Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (38 page)

Like the Tunisian and others who plotted attacks—9/11, Madrid, London—Umar cut ties with his former companions who he felt were too timid to act and cemented bonds with those who would be willing to strike. Like these others, Umar entered a seemingly privileged and parallel universe framed by the Takfiri vision of how the Prophet and his companions withdrew from Mecca to Medina to gain the spiritual and physical force to conquer the world.

Although many leap to the conclusion that Awlaki helped to “brainwash” and “indoctrinate” Major Hasan, Umar, and Shahzad, it was much more likely that they sought out the popular Internet preacher because they were already radicalized to the point of wanting further guidance to act. “The movement is from the bottom up,” notes Marc Sageman, “just like you saw Major Hasan send twenty-one e-mails to al-Awlaki, who sends him back two, you have people seeking these guys and asking them for advice.”
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The influence of media-savvy imams had steadily risen since about 1997, with the birth of the interactive IslamOnline Web site by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusef al-Qaradawi, who also has his own Al Jazeera TV show,
Sharia and Life.
That year also saw the creation of the more radical media company Islamic Conflict Studies Bureau, by the Syrian Qaeda activist Mustafa Setmarian Nasar. It was Setmarian who arranged CNN’s first Bin Laden interview and who would go on to become the Internet guru of “leaderless jihad” by individuals connected to small autonomous groups.

Like American television evangelicals, popular Internet imams interpret the complex political and social issues of the day as moral crises defined by simple binary choices that require action: for good versus evil, justice versus injustice, civilization versus barbarism, true religion versus false prophets. The Internet imams offer clear goals and courses of action for those who are already seeking the means to a glorious end where, in the words of Web celebrity Sheikh Khalid bin Abdul Rahman al-Husainan of Kuwait, “Happiness is the day of my Martyrdom.”

It is not by arraying “every element of U.S. power” (as President Obama proclaimed) against would-be jihadis and those who inspire them that violent extremism will be stopped. It is by paying attention to what makes these young men want to die to kill, through listening to their families and friends, and by trying to bind with them on the Internet. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” said the cunning canine in a 1993
New Yorker
cartoon.
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And what goes for dogs can certainly work for police. Good investigative reporting and police intelligence, like that at the NYPD, does this sort of tracking and outreach well. Even if every airline passenger were to be scanned naked or patted down, it would not stop young men from joining the jihad or concocting new ways of killing civilians. (On August 28, 2009, Prince Nayef of Saudi Arabia survived a gruesome suicide attack by a man armed with an explosive suppository.)
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Truth be told, the physical threat to our population is extremely low, if fairly constant, and by no means poses any serious threat to our nation’s existence or infrastructure. But each near-success breeds a monstrously outsize reaction, given the actual damage that could be done to society. (There was a report written back in the early days of car touring, on the “jerk effect”: When you hit an unexpected pothole, your emotions rapidly rachet up, and you jump at the expectation of potholes at every turn for some time after.) A good risk analyst, like Carnegie Mellon’s Baruch Fischhoff, would say that we exaggerate the numerator of risk, by extending it to near-misses (knowing someone who knew someone who has flown on a similar route), and we underestimate the denominator (the total number of flights). In fact, between October 1999 and September 2009 there were nearly 100 million commercial flights (99,320,309, to be exact). Six flights suffered a terrorist attack and four were successful, with 647 passengers losing their lives. That’s out of seven billion (7,015,630,000) passengers. You’re more likely to die while mowing your lawn than while on a flight that suffers a terrorist attack. The odds are about 10 million to 1.

Terrorists are directly responsible for violent acts, but only indirectly for the reaction that follows. To terrorize and destabilize, terrorists need publicity and our complicity. With publicity, even failed terrorist acts succeed in terrorizing; without publicity, terrorism would fade away.
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The irony is that press and publicity are also the oxygen of an open society. But this does not require that our leaders equate what is most scary and spectacular with what is really most threatening and politically important. By amplifying and connecting relatively sporadic terrorist acts into a generalized “war,” the somewhat marginal phenomenon of terrorism has become a primary preoccupation of our government and people. This transformation puts the lie to the constant refrain by our same leaders that “terrorists will gain nothing.”

Terrorism remains at the top of the behavioral agendas of our political parties. This means that no matter what the outcome of our democratic elections, terrorists will continue to hold sway over our society in ways only the most audacious and outrageous among them ever imagined, at least in their thinking about the short-term product of their actions. In this sense, Bin Laden has been victorious beyond his wildest dreams—not because of anything he’s done, but because of how we have reacted to the episodic near-misses and rare successes he inspires.

“THE GOLDEN AGE FOR DRUG DEALERS, WHITE-COLLAR CRIME, AND THE MOB”

A good example of the hype and hysteria is the wild concern with prison radicalization in the United States. Western Europe has a population roughly the size of the United States. In France, Muslims represent less than 10 percent of the country’s population (5 million to 6 million out of 62 million), but about two thirds of the prison population (40,000 out of 60,000 total).
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In Spain, Muslims represent about 2.5 percent of the total population (1 million out of 40 million), but 16 percent of the prison population (8,000 out of 52,000). Many draw the wrong inference from these figures, namely that Islam encourages criminal behavior.

In the United States, Muslims represent less than 1 percent of the population (2.3 million or so). The predictive factors for Muslims entering European prisons are pretty much the same as for African Americans entering U.S. prisons, namely lack of employment, schooling, political representation, and so forth. But nearly two thirds of Muslims in the United States are foreign-born, and nearly three quarters of them buy into the American Dream and believe they “can get ahead with hard work.”
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Overall, foreign-born Muslims in the United States have about the same education and economic levels as the general population, whereas foreign-born Muslims are five to seven times more likely to be poor than non-Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany and nearly ten times more likely to be poor in Spain.

Even in Europe, though, religious education is a
negative
predictor of Muslims entering prisons. Authorities consider only 2 percent of Muslim prisoners in Spain (160) to be jihadis or would-be jihadis.
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In France, only 1 percent of Muslim prisoners (400) are considered to be jihadis. In the United States, very few Muslim inmates are known to have jihadi sympathies, and only a small handful, less than one-thousandth of a percent of the total U.S. Muslim population, have been convicted in the single plot uncovered so far. But this is apparently enough to warrant the speculation that “Al Qaeda recruits in prisons…. Prisons are a prime, prime target for terrorist recruiting. It is a ripe population.”
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In fact, this one prison plot had nothing to do with Al Qaeda recruitment.
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The man who concocted the plot was Kevin Lamar James, the native-born son of a former Black Panther who was serving ten years for robbery in New Folsom State Prison, a maximum-security prison outside Sacramento, California. He founded what he called the “Jami’yyat al-Islam al-Sakeej” (“the Authentic Islamic Group,”) in prison in 1997. According to court documents, his goal was to recruit recent prisoners in the California State prison system to jihad, focusing on those about to be released or paroled so that they could go on to establish “JIS cells” on the outside.

In prison, James recruited his cellmate, Levar Haney Washington, an African-American convert to Islam who had a criminal history as a gang member. James told Washington, due for release a year before James, to “go out and do something.” In a handwritten “Blueprint 2005,” James laid out what he expected Washington to do on the outside, such as: learning Arabic, recruiting people with no history of felonies and teaching them to recruit others, acquiring bomb expertise, producing and distributing propaganda, and taking measures to “blend into society.” It was styled a bit on the so-called Al Qaeda manual, which was publicly available on the Internet, but there is no evidence of any direct connection between JIS and any other group.

After Washington’s release, James made his new cellmate, Peter Martinez, his deputy. Together James, Martinez, and Washington began scheming to attack more than a dozen military and Jewish sites in the Los Angeles area on September 11, 2005. Washington recruited two others on the outside, Gregory Vernon Patterson and Hammad Riaz Samara. Washington found Patterson and Samara in a local mosque, where they began talking about the invasion of Iraq. The conversation moved to a nearby apartment, where they psyched themselves up with images of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison being humiliated by their American captors. Patterson, an African-American convert to Islam with no criminal record, was from an upper-middle-class family, the son of a university professor. Samara, a Pakistani immigrant, was a naturalized U.S. citizen who also had no criminal background.

Their idea was a two-pronged attack using firearms, not a suicide mission. Samara authored a target list, including the Israeli “Consulate of Zion” in Los Angeles, the ticket office of the Israeli airline El Al at the L.A. airport, and Jewish synagogues. The group even debated the idea of going to Saudi Arabia to carry out an attack, figuring that it might call more attention to their group than action in the United States. They had big plans, some of them really screwy. But the plotters were resourceful, able to access and case the airfield at the L.A. airport through a duty-free store. “They were knuckleheads,” one law enforcement agent said to me, “but dangerous knuckleheads only two months away from killing big-time.”

The plot unraveled following a string of gas-station robberies, when police in Torrance, California, traced the number of a dropped cell phone to Patterson. At first, interrogators focused on Patterson, who they felt sure would break because of his upbringing and no criminal history. But he refused to fold, telling interrogators to “drop dead” and “if this is my martyrdom, so be it.” Patterson turned out to be the most ideologically committed of the four conspirators.

It was Washington, a hardened criminal, who “sang like a bird,” as one interrogator put it, and ratted out the others because he already had two prior convictions and didn’t want to be put away for life under California’s “three-strike” rule. Washington confessed that the robberies were to get money to buy ammunition and guns to prepare “jihad.” He complained that James constantly bugged him to take off his tattoos and to find a wife in order to better “blend into society.”

All were charged with conspiracy to levy war against the U.S. government through terrorism. All but James were charged with conspiracy to kill members of government. James, Martinez, and Washington identified about forty inmates they had been trying to enlist, as well as a few others from the outside, including African Americans, Hispanics, Middle Easterners, and whites. Six were deported, others remained in custody or were later paroled.

Well over four hundred FBI agents were assigned to the case (out of about twelve thousand agents in the country). Agents from as far as St. Louis were taken off other cases to cover the night shift of the FBI’s Los Angeles contingent. If it were not for claims by three losers that they were jihadis, it’s doubtful that anyone would have paid much attention. As one law enforcement agent told me, “The political leadership has to change their song about ‘zero tolerance’ for anything that smacks of jihad before we can get back to business.”

One source at the White House wryly commented, “It’s the Golden Age for drug dealers, white-collar crime, and the Mob.” Of course, this is something of an overstatement: The FBI’s success, or lack of success, in these areas has not changed all that much since the rise of terrorism as a major concern. But the gist of the White House staffer’s remark is that zero tolerance for terrorism has translated into less political concern for other severe ills of society, including blindness to the shenanigans of licensed thieves on Wall Street. Indeed, when the October 2008 financial meltdown occurred—the worst economic crisis since 1929—the
New York Times
headlined a story “F.B.I. Struggles to Handle Wave of Financial Fraud Cases,” which reported:

So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars…. “The administration’s top priority since the 9/11 attacks has been counterterrorism,” Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, said. “In part, that’s reflected by a significant investment of resources at the F.B.I. to answer the call from Congress and the American public to become a domestic intelligence agency.”
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