Authors: Matthew M. Aid
After being repeatedly interrogated by the FBI about his alleged involvement with the 9/11 hijackers, al-Awlaki was allowed to leave the United States in late 2002. He moved to England, then two years later returned to his family's native Yemen, where he has since become a leading ideological force behind al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, earning him the dubious distinction of being the first American placed on the CIA's terrorist “kill on sight” list, by President Obama in April 2010. Since then, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, five other U.S. citizens have joined al-Awlaki on the CIA's list of individuals authorized to be killed if they are located.
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 statements 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.”