Interesting -- and significant -- story in the Washington Post today. Radical imam Anwar Alwaki -- an American citizen -- may soon be added to the CIA's drone target list.
Much ado has been made about the fact that this would be the first time an American has been targeted -- although as I have noted elsewhere, it would not be the first time an American Jihadist was killed in a drone attack. In 2002, a U.S. drone strike in Yemen (as it happens) killed Kamal Derwish, a Buffalo native connected to the Lackawanna Six.
It was reported earlier that the U.S. may have missed an opportunity to kill Awlaki due to wrangling over the legalities that his citizenship may or may not complicate. The questions include:
What standard of evidence gets you on the kill list?
Who reviews that decision?
Do you (as a citizen) have any recourse to get off of the list?
These are not idle questions. In at least one case, U.S.-aligned forces killed an Al Qaeda suspect whose terrorist credentials were (at the least) questionable. That person wasn't a U.S. citizen, but it's still a troubling precedent. What if Eliot Ness has simply whacked Al Capone?
The kill list is -- currently -- about two dozen names long. Most of them are active in command and control of terrorist attacks. While there are strong reasons to suspect Awlaki falls into that category, extremely significant unanswered questions remain -- not only about his role in the Detroit Christmas bomb attempt and the Nidal Hasan massacre, but about his connection to September 11.
Realistically, the only way most of those questions are ever going to be answered in the public sphere is if Awlaki is captured and returned to the U.S. for a trial. As I have mentioned before, trials are the public's most important window into Al Qaeda and how terrorism works. And there is no case we need to understand more than 9/11.
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Friday, January 15, 2010
Fallout in the Military Over Nidal Hasan
It looks like there will changes in procedures and discipline for those who failed to spot problems that could have prevented the murder spree of Nidal Hasan, the Army major who shot and killed 13 people in November. The missed warning signs included Hasan's obsession with U.S. wars as "wars against Islam" and his contacts with radical Al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar Awlaki.
Contrast that to the handling of Ali Mohamed, Al Qaeda's last big conquest within the military. Mohamed infiltrated the U.S. military on orders from Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader Ayman Al Zawahiri. Some of his commanding officers sent up alarm bells about Mohamed's radical leanings (including statements made on the video below which was distributed by the military to educate soldiers about the Middle East).
No one was disciplined and nothing was changed after Mohamed's spying on behalf of Al Qaeda was exposed, a failure that spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. The Pentagon even stonewalled requests by the CIA for information about foreign nationals serving in the armed forces after Mohamed's duplicity was finally exposed in 1998.
Accountability is an important tool in dealing with terrorism, because accountability leads to adaptability, which is our enemy's greatest strength. It's a lesson that could be applied even more broadly in the U.S. government, but a good start is a good start.
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Thursday, January 7, 2010
American Jihadists Study
An interesting report out this week on American Jihadists. It summarizes a lot of key points to keep in mind on this subject, but it's focused mainly on post-9/11 terrorism cases.
Highlights:
About a third of the cases covered involved converts to Islam. In my own reporting, I've found that converts are an extremely important part of the jihadi mix -- especially when it comes to Americans.
About half of the cases they studied were Arabs, the rest were a mix of ethnicities. The cases I have documented in the book will probably end up skewing slightly higher toward non-Arab ethnicities.
About half the cases covered involved U.S. citizens. I expect to skew slightly higher on that front as well, although it's going to be in the same neighborhood.
There a few important elements I will be covering in the book which are not present in the study. First off, Americans have been taking part in jihad ever since the modern age of terrorism began in 1979. I'll be looking at several of those cases in the book, including some interviews with pre-9/11 jihadists. I am also examining Canadians in the book, because the cultural and logistical markers are fairly similar.
The second point is that not everyone who takes part in jihad also becomes involved in terrorism. I'm working to integrate some of those cases into the book as well.
Finally, I want to note there are plenty of cases which haven't made a big splash in the news media. I'll be looking at some of those as well.
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Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Anwar Awlaki Describes Nidal Hasan Contacts
Awlaki said he met Nidal Hasan nine years ago, at the Dar Al-Hijra mosque in Washington, D.C. Hasan began emailing Awlaki again on Dec. 17, 2008, almost a year before Hasan shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood.
The pressing question for American counterterrorism officials has been: Should those messages have alerted U.S. intelligence that Hasan was a threat? Awlaki's answer to the question of the message content certainly suggests the answer was "Hell, yes."
He was asking whether killing American officers and soldiers is legitimate or not. [...] I am surprised where were the U.S. security agencies, which claimed one day that they are able to read cars and vehicles plate's numbers from up in space, anywhere in the world. His messages were asking about the Islamic rule of killing a Muslim soldier, who served in the U.S. Army.
And in other letters he explained his view of killing Israeli civilians and was in favor of this, he mentioned the legal and factual justifications for targeting Jews with rockets. Later, there were some of his letters that asked for a way he can transfer some funds to us, to contribute on charity works.
More broadly, Awlaki said:
An American-Muslim's loyalty is to the Muslim nation, not for America. Hasan has proved that, through his blessed operation; may God richly reward him.
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Thursday, December 31, 2009
Detroit Bomber Attended AlMaghrib Institute In Houston During 2008
The Christmas Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attended a Houston-based Islamic seminar in 2008, according to the Detroit Free Press. He was in Houston for 17 days.
With the caveat that I don't want to read too much into this, it's interesting to note that American Jihadist Daniel Maldonado was a member of the AlMaghrib Institute's Internet forum using his online handle of Daniel Aljughafi. At the time of his arrest, he had only made two posts to the site. Oddly, one of those posts has since disappeared.
Threads of interest on the AlMaghrib site include:
UPDATE: Internet Haganah has an extremely good post which sheds further light on Maldonado's connections to AlMaghrib and AlMaghrib's connection to other points of extremist interest on the Web.
Intercepts and other information point to connections between terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Anwar al Awlaki -- who also communicated with the accused U.S. Army gunman in last month's attack on Ft. Hood, Texas, that left 13 people dead.
Some of the information about Awlaki comes from Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with attempting to detonate a hidden packet of PETN explosive aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, the officials said.
Under questioning by the FBI, Abdulmutallab has said that he met with Awlaki and senior Al Qaeda members during an extended trip to Yemen this year, and that the cleric was involved in some elements of planning or preparing the attack and in providing religious justification for it, officials said.
Other intelligence linking Awlaki to Abdulmutallab became apparent after the attempted bombing, including communications intercepted by the National Security Agency indicating that the cleric was meeting with "a Nigerian" in preparation for some kind of operation, according to a U.S. intelligence official.
A senior American counterterrorism official confirmed that American and allied authorities are looking closely into Mr. Abdulmutallab’s possible connections to radical elements in Yemen, including extremist figures on Jihadist Web sites like Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric linked to Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings last month. Investigators are trying to determine whether Mr. Awlaki may have motivated Mr. Abdulmutallab.
UPDATE: Some later stories have been downplaying this possibility, but I'm in a wait-and-see mode. The Detroit attack appears to be well in keeping with Awlaki's "leaderless jihad" philosophy in which individuals carry out attacks with minimal guidance from headquarters. It is, of course, a critical question as to what organizational affiliation Abdulmutallab had and how strong it was. If this attack turns out to have a strong Al Qaeda component, I will have a lot to say about what that means for the future of the war on terror.
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Thursday, December 24, 2009
Anwar Awlaki Dead?
The government of Yemen seems to think that an air strike has killed Anwar Awlaki, the American citizen turned radical imam who was a spiritual leader to 9/11 hijackers, as well as Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan. The strike also supposedly killed a couple of important Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leaders. There have been plenty of false reports in the last year, so we'll wait a while to see how this pans out. Another ambiguity awaiting clarification -- did the U.S. play a role in the strike? If so, that sends a powerful message about this administration's tolerance for those who support terrorism. We will see.
12/25 UPDATE: Awlaki is reportedly still alive. Some of the stories out of Yemen said that his house (or what was believed to be his house) was specifically targeted in the strike. That question is an interesting one for the reason cited above. It speaks to the Obama administration's tolerance for terrorist supporters, and perhaps also to their definition -- as in, was Nidal Hasan's shooting spree terrorism?
"It's quite clear that the next step for these men is to be deported to their home country, America, but we will do so only after a full investigation is complete," Punjab province Home Minister Rana Sanaullah said today in a telephone interview from Lahore, the provincial capital.
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Thursday, December 10, 2009
Americans in Pakistan: A Classic Case
On CNN's Situation Room, CNN correspondent Arwa Damon said Pakistani officials told her the five Americans arrested there this week "were not motivated by Islam" but were instead traveling to a combat zone to defend Muslims against "ongoing atrocities." The report also stated that they said attacking a Muslim anywhere in the world was the same attacking all Muslims.
I have no doubt this is an accurate quote of what Damon was told, but it's a tremendous misdirection to say that these young men were not motivated by Islam. The narrative of Muslim victimization -- and Muslim solidarity against victimization -- is the dominant theme of jihadi recruitment, and an important recurring theme in Islam generally and in jihadist thought specifically.
It's also one of the most important factors which leads Americans to jihad, as I will discuss at more length in my forthcoming book. Americans are especially responsive to the Muslim victimization theme, for a number of reasons including media consumption, American political dialogue and cultural principles.
If these young men said what is attributed to them (and I'm quite certain they did) that places squarely in the center of Islamic jihadist thought, and the American Jihadist theme -- not off to one side as this report suggests.
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Five Americans In Pakistan Linked to Al Qaeda, Pak Officials Say
This from the Wall Street Journal:
Five young Americans detained in eastern Pakistan had developed contacts with al Qaeda operatives through the Internet and were on their way to North Waziristan to join a militant training camp, said a senior Pakistani intelligence official.
The story cited intelligence from the men's laptops.
Scores of radical Muslims from the West are believed to have received training in al Qaeda camps in recent years and have now been fighting on both sides of the border Afghanistan and Pakistan border. In September, Pakistani security forces arrested Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali, a Swedish national and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, who was trying to go to Waziristan to join al Qaeda.
The five were arrested just a couple weeks after leaving the U.S., at the home of Khalid Farooqi, a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, according to the Pakistani paper. JEM is a jihadist group focused mainly on Kashmir. It's also connected to Lashkar-e-Tayiba, which has attracted American Jihadists in the past, and both groups are suspected of playing a role in the murder of Daniel Pearl by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
One of the group left behind a video which appeared to be expressing jihadist sentiments, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which held a press conference today to say it was assisting the investigation. In light of recent threats against American Muslim organizations by an Al Qaeda-linked forum, it will be interesting to see how the jihadists react to CAIR's collaborative role with law enforcement in this case.
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Monday, December 7, 2009
New charges in Chicago for alleged LeT member David Coleman Headley
This from this Justice Department this morning:
New federal charges filed today allege that a Chicago man, who was arrested in October for planning terrorist attacks against a Danish newspaper and two of its employees, also conducted extensive surveillance of targets in Mumbai for more than two years preceding the November 2008 terrorist attack on India’s largest city that killed approximately 170 people, including six Americans, and injured hundreds more.
The defendant, David Coleman Headley, a U.S. citizen, earlier this decade allegedly attended terrorism training camps in Pakistan maintained by Lashkar e Tayyiba (Lashkar), and conspired with its members and others in planning and executing the attacks in both Denmark and India, federal law enforcement officials announced today.
Also today, a criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Chicago charging Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed (Abdur Rehman), a retired major in the Pakistani military, with conspiracy in planning to attack the Danish newspaper and its employees. Another Chicago man, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Canadian citizen and native of Pakistan, was arrested in October on federal charges filed in Chicago relating to the Danish terrorism plot.
Through his attorneys, Headley has authorized the Justice Department to disclose that he is cooperating in the ongoing investigation of both the Danish and Indian terror plots. He has remained in federal custody without bond since he was arrested in Chicago on Oct. 3, 2009. No date has been set yet for his arraignment in U.S. District Court in Chicago.
I've been tied up working on the book for the last couple of weeks, but I'll have some updates on this story (including documents) and some other American jihadist cases within the next few days.
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Thursday, November 26, 2009
American Muslims Threatened Over Statements Condemning Nidal Hasan
The Al Ansar Web site, a Al Qaeda-linked jihadist forum in English and Arabic, has published a statement which threatens American Muslims who criticize Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
We ... issue this statement due to the unfortunate yet expected wave of apologetic statements being given around the world which smack of apostasy, especially in the land of the Lead Crusaders, the United States of America, the likes of which are only given either to safeguard their worldly gains from living there, due to their misguidance and ignorance of firm principles which they easily throw away based on their false concepts of "general interest", or due to the verdicts of misguided or evil scholars.
In the Al-Ansar worldview, apostasy is punishable by death. The threat is repeated again at the end of this message, which is largely concerned with justifying Hasan's attack on a theological basis.
We warn all Muslims, both individuals and organizations, to fear Allah in the views they hold and statements they make in regards to the validity of Nidal's actions, the character of our brother, and the correct Islamic views in relation to matters of this sort. They must be very careful that they do not knowingly or unknowingly fall into disbelief and apostasy.
"[Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan] had his struggles, and he embraced his religion with such intensity that one wondered whether he" could have suffered from a form of "delusion," the [Walter Reed] staffer said. He cited as an example -- without speaking of Hasan in particular -- the belief that the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are against Muslims rather than against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's government and then insurgents in Iraq.
The view that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are directed at Islam is not "delusional" -- it's the product of a selective worldview shaped by an overwhelming amount of public discourse from authority figures within the Muslim world, and to a lesser extent, the Muslim-American world.
This "War on Islam" concept is an major component of radical thought, although the opinion is so widespread that it's probably unreasonable to say it's outside the Muslim mainstream (on a worldwide basis).
The "delusion" comment betrays such a profound lack of understanding and attention to the global Muslim public square that it's easy to see how Hasan's colleagues could have missed more important signs of extremism.
And for those keeping score, one of Anwar Awlaki's more popular audio tracts is titled "It's a War Against Islam."
AmericanJihadists.com is a blog examining Americans fighting for Islamic causes. This topic includes -- but is not limited to -- terrorists and alleged terrorists. This site will also feature news and updates about the forthcoming book "American Jihadists," by J.M. Berger of Intelwire.com. For more information, click here.
The Word 'Jihad'
The word 'jihad' is not always associated with a military dimension. However, this site is specifically about people who support or participate in military jihad. These individuals describe their activities as jihad, and where applicable, this site will use their terminology.
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