A Failure of Realization
Omar Farouq Abdelmutalib is a young Nigerian man, son of an eminent banker and former finance minister, educated in London. He went on to attempt to detonate a complicated chemical explosive device hidden inside his underwear in the skies above Detroit.
Nidal Malik Hassan is a psychiatrist nearing middle age, a Major in the United States Army, and a resident of Maryland. He murdered thirteen people in a shooting rampage on the Fort Hood army base.
Despite these divergent backgrounds both men have a great deal in common.
Both were indoctrinated, primarily via the internet, by Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born, Al-Qaeda-linked Muslim cleric currently residing in Yemen.
Both Abdelmutalib and Hassan were in close contact with Awlaki before they made their fateful decisions to embark upon Jihad. Nor were they alone. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) the New Mexico-born Alwaki’s preaching was described as inspiration for both the Fort Dix terror plot as well as the 7/7 Bus and train bombings in London , and Alwaki’s online sermons have been viewed nearly three million times, receiving a host of supportive comments from viewers around the world.
Neither Abdelmutalib nor Hasan were strangers to western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Abdelmutalib was apparently nicknamed “The Nigerian” by CIA and was already on a terror watch list. He was also on the radar screen of British intelligence, three years prior to the bombing attempt, because he appeared on wire tap surveillance being conducted of known UK jihadists. As for Hasan, the FBI had investigated remarks made by the psychiatrist turned gunmen to the radical imam Alwaki and bizarrely concluded they were, “consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center.”
If on September 11th, 2001 “the most important failure was one of imagination,” as the 9/11 Commission wrote, then these most recent attacks have been a “failure of realization,” a stubborn refusal to draw the appropriate conclusion from the available information. It is only by such failures that the Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano could possibly state, “the system works,” after a terrorist attack which was averted only by good fortune and a quick thinking Dutch tourist, despite abundant intelligence and law enforcement information.
It is the same stubborn rejection which allows President Obama to label Abdelmutalib a “lone extremist,” even as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula releases its post-attack celebratory video praising the “Mujahid from Nigeria.”
Nor are government officials the only one’s suffering from this failure. So too, for major media figures who asserted that “post-traumatic stress disorder,” may have led a man, who gave full length lectures (complete with power-point slides) on the Koranic pronouncements regarding beheading unbelievers, to kill thirteen of his fellow Americans.
When it comes to the Jihad against the West, there are no “lone extremists.” Whether trained and equipped in the deserts of Yemen by hardened Al Qaeda terrorists recently released from Gitmo, as was Abdelmutalib, or motivated by the online religious sermons of a cleric from the comforts of a Maryland living room like Major Hasan, jihadists everywhere are agents of the same violent political ideology.
Following the Christmas Day bombing attempt, authorities instituted a number of new procedures, limiting everything from when passengers may go to the airplane restrooms, to what they may lay across their laps during the flight. And while there may be some specific procedures of value in preventing a repeat of Abelmutalib’s bombing attempt, taken as a whole they are largely an effort by the security bureaucracy to appear busy. It is not as though Al Qaeda and its ideological fellow-travelers have declared a jihad against airliners as a means of transportation. No, their war is against America specifically, and the entire West more generally, no matter where they are.
The government will likely now spend millions on improving scanners in airports and other sensitive locations, which is fine. But we would be far better served, and exponentially safer, if the government spent more time trying to detect the real weapon, the jihadists themselves. It is the indoctrinated jihadist, who is the real danger; , not the mere tool with which he is equipped whether it is a bomb, gun, axe or knife. As it was put best in the Kubrick film, “Full Metal Jacket”, “It is a hard heart that kills.”
The real target of our efforts should be the heart-hardeners. The makers of human bombs. The ideologues like Anwar Al Awaki who indoctrinate and recruit on the internet, and throughout radical mosques all over the world.
So far the efforts to identify, expose, and pre-empt the internet clerics and the extremist preachers have been largely ignored by the government security establishment. Our security establishment finds itself institutionally incapable of coming to terms with the full extent of the Islamist ideology with which they are at war.
Instead it is private organizations that stand, like the little Dutch boy with their fingers in the dike, waiting for the government to wake up and relieve them. Research institutes like MEMRI, not the CIA documents the radical sermons and videos being spread throughout the Arab world. Networks of radical hate preachers and their associates are tracked, not by the FBI, but by non-profits like the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Terrorist websites and propaganda videos are deleted or shutdown not by court order, but by tireless grassroots projects with names like “Operation Youtube Smackdown.”
To secure the American people, the government must shift its focus. It must work to preempt jihadists, not moments before they board the plane with their explosives, or even days before they reach their Yemeni or Afghanistan training camps, but before they are indoctrinated into this deadly ideology. It is well past time that the government finally commits to winning the war of ideas.