Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2010: On Christmas afternoon in 1992, Steven Emerson, then a staff reporter for CNN, noticed a large group of men in traditional Arab clothes congregating outside the Oklahoma City Convention Center. At first, he thought they were extras for a movie—until he remembered the date. So, he explored a bit; inside, he discovered a conference sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association. The vitriol of the speakers, replete with hateful rhetoric against Jews, Israel, and America mixed with exhortations of violence toward these enemies, alarmed him. Spontaneous shouts of “Kill the Jews” and “Destroy the West” came from the audience throughout the event.
Worried by what he had witnessed, Emerson notified a contact in the FBI, only to be told that the agency knew nothing about the conference and also lacked a mandate to investigate it because no criminal activity had occurred or was imminent. This experience indelibly impressed him, leaving a sense of government weakness and suggesting the need for a private agency to explore the threat of radical Islam within the United States. . . .
. . . In 1995, he established his own think tank, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), which has since conducted investigations into many Islamist and terrorist groups and individuals. . . . Emerson undertook effective investigations on his own before he started the IPT. Most notable was his 1994 documentary Jihad in America, which raised awareness of the threat of radical Islam in the United States. The film focused on a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, who founded the Arab Fighters Service Bureau in Afghanistan to recruit and train thousands of mostly Arab jihadists. Osama bin Laden, a protégé of Azzam’s, cofounded the bureau and later transformed it into Al-Qaeda. The bureau’s North American office, the Al-Khifa Refugee Center in the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, soon became the hub of a network that included outposts in Atlanta, Chicago, Connecticut, and New Jersey. . . .
. . . .Emerson founded the Investigative Project on Terrorism in 1995 and currently serves as its executive director; this think tank and archive maintains the world’s largest collection of nongovernmental data on radical Islamic groups, including more than four million documents, thousands of hours of clandestine video and audio recordings made at radical Islamic conferences, training sessions, fundraising activities, and assorted gatherings; and tens of thousands of original terrorist manuals and periodicals. The IPT has also compiled a database of thousands of known or suspected terrorists as well as dossiers on radical groups.
The IPT website offers a comprehensive counter-Islamist source of information, with government documents, proprietary information, and breaking stories. The IPT also employs analysts to collect and interpret data and sends associates to listen to speeches by Islamist leaders. The IPT receives information from a variety of sources, including many not available to government agencies. The archive holds the trial exhibits from the first (1993) World Trade Center bombing case, which include numerous records on Muslim terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. Emerson and his staff meticulously copied the documents, which were all publicly available and obtained from the court and prosecutors. After reviewing the records, Emerson concluded that these various Islamist groups were coordinating their activities in a worldwide network. . . . . .
Documentary from 1994, seven years before 9/11:
Newsweek, 13 Jan 10: There is something haunting and deeply sinister about the interview that NEWSWEEK TÜRKIYE’s Adem Demir did with Defne Bayrak, the wife of the “CIA bomber,” last week. But she seems to have quit talking since she was picked up by the cops in Istanbul, questioned, and released—and that’s really too bad, because there are a whole lot of questions I’d still like to ask her. For starters, did she put him up to the bombing? Did she, perhaps, want to be the bride of a martyr? . . .
. . . . . Radicalization is not a mechanical process. It is deeply emotional and personal—especially when suicide is involved. For a well-read woman like Bayrak it is also an intellectual journey. Was she along for the ride, merely doing her husband’s bidding, or was he doing hers?
Humam al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian doctor who blew himself up along with seven CIA employees and a Jordanian handler in Afghanistan on Dec. 30, was always a pretty lonely guy. According to his mother, Shnara Fadel al-Balawi, he had “a social phobia.” She told NEWSWEEK’s Ranya Kadri that he seemed to live his life on the Internet. Whether he focused entirely on jihad there or indulged in other vices, we don’t know. In any case, while he was in medical school in Turkey in the late 1990s, he got tired of using technology and started looking to meet women face to face—good, religious women, of course. He first came across Defne Bayrak in a chat room. An aspiring journalist who was a few months younger than he, she had just recently started wearing the hijab, or head covering, that is a clear political as well as religious statement in modern Turkey.
As Bayrak describes their relationship, it was a rather cold-blooded contract in the beginning. They decided to get married, she said, after they “evaluated and agreed on [their] opinions, family structure, and friendship.” Soon afterward they moved to his hometown of Amman, Jordan. Their two daughters were born in 2003 and 2004, and they all lived in the same house with his parents. Every so often, Bayrak would go back to Turkey, but Humam didn’t join her.
While he was struggling with his medical career, working in different Jordanian hospitals, she was developing hers as a propagandist for violent jihad. Over the last decade, this has become a key role for women who sympathize with Al Qaeda. “There is an army of female organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either enlist with their husbands or succeed those who are jailed or killed,” writes American scholar Mia Bloom in a draft of her forthcoming book, Bombshell: Women and Terror (Penguin, August 2010). “A significant development in women’s participation in the global Jihad has been the dissemination of radical ideologies on-line. The Internet has afforded Jihadi women … the opportunity to participate in Jihad without compromising their position and inferior status in the society. Articles, communiqués and online chat rooms offer women the space to express their fanatical support.” . . . .
STRATFOR, 13 Jan 10: U.S. President Barack Obama outlined a set of new policies Jan. 7 in response to the Dec. 25, 2009 Northwest Airlines bombing attempt, which came the closest to a successful attack on a U.S. flight since Richard Reid’s failed shoe-bombing in December 2001. As in the aftermath of that attempt, a flurry of accusations, excuses and policy prescriptions have emanated from Washington since Christmas Day concerning U.S. airline security. Whatever changes actually result from the most recent bombing attempt, they will likely be more successful at pacifying the public and politicians than preventing future attacks.
At the heart of President Obama’s policy outline were the following key tactics: pursue enhanced screening technology in the transportation sector, review the visa issuance and revocation process, enhance coordination among agencies for counterterrorism (CT) investigations and establish a process to prioritize such investigations. While such measures are certainly important, they will not go far enough, by themselves, to meaningfully address the aviation security challenges the United States still faces almost nine years after 9/11.
Holes in the System
For one thing, technology must not be seen as a panacea. It can be a very useful tool for finding explosive devices and weapons concealed on a person or in luggage, but it is predictable and reactive. In terms of aviation security, the federal government has consistently been fighting the last war and continues to do so. Certain practical and effective steps have been taken. Hardening the cockpit door, deploying air marshals and increasing crew and passenger awareness countered the airline hijacking threat after 9/11; requiring passengers to remove their shoes and scanning them prior to boarding followed Reid’s 2001 shoe-bombing attempt; and restrictions on liquids and gels followed the 2006 trans-Atlantic plot. Not enacting these measures would have meant not learning from past mistakes, and they do ensure that unsophisticated “copycat” attackers are not successful. But such measures — even those that are less technological — fail to take into account innovative militants, who are eager and able to exploit inevitable weaknesses in the process.
Even advanced body-imaging systems like the newer backscatter and millimeter-wave systems now being used to screen travelers cannot pick up explosives hidden inside a person’s body using condoms or tampons — a tactic that was initially thought to have been used in the Aug. 28 assassination attempt against Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. (It is now believed that the attacker in that case used an underwear bomb like the one used in the Christmas Day attempt.) Moreover, X-ray systems cannot detect explosives cleverly disguised in carry-on baggage or smuggled past security checkpoints — something that drug smugglers routinely do.
Preventing attacks against U.S. airliners would require unrealistically invasive and inconvenient measures that the airline industry and American society are simply not prepared to implement. El Al, Israel’s national airline, is one international carrier that conducts thorough searches of every passenger and every handbag, runs checked luggage through a decompression chamber and has two air marshals on each flight. The airline also refuses to let some people (including many Muslims) on board. While these practices have been successful in preventing terrorist attacks against the airline, they are not in line with American and European culture and President Obama’s insistence that measures remain consistent with privacy rights and civil liberties. It is also economically and politically unfeasible for major U.S. airlines operating hundreds of flights per day from hundreds of different cities to impose measures such as those followed by El Al, an airline with fewer planes and a smaller area of operation.
And as long as U.S. airport security relies on screening techniques that are only moderately invasive, there will be holes that innovative attackers will be able to exploit. While screening technology is advancing, there is nothing in the foreseeable future that would be able to do more screening with less invasiveness. The U.S. prison system grapples with the same problem, and even there, where inmates are searched far more invasively than air travelers, contraband is still able to flow into facilities.
Focusing on the visa issuance and revocation process also leaves holes in the system. The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been given a multiple-entry U.S. visa, which allowed him to travel to the United States. When Abdulmutallab’s father expressed concerns to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, on Nov. 19, 2009, that his son might have been involved with Yemen-based Islamist militants, Abdulmutallab’s name and passport number were sent from the U.S. Embassy in Abuja to Washington and placed in the “Visa Viper” system, which specifically pertains to visas and terrorist suspects. His name and passport number were also logged into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, but not the “no-fly” list.
This standard operating procedure (which does not automatically result in a visa revocation) passed the responsibility from the CIA agents who spoke to Abdulmuttalab’s father on to the U.S. State Department, where agents unfamiliar with the specifics of the case did not, apparently, decide to act on it. In hindsight, the decision not to take the father’s warning more seriously appears to be a glaring mistake, but in context it seems less obvious. The father’s tip was vague, with little indication of what his son was up to or, more important to U.S. CT agents, that he was planning even to travel to the United States, much less attack a U.S. airliner.
Intelligence Limitations
The possibility of yet another jihadist suspect emerging in the Middle East does not pose an existential threat to the United States, so this raises the third challenge: prioritizing CT investigations. Vague warnings such as the tip from Abdulmuttalab’s father spring up constantly throughout the world and CT investigators have to prioritize them. Only the most serious cases get assigned to an investigator to follow up on while the rest are filed away for future reference. If the same name pops up again with more information on the threat, then more action is taken. U.S. CT agents are most concerned about specific threats to the United States, and with no actionable intelligence that Abdulmutallab was plotting an attack against the United States, his case was given a lower priority.
Nevertheless, not acting immediately on the father’s vague threat proved to be a near-fatal move. This highlights the danger of the unsophisticated, ill-trained militant, referred to in U.S. CT circles as a “Kramer jihadist” (after the bumbling character in the sitcom “Seinfeld”). By himself, a Kramer jihadist poses a minimal threat, but when combined with a trained operative or group, he can become a formidable weapon. Abdulmutallab had been radicalized, but there is nothing to suggest that he had extensive jihadist training or any tactical expertise. He was simply a willing agent with a visa to the United States. When put in the hands of a competent, well-trained operator (such as those involved with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), a Kramer jihadist can be outfitted with a device and given a support network that could supply him with transportation and direction to carry out an effective attack. There are simply too many radical Islamists in the world to investigate each one, but immediately revoking visas to keep suspects off U.S. airliners until they can be investigated further is a fairly simple process and would be an effective deterrent.
Finally, the lack of coordination among agencies in CT investigations is an old problem that dates back well before 9/11. This challenge lies in the fact that the U.S. intelligence community is broken up into specific agencies — each with its own specific jurisdiction and incentive to leverage its power in Washington by controlling the flow of information. This system ensures that no single agency becomes too powerful and self-interested, but it also fractures the intelligence community and bureaucratizes intelligence sharing.
National Counterterrorism Center
In order to investigate a case like Abdulmutallab’s, agents from the CIA must work with agents from the FBI, and the State Department is tasked with coordinating the requests for information from various foreign governments (whose information is not always reliable). For foreign threats specifically aimed at airlines, agents from the Transportation Security Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, Office of Director of National Intelligence, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement must be notified. Rallying and coordinating all the appropriate actors and agencies to respond to a threat requires careful bureaucratic maneuvering and presents numerous opportunities to be bogged down at every step. Certainly, the more overt the threat, the easier it is to move the bureaucracy, but a case as opaque as Abdulmutallab’s would not likely inspire a quick and decisive follow-up.
The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was created to aggregate threats from various local, state and federal agencies all over the world in order to streamline the threat-identification and investigation process. However, the additional bureaucracy that was generated with the formation of the NCTC has essentially canceled out any benefit that the center might have contributed.
When it comes down to it, modern airliners — full of people and fuel — are extremely vulnerable targets that can produce highly dramatic carnage, characteristics that attract militants and militant groups seeking global notoriety. And Abdulmutallab’s efforts on Christmas Day certainly will not be the last militant attempt to bring an airliner down. As security measures are changed in response to this most recent attempt, terrorist planners will be watching closely and are sure to adapt their tactics accordingly.
Times of London, 14 Jan 10: In a new book (coming 18 January), an author reveals for the first time secrets of one of the most audacious acts of wartime deception — how a British corpse was dropped into the sea with a new identity to fool Hitler about Allied invasion plans . . .
. . . . . Room 13 of the Admiralty was a clearing house of secrets, lies and whispers. Every day the most lethal and valuable naval intelligence — decoded messages, deception plans, enemy movements, coded spy reports and other mysteries — poured into this little room, where they were analysed, assessed and dispatched to distant parts of the world, the armour and ammunition of a secret war.
The two officers were also responsible for running agents and double agents, espionage and counterespionage, intelligence, fakery and fraud: they passed lies to the enemy that were false and damaging, as well as information that was true but harmless; they ran willing spies, reluctant spies pressed into service and spies who did not exist at all. Now, with the war at its height, they sought to create a spy who was different from any that had come before: a secret agent who was not only fictional, but dead. . . . .
Center for Security Policy: Muslim Brotherhood front groups and their apologists never tire of pointing out the strict Koranic injunctions against killing innocents. This is, of course, dissembling. In a rare radio interview, Major Stephen Coughlin (expert in Islamic law and former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff) tackles an issue of the utmost importance: who is innocent under Shariah law and who is it permissible to kill? This distinction makes all the difference.
