The Content and Context of Anwar Awlaki's E-mails with Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan

Probably the most difficult, bedeviling problem in combating terrorism through law enforcement is interpreting the words of suspects to divine their real intentions, then to build a case from that interpretation.

It seems to me that this issue is exemplified by the long-withheld e-mail exchange between the radical American cleric Anwar Awlaki and the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Hasan.

My friend Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has a new entry over at Gunpowder and Lead, with Lauren Morgan, outlining the case for rating the e-mail exchange as a high threat and arguing that it should have prompted more aggressive investigative action. The post was prompted by a question from Charles Cameron.

I waited for this post before ringing in, because I wanted to see if I would be swayed by Daveed's argument, which he broadly telegraphed on Twitter last week. While we ultimately reach the same conclusion -- that the FBI and Defense Department should have investigated Hasan more aggressively -- we get there by a different path and with somewhat different areas of emphasis.

I'm not going to summarize the G&L post, which you should read before proceeding, precisely because it so thorough in its treatment of the question. But therein lies the rub. We're scrutinizing these emails and how they were handled. Why? Because we now know one person involved carried out a horrific act of terrorism and the other became a top Al Qaeda propagandist.

Nothing in Daveed's argument is wrong and it all falls within the scope of what he and Lauren set out to examine. There are clearly markers of concern in these e-mails, and the fact they involve an active duty military officer and a known radicalizer with links to September 11 is alone sufficient reason for the Washington Field Office to have escalated the case, at least to the point of an interview with Hasan and his immediate superiors.

But I think there are distractions lurking here, which move us away from what actually went wrong and what lessons we should learn.

I want to raise two key issues in this respect, because I think it's hard to really understand the case without them. This doesn't negate the points raised by Daveed and Lauren, but I feel that the context here is so important that it's misleading to consider the issue without acknowledging them.

The first issue has to do with the relationship between the FBI's San Diego and Washington Field Offices. If you read the more thorough Senate Homeland Security Committee report, the more telling Webster Commission Report, and records released by the 9/11 Commission, you don't have to squint very hard between the lines to see there were political tensions between the two offices, which I have also heard from multiple sources with knowledge of the situation.

Much of this tension specifically revolved around Awlaki and long preceded the Hasan emails. The Awlaki investigation ping-ponged back and forth between the two offices like a hot potato since 2001. These tensions resulted in strained and often inadequate communication between the two branches, which creates inertia and resistance and obstacles to effective, objective functioning.

This doesn't excuse the handling of the case. If anything, an institutional management failure is more damnable than a simple oversight or misinterpretation. But the testy relationship between the offices, clearly illuminated in the Webster report, has little to do with the content of the investigation.

When we're looking for lessons learned, it's my opinion (based on what we know today) that the will to analyze may have been a larger issue than the approach to analysis.

The characterization of the e-mails by unnamed officials as "fairly benign," which Daveed rightly attacks, was an after-the-fact effort at spin. It deserves to be refuted but also points to the second issue.

Anyone who has spent time with raw intelligence knows that you have to triage leads. For every intercept that states "I've bought the fertilizer and I'm loading it in the truck tonight down by the lake," there are literally thousands and thousands that say "I hate America," "I love Al Qaeda," "I'd like to kill those bastards," "I swear to God it's time for action and not words," "If I was James Holmes, here's how I would have done it better," "You need to start mentally preparing now to kill your neighbors when the revolution comes," and "Would you consider someone like Hasan Akbar to be fighting jihad, and if he died would he be a martyr?" (All of the above are paraphrases of actual extremist content I've reviewed.)

The words of suspects -- whether recounted in e-mails, phone intercepts, informant reports, or online postings -- must be interpreted and prioritized relative to dozens or hundreds or thousands of other leads. This can be a science if you're a trained FBI profiler, but it's strictly an art if you're anyone else. Zach Chesser's online output, to the layman, was pretty alarming and seemed to indicate he might try to act out violently on U.S. soil, but he never did. And even profilers cannot read intent from most verbal and written content with absolute reliability.

Based on who Hasan was (a military officer), who he was talking to (a suspected 9/11 accomplice), and the fact he repeatedly tried to get Awlaki's attention using a variety of stratagems, the case should have been escalated and Hasan's superiors should have been informed.

But when you place the content of Hasan's messages alongside all the other raw intelligence that counterterrorism investigations generate, it's extremely hard to argue from a subjective, non-psychoanalytical reading that they represented a red flag.

Even putting aside the broad universe of raw intelligence, consider just the workload generated by the Awlaki Web site intercept and what we don't know about the nature of that content.

If you get 60 leads per day featuring people writing to Awlaki, are half asking what concrete steps they can take to participate in jihad? Are the other half are oblique in the same way Hasan was oblique? Which would you prioritize?

Hasan's e-mails didn't exist in a vacuum; they competed for attention with an unknown number of other e-mails featuring unknown content from Awlaki's Web site but also his email accounts as well as traffic from other investigations. The Webster report indicates that two San Diego analysts were processing an average of 65 to 70 electronic intercepts per day. Although it does not specify if all of those were related to Awlaki, other figures quoted in the report would be consistent with that conclusion. (H/T @emptywheel) The exact content distribution is unknown.

It's difficult to separate hindsight from our analysis. We approach these emails looking for evidence of Hasan's intentions, but we already know his actual intentions. If we read the thousands of e-mails generated during the period Hasan was corresponding with Awlaki, without any names attached, would we pick Hasan's messages as the most important? Would they even make the top 10 or the top 100? I suspect they would not.

It would be interesting to approach this subject from the perspective of a blind study, analyzing dozens of unlabeled intercepts -- some from people who went on to act violently, and some from people who did not. I'd bet serious money such an experiment would be a massive failure and would not reliably identify which subjects became violent and which did not.

Without such a study in hand (and if you have one, please send), we need to acknowledge the lack of hard data correlating different types of talk with physical action and the subjectivity of the exercise. The content certainly informs our understanding, but I don't think it leads to a "lesson learned" moment.

I don't disagree with the content markers noted by Daveed and Lauren, but I think it's a mistake to say those markers can be interpreted with much certainty without the benefit of hindsight. I'm not claiming this is their actual argument -- I think they're arguing to include context -- but I came away from reading the piece feeling that there was too much emphasis on the content and too much certainty about its significance.

It is, of course, important to understand and study content, but you can't point to a reference to Hasan Akbar in a vacuum and say it's significant, unless you've looked at a constellation of similar references and attempted to correlate them to action.

I don't think this particular example illustrates useful investigative triggers that are likely to result in improved screening, and I don't think it illustrates a systemic failure that requires correction. The "lesson learned" is that the context of the messages should have escalated the investigation (and prompted more attention to the content).

If the content of the Hasan e-mails represents a threshold for escalated investigative concern, we're going to need a whole lot more FBI agents. I see dozens of online postings and messages per day that are far more worrisome than these e-mails, yet it is extraordinarily rare for these posts to connect with terrorist acts in any way. We need more study of how talk correlates to action, but the art of textual interpretation is not simple and rarely leads to black-and-white answers.

For more about American jihadists, check out J.M. Berger's new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, on sale everywhere.


This post was updated at 1:47 p.m. 

Labels: American-Al-Qaeda, American-Terrorists, Anwar-Awlaki, Fort-Hood, Jihad-Joe, Nidal-Malik-Hasan

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Anwar Awlaki E-Mail Exchange With Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan

I listened to a lecture that made a parallel between Iblis and the People of the book and was wondering if it was consistent with what the Quran teaches. He basically stated that Allah (SWT) speaks the truth and should always be obeyed. He told the story of how Allah (SWT) told Adam (AS) to take Shaitan as an enemy and toldy him to stay away from the tree. Shaitan told Adam that he was his well wisher and the only reason the tree was denied him because it would make him an angel or live forever. So Adam listened to Shaitan and neglected the heedings of his lord. He goes on to say that Allah (SWT) warns us not to take the people of the book as protecting friends (aulia) and the lecturer stated that if we ignore Allah (SWT) like Adam we will have no exuse if we end up in hell fire because of the advice given by the people of the book. He explains that some of the people of the book are sincere in their advice but are ignorant and if you listen to sincere ignorant advice over Allah (SWT) you fall at your own peril. V/R Nidal


For more about American jihadists, check out J.M. Berger's new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, on sale everywhere.

Labels: Al-Qaeda-In-The-Arabian-Peninsula, American-Al-Qaeda, American-Jihadists, American-Terrorists, Anwar-Awlaki, Fort-Hood, lone-wolf, Nidal-Malik-Hasan

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Al Qaeda and the U.S. Military: Resources For Journalists

On Wednesday, a joint Congressional Homeland Security hearing will examine the threat of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism to America's military on U.S. soil. This is a very large and complex topic. I wanted to share some resources for journalists looking to cover the hearings and the topic more broadly. Please note that I will be in Washington on Wednesday afternoon if you're looking to book someone to discuss the issue.

There are two components to the terrorist threat against the military at home: Internal and external. The current external threat is, in some ways, the simpler one to understand.

Al Qaeda-inspired homegrown terrorists have shown a sharp preference for targeting military facilities in recent years, including Khalid Abdul Latif in Seattle, Yonathan Melaku in Virginia, the Fort Dix Six, Antonio Martinez in Baltimore, and Nidal Hasan and Naser Abdo, both at Fort Hood in Texas.

What's interesting about this is the fact that many of them choose military targets because of explicit discomfort about the morality targeting civilians. I wrote about this dichotomy for The Atlantic.

The internal threat is more complicated and less covered by the media. There's a baseline issue with military personnel who turn against their own, as in the cases of Melaku, Hasan, Abdo and Sgt. Hasan Akbar, all of whom were -- to a greater or lesser extent -- operating independently. They were people serving in the military who allegedly became caught up in the tension between serving in the U.S. military and feeling that they were religiously or morally unable to kill fellow Muslims in theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beyond these cases, which seem to be on the rise inasmuch as a such statements based on the very small sample size, the military has been the subject of deliberate and often very successful infiltration efforts by Al Qaeda and related groups.

These efforts go back to the 1980s. One of the earliest examples is the case of Ali Mohamed, a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who later became a key operational terrorist planner, trainer and security chief in Al Qaeda.

Mohamed's resume also included the position of Staff Sgt. in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Bragg. Current Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri tasked Mohamed to infiltrate U.S. intelligence during the early 1980s on behalf of EIJ, the group Zawahiri led at the time (this was before Al Qaeda even existed). After an unsuccessful run at the CIA abroad, Mohamed moved to the United States, joined the Army and became a U.S. citizen. He was in the Army for four years, during which time he stole military manuals and sensitive information from Fort Bragg, took part in active fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and conducted training for jihadists and terrorists both abroad and in the New York City area. Some of his trainees took part in the World Trade Center bombing and a thwarted plot to bomb New York landmarks and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

Here are some INTELWIRE-exclusive resources on Mohamed:

Who Is Ali Mohamed?

Al Qaeda Spy Crafted 9/11 Network

New Link Between Ali Mohamed And 9/11

Who Masterminded 1993 WTC Bombing?

'Coleman Affidavit' on Ali Mohamed

Ali Mohamed Sourcebook

Nat Geo documentary, J.M. Berger Lead Researcher

Mohamed's case was not the only notable infiltration of the U.S. military by Al Qaeda. During the first Gulf War, an Al Qaeda operative named Tahir was part of a religious team dispatched to Riyadh by the Saudi government in a wildly successful effort to convert U.S. soldiers to Islam.

Tahir, a Vietnam vet who worked for Al Qaeda in Bosnia and Somalia, was one of several team members given wide-ranging access to U.S. personnel as part of an initiative presented by the Saudi government under the pretext of a cultural exchange. Another member of the team was Bilal Philips, an extremely controversial Islamic scholar who has been banned from entering Germany and the UK due to his preaching on such subjects as homosexuality and child marriage. At least hundreds of U.S. soldiers reportedly converted to Islam after the program.

After the war ended, Tahir and Philips attempted to recruit soldiers who had been exposed to the program as jihadist fighters in Bosnia. At least a dozen U.S. military vets went to Bosnia as "trainers" under this program and some stayed as fighters. The same program later recruited and trained the terrorists who attempted to carry out the Landmarks plot. The Bosnia program was funded by the Third World Relief Agency, an Al Qaeda-linked NGO which posed as a charity but in reality ran guns to Bosnia in defiance of a U.N. embargo and supported various terrorist causes.

As part of the recruiting program for trainers of the Bosnian mujahideen, Philips told me that he enlisted the help of Qaseem Uqdah, a vet then affiliated with the organization Muslim Military Matters, and for more than a decade after one of the key figures involved in certifying Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military. Uqdah refused repeated requests to discuss his involvement in the program with me.

For a very detailed account of this complex and nuanced program, which has never been fully exposed before, check out my new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam.

Labels: Al-Qaeda, Ali-Mohamed, Bilal-Philips, Bosnia, Egyptian-Islamic-Jihad, Fort-Hood, lone-wolf, Nasser-Abdo, Nidal-Malik-Hasan, Third-World-Relief-Agency, Yonathan-Melaku

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Who Really Inspired Nasser Abdo?

New details continue to emerge regarding Nasser Abdo, the would-be terrorist who was arrested before he could carry out an attack on military personnel stationed at Fort Hood.

Abdo's own words indicate he was inspired by Nidal Hasan, the Army major and devotee of Anwar Awlaki who killed 13 people in a shooting spree in November 2009. And a search of his hotel room revealed he was also reading Inspire magazine, which is published by Awlaki and his followers and urges Americans to take up "individual jihad" by plotting solitary attacks.

But here's something else to consider. Abdo, it now appears, was planning to carry out a complex attack using a bomb, in combination with a shooting attack, while wearing a fake military uniform.

Just days earlier, Norwegian right-winger Anders Breivik had carried out a complex attack that combined a bomb with a shooting spree, employing a fake police uniform in the process.

Breivik's attack was carried out July 22. Abdo didn't purchase the guns and other supplies for his attack until July 27.

We don't know enough to draw any firm conclusions here, but I will be very curious to see how the timeline of Abdo's alleged attack plays out as his court case progresses.

One of the worrisome things about Breivik's spectacular terrorist attack is that its most successful features are relatively easy to emulate compared to the work of a bomb design genius like Ramzi Yousef, or expensive and complicated attacks like September 11 which require a robust support network.

My concern is that Breivik has provided a "proof of concept" not previously seen in the terrorist world, which shows terrorists of any ideology just how much impact one person can have. Could Abdo have been moved closer to action by this example? We don't have enough information to be certain, but it's a provocative -- and worrying -- question.

For much more about American jihadists, check out J.M. Berger's new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, on sale everywhere.

Labels: Anders-Behring-Breivik, Anwar-Awlaki, Fort-Hood, Inspire-Magazine, Nasser-Abdo, Nidal-Malik-Hasan, Oslo

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink