Assaying the Terrorism Threat: The Next Five Years
Testimony given before the Future of Terrorism Task Force of the DHS, September 28, 2006
Washington, DC

by Harvey Kushner

May 16 , 2009

I'd like to thank the Homeland Security Advisory Council of the Department of Homeland Security for inviting me to participate in this important panel discussion.

As directed, I will limit my remarks to the future of terrorism over the next five years.

As stated in my books published nearly a decade ago, Terrorism in America and The Future of Terrorism: Violence in the New Millennium , the radical Islamic threat in the twenty-first century will come from individuals and small groups residing inside this country. I document this infiltration in my latest book, Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States .

These domestic terrorists will deviate from past terrorist practices. They will not duplicate the behavioral patterns our intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities have come to expect.

Past al Qaeda behavior indicates a desire to commit large scale attacks against the United States. Under the direction of Osama bin Laden and his minions, al Qaeda-trained terrorists have demonstrated a penchant for a single focal point with an immediate dramatic impact such as the 1998 simultaneous East African embassy bombings, the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Traditional al Qaeda fighters stick to tactics and targets that have served them well. They appear unwilling to try something new or copy techniques of other Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. It is by design that they leave it to others to experiment with new methods of attack, especially disenfranchised minorities inside American prisons.

It is a matter of record that al Qaeda sympathizers in our prisons seek out men like “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla to convert to radical Islam. Al Qaeda training manuals specifically identify America's prisoners as candidates for conversion because they maybe “disenchanted with their country's policies.” As US citizens, they will combine a desire for “payback” with an ability to blend easily into American culture.” A former gang member, Padilla had a long record of violence, with a hatred for America that proved easy to be nurtured by radical Islam into acts of terrorism.

Inmate recruitment isn't just a problem in America. It is an international network of subversion, conversion, and recruitment, demonstrated by the attempt of British citizen and al Qaeda member Richard Colvin Reid to blow up American Airlines Flight 63 with a crude bomb embedded in his sneaker on December 22, 2001.

Arrested for mugging at seventeen, Reid spent the next six years in and out of jail where he was first exposed to Islam and later converted to it.

Padilla and Reid are excellent examples of what radical Islam looks for—minority males, poor, uneducated, alienated, with a history of trouble with the law. They are often abandoned or isolated from friends and families. They are easily swayed and manipulated once they are converted to radical Islam.

There is an ample supply of these men throughout America's prison system, and in prisons throughout the world. In 2002, for the first time, the Justice Department estimated that there was almost six million Americans in prison or have served time there. That translated into 1 in 37 adults living in this country. If the trend continues, and there is every reason to believe it will, 1 in 3 black males would serve time in prison. For Hispanics, it would be 1 in 6; and for whites, 1 in 17.

Prisons are well known for exacerbating racial conflict. I learned this first hand when I ran a number of educational programs at New York's Rikers Island facility in the 1980s. I observed that a high percentage of inmates viewed “white” society as their oppressor and America's “racist legal system” as responsible for their incarceration. These beliefs cause racial confrontations throughout jails and prisons across the county. Even inmates who aren't racist soon become so as a cycle of hatred and violence between inmates draws them in.

In the violent closed world of a correctional setting, identifying with a group means survival. It can save your life. Friends protect; they watch our backs. Your enemy is their enemy. There is unity and strength in belonging to a group, especially if the group provides physical—and spiritual—protection. Islamic groups inside prisons deliver just that—protection.

Significant numbers of minority inmates seek out Islam for just that reason. Many converts enrolled in my programs told me that Islam helped them escape the violence of prison life. It was true that some converted for the more palatable halal food products, but the overwhelming majority did so for safety.

Safe passage had a price, however—proselytizing that bordered on brainwashing. Constant discussions of racism and strife ruled the day. If an individual under my supervision wasn't convinced of how “bad” this country was before his conversion, he was certainly convinced after conversion, listening to fellow Muslims constantly listings the evils of American society. It added religious righteousness to the condemnation of the perceived racist system that caused their incarceration. Time and time again, I heard converts discussing how Islam set them free from the racism of America—and gave them the right to fight back.

The nonviolent methods of Martin Luther King Jr. had no place in their discussions. To me, they were the dangerous teachings of Frantz Fanon, expressed in his Wretched of the Earth. Fannon, a black psychiatrist, posited that only through spilling the blood of oppressors could the downtrodden destroy their masters and in the process feel good about themselves. He justified violence. So did the Islam's teachings of incendiary, stem-winding imams in the prisons, as I was exposed to it.

The other significant recruiter for radical Islam is the media, especially the Internet.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government was somewhat more aggressive in trying to shut down Websites that provided material support for terrorism. It's a daunting task. Sites go up, they're closed down, and they go up again somewhere else. The problem is even greater with sites originating outside this country as states such as Syria and Iran allow terrorists to operate freely on the Internet. In passing it should be noted that next to Americans, Iranians blog and visit chat rooms more than anyone else.

Radical Muslim groups have long used the Internet to suggest violence in the name of Islam. Al-Muhajiroun, an extremist Muslim group once headquartered at the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, is such a group. The group's leader, Sheikh Omar Baki Muhammad, gained worldwide attention in 2002 when he announced a conference to celebrate “The Magnificent 19.” He meant the 9/11 hijackers.

Al-Muhajiroun has a considerable following in the New York Metropolitan area. On its Website it notes: “There is no Copyright in Islam/Please feel free to copy and distribute any part of this website, however, please do not change any of the content found in this website.” The content is easy to understand—Islam must dominate the world through violent jihad.

Another call to violence can be found on the Website of Maktab Al Jihad. This on-again-off-again site is a “news you can use” form for jihadists across the globe. The site's content is meant to incite. It promotes Holy War through the violent teachings of Abu-Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed, one-eyed former imam of London's Finsbury Park Mosque.

The Finsbury Park Mosque was where “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid and other al Qaeda terrorists such as Zacarias Moussaoui once worshiped. This is more evidence that Islamic terrorists are hard at work reaching out as much through cyberspace as through prayer.

In the twenty-first century, terrorists don't have to time their actions—as Black September did during the September 1972 Olympic Games in Munich—to coincide with the physical presence of a media crew. Portable equipment, satellite telemetry, and world-wide 24/7 cable news competition have changed all that. Terrorism today always plays to a full house and standing room is guaranteed as hordes of cable news reporters descend to cover a story. Around-the clock news programming necessitates hours of video interspersed with sound bites to attract viewers and to raise revenue. Cable networks live and die by ratings. All this, and Al-Jazeera, make for the “perfect storm” of terrorist coverage.

On April 12, 2000, I addressed a distinguished international panel of terrorism experts at the Ancillary Meeting at the Tenth United Nations Congress in Vienna, Austria. My speech, “The Impact of Terrorist Events in the Media on the Traumatization of Society,” focused on how media in the twenty-first century could traumatize, and thereby sway, society with their reporting of terrorist events, not to mention the purposeful recruitment of terrorist.

The truth is that the ability of the media to utilize radio, television, and the Internet to reach every nook and cranny throughout the world with its terrorist images makes any trauma, everyone's trauma. Instantaneous, albeit repeated, media images can traumatize as effective as a natural disaster.

Media imagery's relationship to trauma is understood by terrorists in America. Repeated images of jets flying into the World Trade Center carried on television and the Internet speaks to the increasing convergence of the place in which we live and function (the physical world) with the place in which data lives and functions (the virtual world). The new media technologies and competition for markets between news cable networks increase the repetitiveness of violent images made available to the general public. Each time we reach a new threshold, we somehow move willingly, albeit eagerly, to the next level. Desensitized, we escalate the cycle of violence to new heights.

Terrorism being communicated through our media, our media being used by terrorism in an ever-shrinking world, and the new protocols we will require to deal with the trauma witnessed by the new technology will be increasingly as important as having to deal with the terrorist event itself.

For those of who do not believe the radical Islamic network understands the influence of media, especially on the young, a story I tell about Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik convicted of influencing others to blow up a series of landmarks in New York, is on point: The sheik was asked by a youth about what to do about Western videos sold in a shop in Cairo. The sheik told the youth that heaven awaited those who with their own hands stopped the selling of blasphemous material. The youth was unsure of his ability to act alone, so he asked, “What if no one will help me and I can't do it?” The sheik answered the boy, “Just knowing the videos are evil does not assure one a place in haven.”

That night, the youth thought about his choices. The next morning he firebombed the video store.

Spiritual guidance from problematic imams, as well as media alerts from the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, will always be useful in fermenting incitement. However, the growing number of radical Islamic converts recruited inside prisons or through the media will take matters into their own hands. They will go where al Qaeda dare not tread. They will act when their rage exceeds their ability to contain their hostility. Radical Islamic converts are less disciplined than their al Qaeda counterparts, and that makes them extremely volatile.

These radical converts will not necessarily desire the immediate drama of a September 11 th type of attack. Agro-terrorism is a case in point because it takes time to be noticed. However, attacks on crops and cattle require less sophistication and planning, a positive for the neophyte terrorist. There is a wide variety of available pathogenic agents and many exotic diseases that pose no risk of accidental human infection. Radical converts are free to experiment until they get it right. There is no need to travel abroad for a terrorist apprenticeship.

Large scale attacks on high-profile targets such as the US Capital will be avoided in favor of softer targets such as schools, hospitals, and shopping malls. Why? These softer targets are more accessible and familiar to home-grown terrorists desirous of “stepping up to the plate” in the name of radical Islam. It is as simple as that. A change to softer targets by radical converts, who are part of the American fabric, should give us reason to pause.

Further contributing to an increased threat level is the Muslim Diaspora throughout Europe and growing inside the United States. Radical Islamic coverts are more likely to interact with Muslim populations that have embedded individuals sympathetic to terrorist tactics. These dialogues will further reinforce beliefs and cause action.

Radical Islamic converts will also find support at institutions of higher education. My many decades as a professor and administrator have shown me that the climate at colleges and universities is nearly always hospitable to the harshest critics of the United States. Institutions of higher education have always occupied a hallowed place in this country. They promote the free exchange of ideas and are rarely subject to government scrutiny. It makes colleges and universities the perfect place for radical Islam to hide, indoctrinate, and welcome new members to the fold.

Thinking outside the box is especially necessary given that the next attack(s) on US soil might come from home-grown terrorists. The latter will shape the direction of the terrorist threat over the next five years.

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