Al-Awlaki may have left the United States nine years ago, but the leaders of Dar al-Hijrah mosque are still trying to repair the damage to their institution’s reputation. The FBI and the 9/11 Commission found no evidence that the mosque’s leaders had any role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but suspicion lingers on. Days after Osama bin Laden’s death in Pakistan in May 2011, Dar al-Hijrah held an open house to try to build a greater sense of trust between the mosque and the local community. According to two Muslim American political leaders in Washington, congregants at Dar al-Hijrah are certain that the FBI still has agents planted among them to make sure the mosque is not being used as a recruiting ground by al Qaeda adherents.
In conversations with senior U.S. intelligence officials over the past three years, two questions came up repeatedly about the future of the American domestic counterterrorism effort. First, can the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities detect another terrorist plot by a “lone wolf” homegrown terrorist with no ties to al Qaeda or any other foreign terrorist group? If a number of American intelligence officials are to be believed, probably not. The second question that many lower-level counterterrorism analysts are currently asking: Is the intelligence community adapting as fast as the terrorist threat is? The answer, again, is probably no.
The biggest problem that the FBI and U.S. law enforcement are facing right now, according to intelligence officials, is that they do not understand the emerging homegrown terrorist threat. For foreign terrorist groups like al Qaeda, the U.S. intelligence community has a reasonably good understanding of the group’s hierarchy, command structure, and membership list; the same cannot be said for homegrown domestic terrorists, who tend to operate alone or in extremely small cells that by their very nature are extremely difficult for the FBI or law enforcement agencies to penetrate. And as the case of Faisal Shahzad proved, existing FBI profiles of potential terrorists may be inadequate for the task at hand.
According to FBI officials who have read his case file, there was absolutely nothing in Shahzad’s background or his behavior that would have attracted the attention of American counterterrorism or law enforcement officials before May 1, 2010. On the surface Shahzad was a relatively well-off family man who had never uttered an anti-American word in his life and had no discernible ties to any foreign terrorist organization. The youngest of four children, Shahzad came from a well-to-do and highly respected Pakistani family. His father, Bahar ul-Haq, was a retired air vice marshal in the Pakistani Air Force who at the time of the May Day bombing attempt was a deputy director of the Pakistani Civil Aviation Authority, Pakistan’s equivalent of our Federal Aviation Administration. Shahzad had moved to the United States in January 1999, received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, then worked as a financial analyst for a number of companies in the Stamford, Connecticut, area. He was married, had two vivacious children, and owned a home in a nice bedroom community in suburban Connecticut. In April 2009, he had been granted his U.S. citizenship after living in this country for ten years. Most important, he had never had any run-ins with the law except for a few speeding and parking tickets. Only after his arrest did FBI officials learn that Shahzad’s personal life was not as rosy as it seemed.
Is Faisal Shahzad the model for the next generation of domestic terrorists that we will have to contend with in the future? Opinions vary widely depending on who you talk to, but virtually all of the former or current-serving officials interviewed over the past three years are concerned that the FBI and U.S. law enforcement may not be equipped to deal with this new kind of “lone wolf” terrorist. According to an e-mail received from a retired senior FBI counterterrorism official:
The odds are the next attack will be by an American who [we] will never have heard of … He will probably have no criminal record or history of mental illness. He will probably be a family man … have a Facebook or MySpace page. Maybe takes his kids to weekend soccer games or ballet lessons … All his friends and neighbors will say that he seemed perfectly normal and did nothing out of the ordinary.
You get a clear sense of the conundrum currently facing the FBI and U.S. law enforcement when you look at the 2010 edition of the U.S. intelligence community’s guide to “Identifying Homegrown Violent Extremists Before They Strike,” prepared jointly by the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI. The “indicators” of what America’s spies and police should be looking for contained in the document are ridiculously vague, offering little, if any, concrete guidance to federal, state, and local law enforcement officials about what they should be looking for.
For example, the document asks federal, state, and local intelligence and law enforcement officials to forward to Washington any information received from their sources about Americans who have “new or increased interest in critical infrastructure locations and landmarks, including obtaining aerial views of these locations.”
This particular item produced gales of laughter at a recent gathering of intelligence analysts at a private home in the Washington suburbs, with a number of the attendees wondering if parents, teachers, and supervisors at work should call the FBI anytime someone they know or work with shows an interest in Web sites concerning the White House, the Empire State Building, or the Hoover Dam. One analyst questioned how anyone could be legally reported to the FBI for merely going to Google Maps and pulling up a publicly available map or aerial photograph of the Washington Monument.
In short, we do not know where to begin in what promises to be a never-ending quest to find the next homegrown terrorist. The intelligence community’s current fixation on al Qaeda obscures the fact that one does not have to be a Muslim to be a terrorist, or even have a political or social agenda. All it takes to become a terrorist is a sense of rage, alienation, and resentment so profound that violence becomes in the mind of the individual the sole viable means of striking back. It also helps if the individual does not care if they live or die in order to accomplish their goal. Once that line is crossed, the next step to becoming a bona fide terrorist is simply a matter of gaining access to guns and/or explosives, finding a target, and doing the dirty deed.
Take for example what happened on Saturday morning, January 8, 2011, when a troubled twenty-two-year-old American named Jared Lee Loughner joined the list of angry and alienated individuals who chose to commit mass murder. Loughner surged into a crowd attending a political meeting outside a Safeway supermarket near Tucson, Arizona, killing six people, including U.S. district court judge John M. Roll, and wounding nineteen others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), who was the target of the attack. Giffords was immensely unpopular with many conservatives in her district because of her criticism of Arizona’s tough new immigration laws, as well as her vote in 2010 in favor of President Obama’s national health care law.
No one yet knows if Loughner’s murderous attack was prompted by disagreements with Congresswoman Gifford’s liberal political positions, or if he was just trying to get his fifteen minutes of fame by killing a popular political personality as so many other mentally disturbed assassins have done before. On May 28, 2011, a judge in Arizona declared Loughner to be mentally incompetent to stand trial for the shooting spree. A mental health evaluation found that he was not only delusional, but was also schizophrenic and suffered from a severe paranoia disorder. The judge ordered that Loughner be held indefinitely in a Missouri prison hospital until he was determined to be sane enough to stand trial.
But it may not matter. Whatever the reason or reasons for his murderous rampage, Jared Loughner perhaps personifies the problem that American law enforcement now faces. On the surface Loughner was a perfectly normal individual with no prior criminal record, other than being suspended from attending the local community college for disruptive behavior. He was not a political activist, he was not a member of any extremist political or religious group, and he had never made any threatening s
tatements against the U.S. government or any political figures. He was a blank slate as far as federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies were concerned. In effect, Jared Loughner represents the new kind of enemy that the U.S. law enforcement’s vast network of agents, informers, and technical surveillance gear is worthless against.
Intelligence officials at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are fully aware of the long-term threat posed by this new generation of “lone wolf” domestic terrorists. They just don’t know what to do about it except to periodically send out bulletins reminding all federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to report immediately any suspicious activity that they may come across. But there is a clear sense of frustration among some law enforcement officials that they do not have the tools needed to do their job.
For example, a number of state and local police chiefs across America have for years lobbied for restrictions on who can purchase the chemical fertilizer ammonium nitrate, which Timothy McVeigh used to construct his car bomb that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995, and which is now the Taliban’s explosive of choice for their IEDs in Afghanistan. Some foreign governments have moved decisively on this issue. Both the Afghan and Pakistani governments have banned the sale of ammonium nitrate to civilians. For reasons defying easy explanation, however, the U.S. government has not yet imposed any restrictions whatsoever on the sale of the chemical, even after Faisal Shahzad built a massive car bomb with this material in May 2010.
The problem for the lack of action is that the U.S. government’s bureaucracy is moving forward at a snail’s pace on this issue. In 2008, Congress granted the Department of Homeland Security the authority to regulate the sale and transfer of ammonium nitrate to individuals in the United States. Three years later DHS still has not acted on the mandate given to it by Congress. No rules have yet been issued stipulating who can purchase the chemical because these guidelines are still working their way through the creaky DHS bureaucracy. Is it any wonder that American law enforcement officials are becoming increasingly frustrated that a decade after 9/11 they still do not have the means at their disposal to detect and prevent a domestic terrorist attack before it happens?
Another question that government intelligence analysts are asking with greater frequency is: Are the U.S. intelligence community and American law enforcement doing anything to try to prevent Americans from becoming terrorists? Again, the answer from intelligence insiders is a resounding no.
Despite the recent spate of Americans being arrested for plotting terrorist attacks, the U.S. government is still paying virtually no attention to the question of why ordinary Americans are deciding in increasing numbers to throw their lives away and become terrorists, a process government officials call radicalization.
Over the past decade, America’s European allies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get to the bottom of the radicalization problem. The British government, for example, is spending more than $200 million a year studying Muslim extremism and radicalization at home and abroad. Overseas, the British Foreign Office has funded studies of what is driving Muslim extremism in Pakistan, while at home the British government has gotten moderate British Muslim community and religious leaders to make public service announcements on television and radio and in the newspapers trying to convince their fellow Muslims that the violent extremist ideology espoused by al Qaeda and other like-minded groups violates the basic tenets of Islam and is morally wrong from any perspective.
On this side of the Atlantic, action on the problem has been notably absent. Virtually no substantive effort has been made to study the problem in depth, much less do anything about it. The Bush administration put almost no money into studying radicalization because senior U.S. government officials did not believe it was worthwhile. The Obama administration has made exactly the same mistake as the previous administration, making no effort to even look into why Faisal Shahzad and other seemingly ordinary Americans became terrorists, because, according to President Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, it “risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.” So today, we have a situation where the Obama Justice Department is willing to continue the practice of spying on Muslim religious institutions in the United States looking for terrorists in their midst, but not to put any effort into finding out why a small but growing number of Muslim Americans have become involved in terrorist activities.
Some senior U.S. government officials, who did not wish to be identified because their views conflict with current White House policy, believe that this rationale for not doing anything is comparable to ignoring the problem in the hope that it will magically go away. According to a source on Capitol Hill, “We have not paid heed to the lessons that the Europeans learned a decade ago about just how difficult it is to detect and neutralize domestic terrorists … We will never win the war on terror unless we admit we have a problem and take steps to try to understand the causes of terrorism.”
A Washington, D.C.–based nonpartisan think tank, the Bipartisan Policy Center, agreed with this sentiment, stating in a 2010 report written by two noted terrorism experts, that it is “fundamentally troubling … that there remains no federal government agency or department specifically charged with identifying radicalization and interdicting the recruitment of U.S. citizens or residents for terrorism.”
Taking its cue from the White House, the U.S. intelligence community has also paid very little attention to the subject. The U.S. intelligence community just does not think that the subject is important enough to warrant serious study or require any action. Today, there is only one intelligence analyst at NCTC who specializes in radicalization, and although her work has received generally high praise from America’s foreign partners, she has been virtually ignored by her colleagues here at home.
The U.S. intelligence community has not even tried to seriously block al Qaeda’s use of the Internet to spread its message of violence and hatred. Only in the past year or so have U.S. intelligence officials publicly admitted that the Internet is a major driver of terrorist activities. According to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, “The Internet has expanded as a platform for spreading extremist propaganda, a tool for online recruiting, and a medium for social networking with like-minded violent extremists, all of which may be contributing to the pronounced state of radicalization inside the United States.” Director Mueller’s views are entirely accurate, but according to current-serving bureau officials, the FBI, like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, is currently devoting far too few resources to monitoring militant chatter on the Internet.
While the U.S. intelligence community has dawdled in responding to the homegrown terrorist threat, choosing to devote the vast majority of its resources to al Qaeda, America’s European intelligence partners have not. For instance, the British intelligence services recognized years ago the inherent danger posed by homegrown terrorists and the fact that their own vast intelligence and law enforcement network may be useless against this new type of threat. According to a May 2008 secret assessment by the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, the “internal threat in the UK is growing more dangerous because extremists are conducting non-lethal training without ever leaving the country and, should they turn operational, HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] intelligence resources, eavesdropping and surveillance assets would be hard pressed to find them on any ‘radar screen.’”
Washington’s allies in Europe are frankly baffled by the near-total lack of interest on the part of their American counterparts as to why Muslim Americans are showing an increased willingness to commit terrorist attacks. A senior European security official attributed the lack of interest within the U.S. government in the whole question of radicalization to the almost complete absence of evidence of any homegrown jihadi terror networks among America’s nearly 3 million Muslim citizens found immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “When you guys found
no [al Qaeda] sleeper cells after 9/11, all interest in the subject disappeared.” The official added, “But things are different now … Many things have changed in the last ten years.”
An important part of the reason why the U.S. government was not paying much attention to why a growing number of Muslim Americans were choosing to become terrorists was that the junior member of the U.S. intelligence community responsible for protecting the United States from terrorist attack—the Department of Homeland Security—was not paying nearly as much attention to the subject as it deserved.
Whether it is merited or not, no branch of the U.S. government seems to attract more derision from American government and intelligence officials than the Department of Homeland Security. Created by an act of Congress a little more than a year after the 9/11 attacks, in November 2002, conceptually DHS was supposed to be the U.S. government’s all-powerful guiding brain and central nervous system responsible for bringing under one roof all of the various U.S. government agencies performing domestic intelligence, counterterrorism, and security missions, plus coordinating the efforts of the nation’s 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, who collectively were responsible for protecting the United States from attack.
The agency that was eventually created was a shadow of what its creators envisioned. Bombarded by telephone calls from senior FBI officials and the bureau’s powerful friends in Washington, all of whom demanded that the bureau’s independence not be abridged, Congress decided to exempt the FBI from DHS control, which in essence neutered DHS before it was even born. Without control over the FBI, DHS was condemned in perpetuity to be nothing more than a poor cousin of the older and more politically connected bureau.
Intel Wars Page 24