Terror Defense No Al Qaida Terror
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- Lone wolf terrorism isn’t increasing in the status quo, and poses no existential threat to the United States.
No Lone Wolf TerrorThe threat of lone wolf terrorism is grossly exaggerated – no terror organization means less resources, smaller skill set, and higher rate of being detected.Harwood 15 [Matthew Harwood, senior writer/editor with the ACLU. A TomDispatch regular, his work has been published by Al-Jazeera America, the American Conservative, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Guardian, Guernica, Reason, Salon, Truthout and the Washington Monthly, “If You’re Afraid of ‘Lone Wolf’ Terrorism, You’re Missing the Point,” February 5, 2015 http://www.thenation.com/article/if-youre-afraid-lone-wolf-terrorism-youre-missing-point/]//JIH You could multiply such statements many times over. There’s only one problem with the rising crescendo of alarm about lone wolves: most of it simply isn’t true. There’s nothing new about the “threat” and the concept is notoriously unreliable, as well as selectively used. (These days, “lone wolf” has largely become a stand-in for “Islamic terrorist,” though the category itself is not bound to any specific ideological type.) Worst of all, its recent highlighting paves the way for the heightening of abusive and counterproductive police and national security practices, including the infiltration of minority and activist communities and elaborate sting operations that ensnare the vulnerable. In addition, the categorization of such solitary individuals as terrorists supposedly driven by ideology — left or right, secular or religious — often obscures multiple other factors that may actually cause them to engage in violence. Like all violent crime, individual terrorism represents a genuine risk, just an exceedingly rare and minimal one. It’s not the sort of thing that the government should be able to build whole new, intrusive surveillance programs on or use as an excuse for sending in agents to infiltrate communities. National programs now being set up to combat lone-wolf terrorism have a way of wildly exaggerating its prevalence and dangers — and in the end are only likely to exacerbate the problem. For Americans to concede more of their civil liberties in return for “security” against lone wolves wouldn’t be a trade; it would be fraud. The “literature” on both terrorism and the lone wolf should be approached with a healthy degree of skepticism. To this day, there is little consensus on what exactly terrorism is; the same is true of the lone-wolf variety. In the media and in recent academic studies, what separates the lone-wolf terrorist from the phenomenon in general is the perpetrator. Lone wolves are, by definition, solitary individuals, almost always men, often with mental health problems, who lash out violently against civilian targets. At least in some fashion, they are spurred on by belief. Researcher Michael Becker defines it this way: “Ideologically driven violence, or attempted violence, perpetrated by an individual who plans and executes an attack in the absence of collaboration with other individuals or groups.” Although you wouldn’t know it at the moment in America, the motivation for such attacks can run the gamut from religiously inspired anti-abortion beliefs to white supremacism, from animal rights to an al-Qaeda-inspired worldview. According to the literature, lone wolves are unique in the annals of terrorism because of the solitariness with which they plan and carry out their acts. They lack peer or group pressure and their crimes are conceived and executed without assistance. In this way, they bear a strong resemblance to the individual school shooters and rampage killers that Americans are already so used to. One practical reason many such individuals act alone, according to researchers, is fear of detection. In “Laws for the Lone Wolf,” white supremacist Tom Metzger wrote: “The less any outsider knows, the safer and more successful you will be. Keep your mouth shut and your ears open. Never truly admit to anything.” (Before 9/11, lone-wolf terrorism in America was overwhelmingly a right-wing affair.) This isn’t to say that individuals who commit political violence don’t talk to anyone before they attack. Recent research into 119 lone-actor terrorists in the United States and Europe, who were either convicted of such a crime or died during it, finds that they often expressed their extremist beliefs, grievances, and sometimes their violent intentions to others—mostly friends and family or online communities. The good news should be that family, friends, and colleagues might be able to help prevent those close to them from engaging in political violence if, as a society, we were to adopt strategies that built trust of law enforcement in the public, particularly affected communities, rather than fear and suspicion. (But given the record these last years, don’t hold your breath.) On the other hand, the methods that the police and national security state seem to be exploring to deal with the issue—like trying to determine what kinds of individuals will join terrorist groups or profiling lone wolves—won’t work. The reasons individuals join terrorist groups are notoriously complex, and the same holds true for politically violent people who act alone. After reviewing those 119 lone-wolf cases, for example, the researchers concluded, “There was no uniform profile of lone-actor terrorists.” Even if a “profile” were to emerge, they added, it would be essentially worthless: “[T]he use of such a profile would be unwarranted because many more people who do not engage in lone-actor terrorism would share these characteristics, while others might not but would still engage in lone-actor terrorism.” As a group, such solitary terrorists differ from society at large in one crucial way: almost one out of three had been diagnosed with a mental illness or personality disorder before engaging in political violence. Another studyconcentrating on 98 U.S. perpetrators found that approximately 40% had recognizable mental health problems. The comparable figure for the general population: 1.5%. Given such high rates of psychological disturbance, there’s a chance individual attacks could be prevented if at-risk people got the mental health care they needed before they took a violent turn. Fact vs. Fiction Fortunately, what makes lone wolves so difficult to detect beforehand renders them more impotent when they strike. Because such individuals don’t have a larger network of financing and training, and may be disturbed as well, they are likely to have a far less sophisticated skill set when it comes to arming themselves or planning attacks. Terrorism researcher Ramon Spaaij of Australia’s Victoria University created a database of 88 identified lone wolves who perpetrated attacks between 1968 and 2010 in 15 countries. What he found should dispel some of the fear now being associated with lone-wolf terrorism and so the increasingly elaborate and overzealous government planning around it. Spaaij identified 198 total attacks by those 88 solo actors—just 1.8% of the 11,235 recorded terrorist incidents worldwide. Since lone wolves generally don’t have the know-how to construct bombs (as the Unabomber did), they usually rely on firearms and attack soft, populated targets, which law enforcement responds to quickly. Therefore, Spaaij found that the average lethality rate was .062 deaths per attack while group-based terrorists averaged 1.6 people per attack. Inside the United States, 136 people died due to individual terrorist attacks between 1940 and 2012—each death undoubtedly a tragedy, but still a microscopic total compared to the 14,000 murders the FBI has reported in each of the last five years. In other words, you shouldn’t be losing sleep over lone-wolf attacks. As an American, the chance that you’ll die in any kind of terrorist violence is infinitesimal to begin with. In fact, you’re four more times likelyto die from being struck by lightning. If anything, the present elevation of the lone-wolf terrorist to existential threat status in Washington creates the kind of fear and government overreach that the perpetrators of such attacks want to provoke. If individual terrorists are the “new nightmare,” it’s only because we allow them to be. Lone wolf terrorism doesn’t exist – most assailants have affiliations with terror organizations, and labeling them as alone precludes possibility for tracing online connections.Weimann 15 [Gabriel Weimann, professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel, “There’s no such thing as a lone wolf in cyberspace,” June 25, 2015, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/25/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-lone-wolf-in-cyberspace/]//JIH “Lone wolf” terrorism is often cited as the biggest terrorist threat today. The problem with this label is none of the assailants act alone. They all belong to virtual wolf packs. Law enforcement authorities in Boston, for example, described Usaamah Abdullah Rahim’s scheme to behead random police officers as the plot of a lone wolf. Police also applied the term to other recent terrorist assaults, among them the brutal attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris that left 12 dead and the Boston Marathon bombing. In all these incidents, the assailants used traditional terror tactics, such as targeting civilians, but appeared to be acting independently of any organization. The “lone wolf” metaphor is based on the image of a wolf alone in the wild. But this is incorrect, as my studies on terrorists reveal. Wolves never hunt alone — in nature or in terrorism. In fact, wolves are among the most social of carnivores; they live and hunt in packs. Though the whole group is not always seen, their attacks rely on a well-coordinated circling and cornering of the victim. Lone-wolf terrorists are very similar. They have their pack — but it’s a virtual one. The solo terrorists are often recruited, radicalized, trained and directed by others online. The current wave of lone-wolf attacks has been propelled by websites and online platforms that provide limitless opportunities for individuals to explore and locate their virtual pack. Gunmen gesture as they return to their car after the attack outside the offices of French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo Gunmen gesture as they return to their car after the attack on the offices of French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo (seen at rear), in this still image from amateur video shot in Paris, January 7, 2015. REUTERS/Reuters TV An aspiring terrorist can use the Internet to find everything from instructions on how to build a bomb to diagrams of civic buildings that could be potential targets. Websites, Facebook pages, YouTube videos and Twitter postings all provide venues for cultivating extremism that was once possible only through clandestine face-to-face meetings. In the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, for example, the lone-wolf killers used an explosive device they had learned to make on the Internet. And that is partly how they were radicalized as well. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, according to FBI interrogators, subscribed to extremist Islamic beliefs developed through online material and messages. Tamerlan, the older brother, downloaded a significant amount of jihadist material, including a book about “disbelievers” with a foreword by the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. He also downloaded the first issue of al Qaeda’s online magazine Inspire, which contained detailed instructions for making a bomb from a pressure cooker. Dzhokhar appears to have been largely influenced by his older brother Tamerlan, but he was also radicalized through online content. An attempted May 3 assault in Garland, Texas, where Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attacked a Mohammad art contest, was also labeled a lone-wolf attack. But Simpson and Soofi had their own virtual pack and they left clear footprint across various online platforms. Simpson, a convert to Islam with a long history of extremism, regularly traded calls for violence on Twitter with Islamic State fighters and supporters. His Twitter virtual pack included Junaid Hussain, known as Abu Hussain al Britani, a British fighter with Islamic State in Syria, and Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, a Somali-American now in Somalia who uses the name Mujahid Miski and frequently promotes Islamic State. Both recruiters were actively promoting terrorism online. Hassan even suggested the cartoon contest as a possible target. On April 23, 10 days before the Texas attack, Hassan praised the January attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and called on jihadists in the United States to follow that example. “The brothers from the Charlie Hebdo attack did their part,” Hassan wrote in one post. “It’s time for brothers in the #US to do their part.” Simpson’s last tweet, sent just minutes before the assault began, included the phrases “may Allah accept us as mujahideen” and “#TexasAttack.” An online statement from Islamic State soon after referred to the gunmen as “two soldiers from the soldiers of the caliphate.” Tracking lone-wolf terrorists can be a nightmare for police and intelligence counterterrorism units. For they are extremely difficult to find, identify and arrest. Compared to group or network terrorism, lone wolves can often avoid detection before and even after their attacks because most do not publicly reveal their real inclinations or plans. Yet they are traceable because they share common characteristics, despite their varied backgrounds. First, they are not really alone: They are connected online, where they often engage in robust conversations. Across a wide variety of sites and platforms, they can reveal a strong commitment to or identification with extremist movements. In addition, their actions do not take place in a vacuum. Their virtual packs can be monitored and studied. Thorough outreach by law enforcement into radical, extremist and other terrorist communities is another key to find early warnings. Lone wolf terrorism isn’t increasing in the status quo, and poses no existential threat to the United States.Roerig 14 [Libby Roerig, assistant director of media relations at Indiana State University, “Lone wolf terrorists target police more, but attacks not more frequent,” September 18, 2014, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140918101400.htm]//JIH "We find no evidence that lone wolf terrorism is increasing," said Mark Hamm, criminology professor and terrorism expert. Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hamm counts 38 cases of lone wolf terrorism -- many cases involving multiple attacks, and in the past 13 years, he isolated 45 cases, most of which were single attacks. No decade was deadlier than the 1990s -- mostly because of the 1996 Olympics bombing, anti-abortion bombers, the return of the Unabomber and mass shooter Colin Ferguson, Hamm said. The targets, weapons and motives have changed in recent years, Hamm found. Before 9/11, these terrorists used bombs, but now high-velocity firearms are the weapon of choice, he said. The change might be a result of legislation enacted after the Oklahoma City bombing limiting the public's access to bomb-making ingredients. Police and military personnel are now the preferred targets of modern lone wolf terrorists, Hamm said. Look at the Fort Hood and Los Angeles International Airport shootings or police assassin Richard Poplawski or Abdulhakim Muhammad (aka Carlos Bledsoe), who committed a drive-by shooting at an Army recruiting center. Many of these attacks, too, are at close-range -- "close, personal, high velocity" is how Hamm described Christopher Dorner's attacks against police in California last year. Many pre-9/11 lone wolf terrorists never saw their victims or met them, Hamm said. For example, Mark Essex killed five police officers and wounded five more in a 1973 shooting in New Orleans. In this attack, he stood on the roof of a hotel and shot at police. Poplawski, however, was so close to his victims, he said he could read their name badges. For his research, Hamm defines a lone wolf terrorist by four characteristics: a person who perpetrates political violence, does not belong to (but often identifies with) an organized group such as al-Qaeda, acts alone (as opposed to the pair of Boston Marathon bombers), and does not commit violence out of grief or the pursuit of profit, vengeance or fame. Statistically, most lone wolf terrorists are white, unemployed single males with a criminal record, Hamm said. Because these terrorists are getting younger in the post-9/11 era, they have grown up in a, media-driven paramilitary or "Rambo" culture; however, less than a third of them have actual military experience and none fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, Hamm said. The research is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, and Hamm's database will be turned over to the government for public use. Assisted by what Hamm jokingly describes as his "Sherlock Homies," (a play on the fictional investigator's name), he and his team started by examining 98 cases between 1940 and 2013 and analyzed the data for 21 variables, producing 2,058 searchable characteristics. It is the largest database ever created on lone wolf terrorism. While the quantitative review is complete, Hamm continues to work on the qualitative aspect, conducting prison interviews where possible. This phase of his research will fill the holes that statistics can't tell, he said. For instance, in the late 1960s, relatively few people were killed by lone wolf terrorists -- among them the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. We have no statistic to measure the political loss of those two men," Hamm said. He describes King as "the conscience of the civil rights movement," and Hamm met Kennedy on the Indiana State campus in 1968, several weeks before he was assassinated. Today, even the Islamic State (formerly, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS) has links to lone wolf terrorism and prisoner radicalization. "You don't come out of your mother's womb a terrorist," Hamm said. ISIS is the "9th, 10th, 11th, 12th-order effect of prison radicalization" and traces its roots to the former Jordanian prisoner Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by the U.S. in 2006, Hamm said. His followers formed the group after his death. A big concern for the U.S. State Department and the F.B.I. is Americans who identify with radicals such as ISIS. "The influence of the Internet is remarkable," Hamm said. While the practice of beheading someone is an ancient punishment in the Middle East, YouTube is new technology. Broadcasting the brutal event fulfills the definition of terrorism: "Kill one, frighten 10, 000," he said. "This is the thing about terrorism -- it affects an entire community. That's why we're so concerned about it," Hamm said. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 2.62 Mb. Share with your friends:
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