian people are bad,” “We need an Islamic state,” or “My daddy says all Western people should be killed.” Visiting nursery schools to brief teachers on spotting these kinds of signs was useful, he said, because younger children would not be clever enough to know what to keep private.61 The idea, it seemed, was to use young children as sources of intelligence on their parents. One youth worker I spoke to believed strong pressure from the police was leading to increasing numbers of young people being identified simply for articulating strong political opinions, for example, about British forces in Afghanistan.

  The cases of young people who have been identified as at risk are discussed by a panel led by the police but including other professionals. It is based on these assessments that a program of mentoring or religious instruction might be recommended, in an effort to transform the person’s ideology. Youth workers or other professionals are expected to report back to the panel after each session with details of the discussions that took place and whether the young person is still a potential threat. There are a variety of approaches. In some cases the emphasis is on addressing emotional issues or frustrations at being denied opportunities to progress in life. Counseling and perhaps help finding a job are provided. In other cases ideological and theological arguments are used to challenge the individual’s worldview.

  Often the young person does not know he is being targeted for intervention as part of a Preventing Violent Extremism initiative. Parents also may not know, especially if there is a suspicion that the family is the source of the extremist ideas. In one case a youth worker was asked to meet with a young person at school and befriend him without his being aware that he had been identified as at risk. Over time he was given mentoring in a bid to change his views about the war in Afghanistan. The youth worker involved pointed out to me that people who really advocated violence would never engage with such a mentoring process. But those who are referred to Channel, he said, have softer views that are more about identity than violence, and are usually driven by a sense that Western foreign policy is riddled with double standards and inconsistencies. Making the argument that Muslims living outside the house of Islam (dar al-Islam) are religiously obliged to follow the laws of the country of their residence is one part of how he responds. Another is to try to get young people to open up about their feelings about being Muslim in Britain, which usually includes descriptions of raw experiences that underlie their political views. Youth workers involved with Channel interventions are paid according to the number of cases they take on, and on the length of time each takes to resolve; there is therefore an incentive for them to talk up the problem of extremism in a local neighborhood, and to prolong the intervention itself.

  In the official literature, Channel has two faces. On the one hand, it is presented as providing support for vulnerable individuals, in a way analogous to child protection measures designed to prevent young people from suffering abuse. On the other hand, it is also referred to as having an intelligence-gathering dimension. Norman Bettison, the former chief constable of West Yorkshire Police and one of the architects of Channel, put it as follows:

  [It] has the dual aims of linking community engagement with the generation of community intelligence with a view to intervening, with partners and the community themselves, where risk is identified.

  Police officers implementing Channel therefore are

  a kind of hybrid of the two roles that have been identified as the central pillars for this approach—community engagement and developing community intelligence.62

  Channel case files are held for a minimum of six years and can be kept indefinitely if it is thought necessary to do so. In one local authority, a document outlining the legal basis for the Channel project states that the data it collects are to be held until the subject is one hundred years old.63 Given that these files contain detailed personal information about suspected young radicals’ political and religious opinions, who they associate with, and other details about their private lives, the questions of who has access to this material, and under what circumstances, are crucial. Since individuals are not identified on the basis of criminal suspicion, it would be inappropriate for the information in the case files to be made available to MI5 or police counterterrorism investigators unless there were some separate basis to reasonably suspect the individuals of involvement in serious criminal activity. If they are shared, Channel would clearly be a significant adjunct to MI5’s general intelligence-gathering work, providing a trove of data that would interlock with other forms of surveillance—but obtained with the collusion of public service providers and community organizations unaware that their data gathering was ending up as MI5 intelligence. Prevent head Charles Farr has refused to say under what circumstances MI5 would be able to access Channel data. In a carefully worded reply to this question he states that anyone who is the subject of an MI5 investigation should not simultaneously be subject to the Channel process. This was meant to reinforce the impression that there is a strong demarcation between the investigative work of MI5 and the community-based work of Prevent, and to reassure us that the Channel project would not be used by MI5 as another window into the lives of people already being investigated. There are two points to be made about this. First, MI5 already has wide-ranging surveillance powers to target subjects considered a national security threat, and so the extra window would in any case add little. Second, individuals referred by schools and universities are presumably on occasion already under MI5 investigation. Unless data is in fact shared between MI5 and the Channel project, how would the kinds of overlaps that Farr is ruling out be avoided in practice? But the real problem is that Farr’s attempt at reassurance does not rule out the more likely scenario that the Channel project provides a way to obtain data on the lives of those on the periphery of social networks already being investigated by MI5. The Channel project is probably seen by MI5 as a cheap way of gaining detailed information about individuals not considered a national security threat themselves but who may associate with those who are. This would explain its apparent emphasis on gathering information on family members and others in a young person’s social network. In any case, the police counterterrorism units that hold these case files include embedded MI5 officers, who would presumably be able to access this data straightforwardly.64 Further clarification on these questions has been rebuffed by Farr with the boilerplate statement that “it has been the established policy of successive governments to neither confirm nor deny in response to questions concerning the intelligence and security agencies.”65

  Not only does the Channel project raise substantial issues of privacy; it is also discriminatory. Since it seems to function in part on the basis of treating religious behaviors as indicators of extremism, and because over 90 percent of its cases have involved Muslims, it appears to be a form of profiling based on religious identity. There are also a number of pragmatic difficulties which call the project into question. First, there is no reason to think that a nebulous Islamic identity politics, which seems to be what usually serves as an indicator of risk, is in any way a precursor to carrying out acts of violence against fellow citizens. When some young Muslims are alienated by their own society and see some of the wars the US and UK governments are fighting, they may come to believe the West is indeed at war with Islam. But there is no evidence to support th
e assumption that such opinions can be taken as indicators of a terrorist threat. Second, by recruiting nonpolicing professionals to engage in what is, in effect, a counterterrorism intelligence-gathering role, their own professional norms of trust and confidentiality are undermined. There is an obvious tension between the imperatives of policing, which is based on gathering information about people, and those of education, which is based on empowering students to think critically and learn how to express their views in effective ways. Young people should be able to fully express their opinions in schools and youth clubs without becoming entangled in the counterterrorism system. Indeed, enabling young people to do so is a surer way of reducing the attraction of political violence than a government-led program of ideological manipulation. But, for a state with a deeply unpopular foreign policy, a generation of young people able to critically analyze what is happening in the world and organize themselves to change it is perhaps a greater source of anxiety than terrorism itself.

  CHAPTER 6

  No Freedom for the Enemies of Freedom

  We shall provoke you to acts of terror and then crush you.

  —C. B. Zubatov, tsarist police director

  In August 2010, twenty-one-year-old Antonio Martinez posted a message on his Facebook page.

  When are these crusaders gonna realize they cant win? How many more lives are they willing to sacrifice. ALLAHUAKBAR. [sic]

  The following month, he commented:

  The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease inshallah … don’t except the free world we are slaves of the Most High and never forget it! [sic]

  A couple of days later, he added:

  Any 1 who opposes ALLAH and HIS Prophet PEACE.Be.upon.Him I hate u with all my heart.1 [sic]

  Martinez had grown up in a Nicaraguan family living in the Maryland outskirts of Washington, DC, and been involved with drugs and petty crime as a teenager. But he eventually had found work in construction and started looking to religion to provide meaning to his life. In his journal, he began to list quotations from the Bible, and wrote about his admiration for samurai warriors who gave their life in battle, adding:

  Oh, how I wish for the same fate, to be remembered forever as a fearless warrior.2

  He was baptized, but Christianity did not seem to work for him. “He said he tried the Christian thing. He just really didn’t understand it,” remembered a former girlfriend.3 Then he converted to Islam, which friends said helped him get his life under control.4 He changed his name to Muhammad Hussain and on his Facebook page began to describe himself as “just a yung brotha [sic] from the wrong side of the tracks who embraced Islam.”5 But the version of Islam Martinez embraced was very different from that practiced by the rest of the local Muslim population. Martinez began to visit radical Web sites at a public library, such as the Revolution Muslim site run by Younes Abdullah Muhammad, whom we met in Chapter 3.6 His postings on Facebook began to reflect his newfound view that the West was at war with Islam and oppressing Muslims around the world. Within a couple of months a member of the local Muslim community, who earlier had been recruited as an FBI informant, spotted the Facebook postings, and identified Martinez to federal agents.7

  Martinez’s online activity was entirely lawful. He was simply expressing religious and political opinions, protected activity under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Large numbers of people in the US believe, like Martinez, that the West is at war with Islam, not because they have been brainwashed by radical Web sites or preachers but because they read the news and concluded that the US government institutionally has a specific view of Islam that makes it more likely to use military violence against Muslim populations. Indeed, there are a significant number of people within the US’s own national security apparatus who also believe the West is at war with Islam. In 2011, military officers undergoing training at the Joint Forces Staff College were told:

  Islam has already declared war on the West, and the United States specifically, as is demonstrable with over thirty years of violent history.

  A presentation by Lieutenant Colonel Matthew A. Dooley, which was subsequently leaked to Wired magazine, argued for

  taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, being applicable to the Mecca and Medina destruction …).

  He added:

  Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.8

  Although the opinions Martinez expressed were lawful and shared by significant numbers of others, one might still wonder whether young Muslims holding them are more likely to become involved in terrorist activity in the future. If so, one could ask, should law enforcement agencies concentrate resources on such individuals as part of a preventive strategy against terrorism? The FBI believes so and justifies its view through academically informed radicalization models that it says can be used to assess what individuals’ lawful religious and political activities indicate about their progression toward terrorism. Like the NYPD’s model of radicalization discussed in Chapter 4, the FBI’s model has four stages an individual passes through, from converting to Islam to becoming a jihadist terrorist.9 In the first stage, “frustration and dissatisfaction with the current religious faith leads the individual to change belief systems,” and watching “inflammatory speeches and videos” on the Internet makes them vulnerable to further radicalization. In the second stage an individual identifies with “a particular extremist cause” without necessarily wanting to take action in support. Interacting with extremist materials on the Internet drives the individual further along the process “from conversion to jihad.” Once the convert has “accepted the radical ideology” but not necessarily gotten involved in actual activities to advance the cause, he or she has reached the third stage, one step away from active terrorism.10 It is not hard to see how applying the FBI’s radicalization model to Martinez’s case could create the impression that he posed a significant risk. He was certainly a world apart from the ruthlessly effective terrorists that television shows like 24 and Homeland routinely depict, and no one believed he was connected to any organized group. But it is such teenagers and young men whom the FBI regards as the greatest domestic security threat to the United States. To the FBI, al-Qaeda is no longer a structured organization able to recruit Western Muslims, train them, and conduct sophisticated, coordinated operations. It is instead an ideology that pushes some young Muslims along a four-stage path of radicalization until they become do-it-yourself terrorists who need no structured support from anyone else.

  Moreover, FBI agents believe that just monitoring young people in these radicalization stages is insufficient. They claim surveillance alone is unreliable, because it risks missing crucial developments that, they say, can occur over as little as a few months. Equally, the FBI believes that in other cases it could be years before low-level radicalism moves to involvement in actual terrorist activity, by which time the case may have been dropped because a period of surveillance failed to indicate any criminal activity. Given these perceptions, as well as the demand that the FBI adopt counterterrorism as its top priority and the requirement that it take a preemptive stance on perceived threats, a more aggressive strategy has inevitably followed. That strategy is provocation: the use of agents provocateurs to test if individuals expressing radical views can, in circumstances carefully engineered by the government, be pushed into criminal activity, so that they can then be arrested and prosecuted. As a RAND Corporation study puts it, agents provocateurs need to be used to “lubricate” suspects’ decision making.11 The assumption is that if an FBI undercover agent or informant can, through elaborate sting operations lasting many months, create circumstances that manipulate radicalized young people into conspiring to commit acts of terror—with the FBI supplying fake weapons—then that is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that a person was already on a radicalization journey to becoming a terrorist. If the key difficulty of a preventive approach to counterterrorism is knowing wheth
er someone who is not currently a terrorist is going to become one in the future, the FBI’s solution is to ask a different question: can someone who is not currently a terrorist be made into one by the FBI?

  This is what the FBI did in Martinez’s case. The informant who had reported his Facebook postings was given the task of befriending him. After a little while the informant told Martinez he wanted him to meet an “Afghani brother” who shared their views—actually an FBI undercover agent. Search warrants were issued for the library computers Martinez had used, and Facebook agreed to release records of all of Martinez’s postings and traffic.12 The full details of the ensuing conversations between Martinez, the informant, and the undercover agent have not been made public. Some were recorded—but key moments were not—due to what the FBI called “recording machine malfunction,” particularly in the early stages, when Martinez seemed to change from having vague thoughts about the oppression of Muslims to having a definite plan of action focused on attacking a local army recruiting center.13 At some point in the developing relationships Martinez began to speak more specifically about wanting to join what he called “the ranks of the mujahideen.” In one online exchange, he wrote:

  Jihad is all I think about when i sleep, when I wake up, sometimes i cry cuz im not there and kaffur [nonbelievers] killing all our brothers and sisters.14[sic]