Sunday, May 11, 2008
A top counterterrorism expert says the London suicide bombers may not have acted alone -- and America may be next.
Jul 19, 2005 | The terrorist attacks that rocked London's mass transit system on July 7 were a shock but not a surprise. The British government had expected, planned for and thwarted plots to carry out similar attacks for years. Though the bus and subway bombings were no less devastating for the families and friends of the 56 people killed and more than 700 injured, the storyline quickly became one of British stoicism and resilience -- the bustling capital took a punch to the gut but stood tall, essentially getting back to business by late that day.
But a different shock wave hit several days later, as investigators began to dig out details of how the attacks were executed -- by four British nationals from Leeds, radical Islamists who had concealed, even from their own families, their plans to commit mass murder using their own bodies as weapons. One was a respected counselor at a primary school; two had left behind their own young children. Nearly four years into the U.S.-led global war against terrorism, the first ever "homegrown" suicide attacks carried out in Western Europe had redefined, chillingly, the parameters of the battle.
"What this shows us is that in many societies the enemy is closer than we think -- and that includes the United States," says Bruce Hoffman, a top counterterrorism expert and director of the RAND Corporation in Washington. Hoffman says the threat of suicide attacks is more acute in Europe than in the U.S., but he warns against the "false expectation" that it won't happen here. "We simply can't stop all terrorist threats and live hermetically sealed off from this particular menace," he says. "There is no such thing as a perfect defense."
Late last year, in a RAND report titled "Three Years After: Next Steps in the War on Terror," Hoffman wrote that suicide attackers are "perhaps the ultimate 'smart bombs'" and that it appeared "very likely" that there will be more suicide attacks in the United States in the future.
European and U.S. intelligence officials have been facing one particularly troubling question since the London attacks: How do you stop an enemy that you can no longer effectively categorize? The inability to profile the enemy -- a pursuit deemed essentially impossible by Israeli security experts after extensive experience with suicide attacks there -- makes it more critical than ever to take away terrorists' ability to recruit and regenerate, according to Hoffman. "Win, lose or draw in Iraq," he says, "in some respects the damage has been done." Hoffman spoke to Salon by phone from his office in Washington.
Were you surprised to learn that these were suicide attacks carried out by four men who had grown up in Leeds?
Intelligence officials in Europe have known for some time that this was a problem waiting to explode into reality. For example, the Dutch intelligence and security service report for 2002 had stated this was an emergent trend and a profound threat. They had noticed that terrorist recruiters and talent-spotters were no longer only hanging around radicalized mosques, but were deliberately seeking out youths, in this case Dutch, who were for all intents and purposes as Dutch and as adolescent as any other teenager -- but who also had about them some sense of alienation or cultural dislocation. And they would move in, almost like sharks smelling blood, to exploit and radicalize people who were assimilated, many of whom had been born in the Netherlands rather than North Africa or Southeast Asia or the Middle East, and who hadn't been practicing Muslims.
It has certainly been the same situation in Britain. In 1999 a senior British police official told me exactly what Tony Blair and British police officials said the weekend after the bombings: that British authorities were aware of upwards of 3,000 British Muslims who were trained in al-Qaida camps in the 1990s. The British official also told me that they'd counted 53 British Muslims since the 9/11 attacks who left the United Kingdom to engage in acts of terrorism elsewhere, so it was just a matter of time before it was turned inwards. Before this attack, the authorities had disrupted at least a half dozen fairly serious plots within the U.K. since 9/11.
So what do these attacks say about the nature of the enemy? They seem to have chilling implications in terms of the ability to identify who the enemy are, and how to stop them.
Often suicide terrorists are portrayed as angry, frustrated and marginalized individuals, in some instances with a hatred and anger that's so profound that they're willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. But that obscures the fact, for instance, that many of the 3,000 British Muslims who left to train in terrorism didn't just pick up on their own; it may be the same in the case of these suicide bombers -- there's an active recruitment process and an organization behind this.
It raises a key point: As the Israelis have already said in the context of suicide terrorism there, it's essentially impossible to profile. Keep in mind, this isn't the first evidence of this. There was the time when two British Muslims went to Israel in 2003 and carried out a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a bar on the Tel Aviv waterfront. They appeared to be similarly assimilated and well-adjusted; one was a graduate of the London School of Economics and was married and had children. So on the one hand you have people like Richard Reid [the convicted "shoe bomber"], a juvenile delinquent who spent much of his young adult life in prison, where he converted to Islam; and on the other you have a graduate of a leading British university.
With these four suicide bombers, what I find both striking and alarming is that it isn't a matter of one size fits all. You've got an 18-year-old, you've got somebody who was a teacher; you have three of Pakistani origin, but also someone from the Caribbean. This is a particular problem in the United Kingdom; when you talk about rounding up the usual suspects, the short list is pretty long. There are the various immigrant communities, but also the phenomenon of British converts to Islam -- people of color, but also not.
So it sounds like profiling is pretty useless at this point. What does that say about the magnitude of the threat?
What this shows us is that in many societies the enemy is closer than we think -- and that includes the United States. Al-Qaida, of course, maintained offices inside the U.S. through the 1990s, operating out of Brooklyn and many other places. I don't think any country is necessarily immune.
I think there is almost a desire to believe these attackers in London were acting on their own, because that would mean the end of the threat, as if it were a one-off or an aberration. But it becomes much more disturbing a problem when you find that there is an organization that is identifying and cultivating people who they think would be susceptible to signing up for "martyrdom."
In light of London, how do you rate the threat of suicide attacks in the United States now?
Well, to some degree past is prologue: In 1997 two Palestinians living in the United States plotted a suicide attack on the New York City subway. They weren't citizens, but they were residents here, not belonging to any [known] terrorist group. It was averted literally at the last minute because a third accomplice got cold feet and informed the police, who had no idea about it. So we shouldn't delude ourselves that this can't happen here.
That said, it's still an apples-and-oranges comparison between the United States and Britain. We know al-Qaida was active here -- they even had an agent who infiltrated the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg in the 1990s -- but I don't think there's anyone in the U.S. who can stand up and say, "We know 3,000 Americans have trained in al-Qaida camps." Jose Padilla was one, but the number is much lower. I don't think we have the same hard core of disenfranchised, alienated people who form the nucleus of the problem.
Get Salon in your mailbox!