Shoebat, who was hired by the South Dakota Department of Homeland Security to speak to law enforcement officers, claims to be a former terrorist who converted to Christianity and offers, via his foundation, what he says is an inside view of what a terrorist looks like. He says to look for a mark on the forehead of fundamentalist Muslims — but no facial hair. After years of praying with their heads to the ground, they obtain a mark on their forehead. “A Muslim with a mark on his forehead but no beard is up to no good,” said Keith Davies, Shoebat’s business partner.
Shoebat’s credentials have been doubted. He’s described as an opportunist who, after the flood of homeland security grant money that followed 9/11, emerged from the woodwork as a “terrorist expert.”
In 2010, the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department hired a retired FBI agent to teach a two-day antiterrorism training course, but the course was stopped after the first day because the trainer provided “incorrect, blanket statements” about who might be involved in terrorism, the department said.
Army Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, who heads the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, recently expressed concern to National Public Radio that many individuals are speaking with authority that comes without merit, and they’re giving state and local law enforcement false impressions about the terror threat. His colleague Bill Braniff, director of the center’s practitioner education, said it is happening “fairly consistently” around the nation.
Everyone acknowledges the growing threat from the homegrown, radicalized terrorist, but the training being provided worries some people. In a letter to U.S. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Maine, asked for assurance that federal funds for antiterrorism training are not being wasted on programs that could undermine the effort to deter homegrown terrorism.
Since Osama bin Laden was killed in May, 19 Americans have been arrested for terrorist activities (as of early October). Al-Qaida is a splintered group and is, along with other groups, inspiring homegrown attacks on Americans. For example, the five Muslim men from Alexandria, Va., arrested in 2009 for plotting to kill Americans showed no signs of radicalization. They reportedly became acquainted with an al-Qaida operative through social networking websites.
It’s this splintered effect that makes it difficult for law enforcement to find these individuals.
How We Got Here
Several years after 9/11, urgency was placed on training state and local law enforcement officers on homeland security and antiterrorism, and the feds flooded states with money to make it happen. Since 2006, the DHS has spent almost $40 million on antiterrorism training, according to reports.
The DHS responded to Lieberman’s letter by saying the department has “robust standards to ensure that counterterrorism training funded by DHS is taught by qualified instructors and based on the latest intelligence and most effective policing techniques.” To receive funds, the DHS said, counterterrorism programs must meet course certification guidelines reviewed by an independent, third-party panel.
Matt Mayer, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said there are “tons and tons of courses” available, many of which are “too thin, too awareness oriented, not technical enough or just not effective.” Mayer, who was a senior official at the DHS under secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, said, “We had worked to try to create a very basic core template from awareness through technical levels that would allow the training to happen. My sense is that it kind of got away from us.”
What happened was that every entity wanted to have a training program approved to please its constituents, Mayer said, and this created a cornucopia of courses without a focus on standards or topics that would get high-risk areas up to speed.
The strategy for most law enforcement agencies, he said, is to educate officers on the basics of Islamic-inspired terrorism — but that’s not enough.
“We need to start digging a whole lot deeper on [suspicious activity reports] training to make sure we’re not sending a whole lot of data that’s not meaningful and throwing more hay on a haystack, making it harder to find the needle,” Mayer said. “We’ve taken the broad brush stroke rather than a surgeon’s scalpel approach.”
A DHS spokesman said the department isn’t a standard-setting organization and can’t control who a state agency hires to speak about terrorism, but added that there’s an effort under way to streamline the process of approving courses. And agencies can’t use DHS grants to fund training courses that the department hasn’t approved.
Adopt the Mission
A culture change among law enforcement is necessary if the nation is serious about combating homegrown terrorism, Mayer said. The law enforcement community, except in Los Angeles and New York, he said, is still mired in a culture of “aggressive enforcement” and is reluctant to change, which inhibits the ability to combat terror threats.
Part of the reason for that is that law enforcement has always looked at terrorism as a federal government priority, and as federal funding to states dries up, that will continue to be a challenge.
“Law enforcement really needs to adopt this national security mission and understand that they are the tip of the spear,” Mayer said. “And in some cases, they’re going to be the ones that detect and prevent bad things from happening.”
Law enforcement agencies should go beyond the See Something, Say Something campaign, Mayer said, and learn the structure of al-Qaida, how it works, its typical modes of operation, the triggers of terrorist activity, as well as the laws surrounding civil liberties and how not to violate those. “Not just, ‘There’s a guy taking a picture of a bridge,’ but trying to understand a little bit more about the sophisticated elements of what they’re doing that aren’t going to be that obvious. It’s one of the key things we need to think through.”
Mayer said whether the nation is focusing too much on Islamists will be the “great question.” But for now, the focal point should be on the homegrown radicalized threat and the continued threat from al-Qaida.
Continued training and refreshing law enforcement on the latest intelligence is important, Mayer said, even if the training is via distance learning.
Rick Nelson, senior fellow and director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also expressed concern about the homegrown terrorist, whether the person is an al-Qaida affiliate or an angry white supremacist. But he wonders about putting law enforcement in an information-gathering mode.
“Law enforcement at any level faces a difficult challenge when it comes to terrorism and extremism,” Nelson said, “because on the one hand these officials, who are relied upon to protect our civil liberties and civil rights, are at the same time supposed to ensure that acts of violence don’t occur.”
It’s one thing to know that a person has become radicalized, but it’s difficult to know when that person will cross the line from radicalization to violence, Nelson said. “The law enforcement community at the federal, state and local levels has the impossible task of trying to figure out when an individual moves from rhetoric to violent action.”
Nelson said if it’s determined that law enforcement officers should become information-gathering entities, then the public should expect them to push the edges of civil liberties, and Americans will have to assume more risk. “That’s OK, if we realize what we’re accepting.”
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is recognized as one of the most innovative in the area of proactive law enforcement, but isn’t part of the national fusion center effort and, critics say, has not been subjected to the same privacy and civil liberties policy requirements when obtaining federal funding. The NYPD has also come under fire from certain groups for what they see as overaggressive surveillance methods.
Though there are approved courses from the DHS, training remains largely the responsibility of locals. “That’s the way the nation is built,” Nelson said. “It’s up to the state and local governments what experts they want to bring in. One community might see an individual as someone they want to learn from and another might determine that individual has no value. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
He added that the government needs to ensure the efficient use of resources, “but it must be careful not to inadvertently undermine training, education and standardization, which are critical components in building an effective homeland security enterprise.”
James Ayre, assistant secretary for training and exercises at the California Emergency Management Agency, said there are “hundreds” of courses available to California law enforcement and first responders. They’re developed in California, approved by the DHS and designed to focus on prevention and protection to avert, deter and minimize attacks.
“At any given time, there are things that are more important to look for,” Ayre said. “If you connect the intelligence world to threats to training, obviously there is a lag time. We build courses in the state, then it goes to the feds and then it is not done for quite a while.”
Ayre said he knows that not all of the courses taken by California law enforcement agencies are approved by the feds because the grant money comes in different forms. And he said the state is using standards and tactics to address the appropriateness of certain training, such as focusing on a religion. “It is human nature that if someone has that sort of mindset, then there could be a risk, but one would hope through all of the other training our police get that they will see it as such and write it off and see that there is personal opinion there.”
A couple of California’s courses are given in conjunction with the correctional system where al-Qaida and other groups are established and recruiting lone wolves.
The Recruitment
The radicalization of inmates first became visible to prison officials in 2005, said Lt. Arnel Bona from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Office of Correctional Safety. “It’s actually pretty widespread.”
The prison gangs include al-Qaida, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, white supremacists and others. Bona said radicalization doesn’t lead to terrorism, but those exhibiting attributes associated with violent extremists are reported and monitored by the correctional system and the federal government.
“We report it if there are indicators that we feel need to be reported to the FBI or the homeland security community,” Bona said. “We look at the criminal predicate that led us to the suspicion and report it to the fusion center.”
The Inmate Basic Awareness Class, which covers how to identify radicalized individuals, is offered to some state, local and federal law enforcement officers and even some firefighters and emergency managers. The intermediate course is being rolled out now and covers monitoring these individuals.
“We train correctional staff and law enforcement on the indicators and warnings of radicalization that may lead to terrorism,” Bona said. “Oftentimes it’s just a tattoo, and if it’s a significant tattoo — like al-Qaida, Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah or ‘Death to America’ — it’s reported to the fusion center.”
Also, embedded in each of California’s 33 prisons is a terrorism liaison officer who shares information with law enforcement outside the prison. Once a prisoner who has been identified as radicalized is released, he is monitored by parole agents and, it is hoped, the FBI.
But the biggest threats may come from social networking sites and the extremists’ websites, where law enforcement needs to play offense, said Mike Walker, senior consultant for the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School, at the National Emergency Management Association Conference in October. “It’s not good enough to play defense and disrupt plots,” he said. “We need to go on the offensive and stop recruitment.”
Nelson called this his biggest concern and said whatever is being done to stop recruiting on these sites isn’t nearly enough. “We have individuals making policy who have not necessarily grown up at being what I would call a ‘digital native,’” he said. “Our policies, by nature, are evolving much more slowly than technology is.”
