Al-Qaeda in the : A Complete Analysis of Terror Offences

SPEAKERS:

Emily Dyer, Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society

Robin Simcox, Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society

TIME: 1 – 2pm, Wednesday 26th June 2013

VENUE: Committee Room 17, House of Commons, , SW1A 0AA

Transcript

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to this rather special meeting of the Henry Jackson Society. I’m Julian Lewis MP [and] I have a particular interest in this area as a member of the UK Parliament’s security and intelligence committee, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see the publication before today and, for those of you who haven’t, as you can see, it’s a little light bed time reading. But what I think is going to be most interesting for us all to hear today is the way in which the authors, towards the end of the volume, have brought out particular trends and characteristics that they have deduced from the absolute mass of case studies of the activities of al-Qaeda operatives and imitators in the United States. Now, we have two speakers here today, most of you will have seen the details but, just to remind you, our first speaker will be Emily Dyer. Emily, like Robin Simcox, our second speaker, is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and both of them indeed have an impressive list of well- known publications to which they have contributed articles and analysis. Emily studied International Relations at Birmingham University and she subsequently went to work for the Department of Education, and in particular she was a Higher Executive Officer in the Preventing Extremism Unit of that department.

Robin, as I say, has also contributed to many publications, and he was educated at the Universities of Leeds and Newcastle. He has an MSc in US Foreign Policy and he has spoken on many platforms including making a presentation at the White House, and at the National Counter Terrorism Centre, the British Parliament, the US Special Operations Command and the European Parliament, so you can’t win them all Robin, and you have to take the rough with the smooth.

I understand we’re going to have to be out of here at 2 o’ clock on the dot, so it’s my great pleasure to introduce Emily Dyer first to start off the presentation. Between them they’ll take up about 35 minutes and then we should have plenty of time for questions. Emily…

Emily Dyer

Thank you, and thank you all for coming to listen to what was the result of close to an 18- month project looking at terrorism trends within the United States. There are many different figures floating around as to the extent of the total number of al-Qaeda offenders, but myself and my co-author Robin tried to be as precise as possible in determining what constituted an al-Qaeda related offence, or what we call an A.Q.R.O. We were looking for members of al- Qaeda or an al-Qaeda affiliated group, people who have links or are in contact with the group’s leadership, those who are trained in al-Qaeda training camps, but also those who had an al-Qaeda inspired motive for their offence, and we came up with 171 individuals from 1997 – 2011. Once we arrived at that figure, we collected exhaustive amounts of information about the individuals in order to then analyse the trends that came through. We looked at everything from their nationality, to their education levels, to whether they were a religious convert or not, to the type of offence they had actually committed and the sentence they then received, whether they had received terrorist training or combat experience and their links, if any, to designated terrorist organisations.

The idea was to make this as comprehensive as possible, but what you can’t do is to create one solid linear line as to whether the threat is increasing or decreasing by looking at the results, because it changes year in year out. There are significant spikes throughout the time period we looked at, for example there was a significant increase in individuals charged and subsequently convicted after 9/11, but then a big drop by 2008, which preceded a sharp increase in 2009, [and] so what made up the numbers really were these huge spikes. Now, in trying to figure out the real nature of the threat, the first thing we looked at was the age of these individuals, so if I could just bring up the first slide…

Now, this is about as unsurprising as you’re going to get in terms of the statistics. It’s no great secret that younger men; and the vast majority were men - are those most likely to be drawn to terrorism, so you see almost a third were between the age of 20 and 24. However there were quite surprising caveats to this. The oldest individual we had in the 50+ category was a 63 year old woman called Hawo Hassan who wired money to al-Shabaab from her small town in Minnesota. So, while a couple of strange cases like this came up, the majority of cases were young men. However, what we found most striking was who these young men were. If we could have the next slide please…

As you can see, the majority… 54% were US citizens. In our minds, this indicates that a change really is needed in our perception of the terrorist threat facing the United States. The formative experience the US had with this sort of terrorism was 9/11; it was planned by a Saudi, based in Afghanistan, using various operatives from around the - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and North Africa. But, as we can see, the majority of offenders are US citizens, far and away higher than any of the other common nationalities; Saudi Arabians, Pakistanis… I apologise to those of you that can’t see it at the back. Of that majority, 36% were born in the United States, so these weren’t just people who had come and gained US citizenship, over a third were actually born in the US. So the majority of the threat facing the United States was coming from within the country itself. If I could bring up the next slide…

Next we looked at employment and education. The perception I think, in the UK, and to an extent in the US, is that these individuals turned to terrorist activity having fallen on hard times due to a lack of economic opportunities. While I’m not discounting this completely, and it can be one of many factors, what we can see here is that 57% of individuals were, in fact, in employment or education, and if you break that down further, 44% were in employment and 13% were students and of the total overall 20% were in skilled employment; we had computer programmers, software engineers, financial analysts, pharmacists - it was a broad range of skilled individuals. So, what we’re beginning to see here is that the common perception that terrorists are uneducated, far- from far flung tribal towns in Saudi Arabia has to begin to change. More often than not, it is US citizens who are well educated and employed so, rather than being marginalised by the system. They’re actually passing through it. If I could just bring up the next slide…Thank you.

Then we looked at where these individuals lived in the US. You can see in some of the dark states dotted around, are where the terrorists were most likely to be living; California, Texas in the South, Florida, Illinois, Virginia and North Carolina, but the most common place of residence prior to charge was New York, which was also a real hub of movement and organisation dating back to the early 1990s. Next slide please…

We then looked at religious converts. 23% of individuals who committed al-Qaeda related offences were converts. In fact, in 8 of the 15 years studied, there was a higher proportion of offences committed by converts than non-converts and, just to highlight the extent of the problem in the US and radicalisation taking place within the US, 95% of all converts were US citizens and 54% of all offenders who were born in the US were, in fact, converts, which for us I think was one of the most striking findings of the report… If I could just get the slide… And the next one…

In our attempt to give another layer of sophistication to our analysis we then looked at various key roles within the actual offences carried out. We grouped the individuals into five categories, so; active participants, who could have been fully fledged members of al-Qaeda, who may have sworn loyalty to Bin Laden, who were actively plotting operationally large scale attacks against the US; active participants made up the largest proportion of every one we looked at, and they made up a third. A quarter we labelled as aspirants, so people who had shown an interest in terrorism but whose plans weren’t in any way fully developed. Facilitators made up a fifth, and these were people who were transferring money, sorting documentation and taking care of the administration side behind many of these terrorism offences. Then we have trained aspirants who were individuals, like aspirants - who had shown an interest in committing a terrorist act, but had gone that step further and gone and received terrorist training abroad, and now ideologues at the end which makes up 2%, which is the lowest, but I think that’s partly to do with the US legislation and the way it’s framed. The incitement crimes, which are reasonably common in the UK, don’t feature as much in the US, so we don’t think this low percentage gives a full picture of the significant threat posed by ideologues to the United States, but it shows only a small proportion pass through the legal system. Next slide please…

We then decided to add another layer in really identifying the threat by looking at who had received terrorist training and combat experience. Almost half - so 47% - of all individuals had received terrorist training. We can see Afghanistan [and] Pakistan are the main countries, but Somalia and Yemen have much lower numbers and I still think the trend of individuals attending training camps in these newer countries is yet to filter through the legal system and, if we were to write another report in 10, 15 years’ time, I think the picture would look very different to the one now. And, finally, of US citizens, one third had received training. Those who went on to – sorry, if I could just get the next slide…Those who went on to fight abroad tended to do so in Afghanistan, and then we see Bosnia and Somalia, but what we didn’t see was a linear progression of those who had received terrorist training to then go on and fight abroad. Lots of people came home after training and then went straight on to commit their offence. For example, the report includes profiles of the Lackawanna Six, which I’m sure most of you are familiar with, who trained in Al Farouq, which is one of the main al- Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, and then went on to commit their offence providing material support to al-Qaeda. Next slide please…sorry, can I have the next slide please? Thank you.

We then looked at terrorist networks and the percentage of those linked to designated terrorist organisations, or D.T.Os. You can see on the right a list of groups, and I’ll send this to anyone who wants to have a look, a list of groups that are al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda inspired, so 57% of all the individuals we looked at were linked to D.T.Os; the most common being al- Qaeda itself and then followed by Lashkar-e-Taiba and al-Shabaab. Next slide please. Thank you.

Finally, we looked at what we referred to as Mass Casualty Operatives, and over a fifth, so 21% were those who were actively planning terrorist attacks that would lead to large – a large scale loss of life in the United States like 9/11, the East African Embassy bomb attacks etc. Now we can see where these individuals trained, but I think the per cent to look out for here is the 11% at the end of individuals who have received no training at all, because this shows there were some individuals who were simply inspired by the ideology, like Carlos Bledsoe, who carried out a drive-by-shooting in Little Rock, Arkansas, who then felt able to go forward and commit such a serious offence without the usual al-Qaeda training, [and] we think this is really significant. Next slide please.

We can also see here - the attacks that made up some of the highest proportion of fatalities amongst the offences, and beneath we can see that the Mass Casualty Operatives, so the sharpest end of the threat, were much [more] likely to be connected to a designated terrorist organisation than those who were not Mass Casualty Operatives. Next slide please.

So there’s a lot of information and analysis in this report. We appreciate this is only a small part of a very important picture, and there are of course countless terrorists that have not passed through the legal system. So there is no exact science to predicting the future of terrorist offences but, what we hope these statistics will go some way in doing, is helping those in the West, and the US especially, to have a clearer view of the threat that it’s facing today, and that is that future attacks in the US will be less well organised, less complex and more likely to be committed by citizens and residents of the United States. Now I’m going to pass over to Robin Simcox, my co-author, who’s going to compare some of the key trends found between the UK and the US. Thank you.

Robin Simcox

Thank you. So [the] Henry Jackson Society, in 2010/2011, published versions of the UK equivalent of this report and I co-authored both of those publications, so it struck us as a worthwhile exercise, to compare, since we were working with similar methodologies, how these trends matchup between the UK and the US, and any key differences there may be. I think this is really relevant at the moment because events in Boston and Woolwich over the last couple months have reminded us what an on-going and serious threat this is. So again, on the unsurprising stuff, the fact that the vast majority are young men is going to be no real surprise to anyone, but Brits had a higher percentage of - Britain had a much higher percentage of citizens- its own citizens, carrying out this attack. America has 54%, it’s a majority, it’s still I think hugely important, but compared to Britain which has 68% the problem isn’t yet as pronounced. Home grown radicalization does appear to still be a greater problem in the UK than the US. However the US has I think problems that are – [that] go beyond the UK’s; one of them would be the huge diversity of the offenders. In the US 28 different nationalities were - became al-Qaeda related offenders from a huge range of backgrounds and ancestries.

In the UK this was only half; only 14 different - only 14 different nationalities were represented and half of those ancestries – half of the offences were committed by those of south central Asian ancestry. In the US, the offenders lived in 26 different states, the most common of which, as you’ve seen, is New York, but even New York only had 14% of the overall total. The problem in the UK is significantly different. Almost half the offenders in the UK lived here in London, so I would suggest in terms of resources and targeting the kind of networks and the areas that can be especially vulnerable, it’s almost a little simpler for the UK because we know London is such a big problem; in the US it’s diffused and it’s spread throughout the country.

When we look at - as much as you can measure things like integration, [the] concept of integration by statistics, and I’m aware this isn’t an entirely perfect way of doing it, but when you look at things like occupation and education levels, we saw 57% of the cases in America were working or were in university. In the UK it’s 44% so again, quite significantly lower. Of all those who had been to college, [in] the US 52%, the UK only 30% so, if you’re going to make socio-economic comparisons, between the US and the UK it would appear as if the US offenders were generally much more integrated. It’s true anyway that the Muslim population in the US earns – [inaudible] generally, earn on average higher than the average American citizen, but this hasn't, by any way shape or form, been a barrier to radicalisation. Success and prospering doesn’t mean that you’re going to be - you’re going to be… there’s no vulnerability to al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda ideology. In terms of the converts, the American percentage of 23% is again higher than the UK which had 15% of offenders [who] were converts, but there is an important caveat to this, and again the statistics performed on this generally haven’t been - I don’t think, are fully fleshed out, there’s only one study I know of that has looked at this, and that’s the percentage of overall converts in the population. So, 2007 Pew Research Centre poll found 23% of the US Muslim population were converts and that perfectly matches up [with] the 23% of offenders in this publication. The UK doesn’t have an exhaustive comparison, but those groups that have looked at it estimate around 4% of the UK Muslim population are converts, and yet 15% of the offenders in the UK case studies were converts to the faith, so converts were very disproportionately represented in the UK, whereas they were exactly in line in the US.

Going past the backgrounds to looking at the sharper end of this; Americans - we saw 47% had received terrorist training in, in… in formal terrorist camps, in the UK only 28% so much less. In terms of where these locations were, the vast majority in the US went to Afghanistan; in the UK the majority went to Pakistan. I would say not that surprising, considering the large amount of traffic that travels between the UK and Pakistan, and obviously the historical and cultural ties that go between the two countries. In terms of actual combat experience, again far greater numbers with the Americans; 18%, the UK just 4% of individuals had had some kind of combat experience in the Afghanistans, Kashmirs, Chechnyas, Iraqs; all these places that we now associate with these kind of conflicts.

In terms of links to designated terrorist organisations, again, much higher in America; 57% of individuals in America and just 34% in the British cases.

At the end of 2011 in the US, there had been 10 major terrorism plots. In the UK, this is in 2010; there’d been 8. In the US, this involved 36 individuals, in the UK; 37, so you’re looking at very similar numbers in both categories but with one huge difference. In the US plots, only 17% were American citizens. In the UK, 86% were Brits. So, you have all these statistics laying out that Brits are less likely to be trained abroad than their American counterparts, they’re less likely to have fought abroad, they’re less likely to be linked [to] and formal members of a designated terrorist organisation, but they are much more common [and] have much more ambition to kill on a mass scale than their US counterparts. This lack of terrorist training, this lack of combat experience, this lack of sometimes networks - of formal ties to terrorist organisations, doesn’t mean these things can still change, it’s… there’s not always a link between receiving the training [and] then going on and fighting - subsequently going on and fighting, and then plotting attacks when you – when they - return. So, I think this is, and we’ve seen this, I guess - a microcosm of this - in the Woolwich and Boston cases; the Woolwich murders carried out by it appears two-two Brits, and the Boston attacks carried out by one America citizen but also one foreign born individual.

I think that’s more statistics than any group of people should ever have to take in at any one time so I’m going to stop there. All I would just finish by saying [is] that, to echo what Emily says, this report tells us about trends in the past and doesn’t necessarily tell us about the future and, I think if anything, Boston and the Tsarnaev case… I don’t know anybody who thought – who ever would have guessed the next attack to hit America would have been, at the moment – [it] looks like it’s linked in Chechnya, so this entire study, this entire field, remains extremely unpredictable and this is our effort to try and…to try at least bring some clarity to what’s been going on over the last decade or so. Thanks.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Thank you very much indeed.

[Audience applause]

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Well both speakers have been admirably concise, so that – and that gives us plenty of time for questions, we’ve got about 30-35 minutes. I think what I might try and do, depending on how many hands go up, is take a couple of questions at a time, given that we’ll probably have to have two people answering each question, so I think that way we’ll get through the business. So I see this gentleman first, and Sally Leivesley, and then Lord Anderson, just spotted him… Yes please… [points to audience member]

Question 1

I’ll refer to the lady, Miss Emily. Miss Emily, you made reference to the drive-by-shooting at Little Rock and you made reference to… that this is something that’s going to come; apparently the person that did that didn’t have any technical – didn’t have any, should we say formal training, he was an amateur, and whereas other people you gave the impression, you may dismiss it, you gave it more significance, you said ‘I think this is something’ something like ‘I think this is something we’re going to see more of’. Enlarge on that, what’s your opinion?

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Okay, thank you…and Sally Leivesley.

Question 2 - Sally Leivesley

Yes, thanks very much. It’s superb to see such a collation of data and without the benefit of seeing the analysis, can I just make a couple of points which you might be able to help me with? One of the difficulties with your data is extrapolating what is really representing policing activity and the difference in policing and intelligence between the two countries in the way the successes are. And, the second is, I doubt that the front end people you’ve studied necessarily tells you much more than who the cannon fodder are and may not necessarily be predictive as to the extent and scale – the real scale of the back end organisation and levels of influence and I think that’s important. Significantly, when we look at the future and predictive, we also need to look at nation state influences in terms of what is the resident capacity within the US and in the UK for groups such as Hizbullah to become [a] totally different scale of threat to what you are talking about at the moment. So the prediction to the future [inaudible] terrorism, I think, is different.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Thank you, right…Who’d like to go first? Presumably you, Emily?

Emily Dyer

If I could just deal with the first question, and Robin deals with the second… In terms of the drive-by-shooting by Carlos Bledsoe, the point I was making was that there are an increasing number of individuals that we’re seeing who have not, as you said, had any form of formal training. They haven’t gone abroad to Al Farouq or Al Matar training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan and what we’re seeing is that it’s increasingly easy to be radicalised and to just go out and commit a terrorist offence without having to have any training, and also the accessibility to this extremist ideology is so out there nowadays [that] you can, within a second, access a terrorist extremist website. So, the fact that 11% of Mass Casualty Operatives haven’t received training... it might sound like a small percentage, but really I think that it’s quite large [as] the preconceived idea was that they… individuals go to terrorist training camps, they receive training, they go and commit a terrorist offence... So that 11% still surprised me even though it was quite small.

Audience member

And do you think it’s going to get worse in the future?

Emily Dyer I think it’s going to get easier and easier not to go to training camps. People are starting to realise that they don’t need to. We saw people set their own training camps up in the US, but even people who don’t go that far can still…they’re realising that they don’t necessarily need to be part of a network or need to be formally trained. The Mass Casualty Operatives, so the more serious terrorists, were more likely to be connected to [a] designated terrorist organisation, less of them are lone wolves.

Question 3

In your opinion, what’s the best way for our security services to keep us safe from people such as this…because, to me, they appear to be - by your description - just individual crazies who’ve just had a bad day and they’re using religion…using religion as an excuse…?

Emily Dyer

I mean we’ve just come back from Washington D.C and a lot of policy people that we spoke to were really worried about the growing, unknown threat. People who haven’t necessarily even ever gone abroad or they’re not on any sort of register, on any lists… We’re not here to offer policy recommendations, all we’re here to do is to talk about the scale of the threat [and] I would say that that threat’s growing.

Robin Simcox

I’ll just make a quick caveat on that…it’s true that the ideology is more and more easy to access and that’s coming at a time when training camps are getting more and more difficult. The case that finished a couple of months ago involving these British guys going to Pakistan and al-Qaeda were telling them they don’t really want them there first of all…it brings a lot of attention and they can’t keep them safe, they can’t - it brings US drones, it brings the rest of it…But, once they were there, they wanted to train them and they wanted to send them back; not necessarily…there was a plot in motion but they also wanted them to distribute their training.

So, the problem for al-Qaeda is all the attention, all the huge amounts of resources from the US especially, that have gone towards disrupting their operations, makes it so much harder for Westerners to travel there now and return, and so I think that’s a reason you may see more people seeking out these self-start plots because the accessibility – I mean, think of how easy it was to join up with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 1997, you could do it pretty much…no one in England really cared if you did it… So different now, so I think that explains one reason, and I think that the second – in terms of what security services can and may do…the point about them not being…not being able to know who everyone is, I think is completely true although in the Woolwich case there was – one of them was on the radar, but I think they’re going to look increasingly on online activity because that is one they can, as best, and obviously there’s legislative problems around this but they do, they can keep a fix to some extent on what people are looking at and who they’re sharing it with, so I – my sense is that’s probably where they’ll go.

Emily Dyer

What we’ve seen as well is that, when people reach the stage where they are fully radicalised, they tend to take themselves out of any sort of formal social grouping, so [whether it’s] prayer in the mosque, or some sort of community group; they suddenly go missing. Whether it’s to go and train abroad or whether it’s to have sort of home based radicalisation and teachings. So, I think something that people could be – have greater levels of communication with leaders of the community to alert the security services when they’re worried about someone, or when someone goes missing.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

I think we better move on to Sally’s question…

Robin Simcox

Yeah, in terms of the policing activity, I entirely take your point, yeah, there’s only so much you can get from this. The one thing we do do is we break down statistically what percentage were – came about as a result of undercover investigations and FBI stings which were a lot more common in the US than they were in the UK obviously, and we have a breakdown of that and what kind of plots they were focusing towards but that’s really as far we go. I also entirely take the point on cannon fodder, I mean the idea behind this, and the UK one as well, was that we wanted to, we wanted a sample which we knew was exhaustive on one specific issue, so we knew we could get all the convictions in, in the court system for example.

In terms of the people who’ve gone abroad, trained abroad, fought and since been killed abroad who may still be out there, because we know – we knew that we didn’t know that and we knew that we may only have – be able to get a small percentage of the actual overall figure we – so for example Anwar al-Awlaki isn’t in the report because he wasn’t convicted in the US system so there is – that’s one of the problems with it really, is that we can’t get everyone, but we could get, we could get all the people who’ve passed through the court system, so that’s how we got around it.

Thirdly - the nation state thing I think is important and one of the – I think one of the kind of unsuspected and again a surprising name to throw into that mix actually might also be . If you think of this train plot that was derailed that - going from new York to Canada recently - we’re very unclear on what is exactly going on with al-Qaeda and Iran, but there is a presence there, they do seem to have some kind of agreement with the state. Now this is complex because obviously al-Qaeda in Iraq viscerally hates the Iranians and al-Qaeda and Iran haven’t traditionally, as far as I’m aware, had anything other than very, very distrustful relations but there is a network there that has – that is being allowed to operate it seems with a degree of complicity by elements within the Iranian government and so I guess it gets back to the cop out answer from earlier about making it so hard to predict where the level of threat’s coming from, and yeah, nation supported actions are also ones we have to concern ourselves with.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Could I just check before I ask Donald Anderson, the actual number of cases, did you cover that in your slides? The actual number of terrorist…of separate terrorist offences as opposed to the number of people committing them? Do you know roughly how much it was in the US for that period of time?

Emily Dyer In terms of offences it was 174…

Robin Simcox

171 individuals committing 174…I mean there’s something like 413 separate charges, but 174 is the overall number of offences committed by 171 individuals. The Department of Justice have this…have this list of something like 494 that hasn’t been updated in about ten years and is full of cases that just aren’t terrorism, so this is, this is the most ideologically – ideologically? The most methodically pure study of it so far.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

How does that compare, sorry to spring this on you, but just incase, how does that compare with the number of terrorists committing a similar number of offences in the UK if you happen to know that…

Robin Simcox

In the UK there were 134 up until 2010.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Offences, or terrorists?

Robin Simcox

Offences. We only deal in convictions, so there’s people like…deportations, the control orders, those sort of things aren’t covered specifically in that book, we’re talking convictions in UK courts and suicide attempts.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

And this was over a period of from when to when…?

Robin Simcox

1998-2010.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

1998 – 2010…and it was how many…with the UK then it was 134 offences and how many offenders?

Robin Simcox

134 offenders, with 138 offences.

Dr Julian Lewis MP Very good, thank you very much. Okay, good…well done. Passed with flying colours. Donald Anderson…

Robin Simcox

You never know, I could have just made it all up!

Question 4 - Donald Anderson

I was intrigued by what you said about those who had been converted and turned to terrorism. I believe that the French citizen responsible for the attack on the soldier in Paris [inaudible] was also a convert. The French are particularly concerned about those that have been converted in prison, is that similar in the US and in the UK? Where were they in fact converted and what work, if any, is being done about the motives of those who have been converted? [What] are they trying to prove? Is it the zeal of the convert? Are they trying to prove something which the generality of the faith are not? Has there been any serious work on their motivation?

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Okay, and one more question. This gentlemen here…

Question 5

It looks like an incredible piece of research work, and really, you’re to be congratulated, but of 171 offences, what do you reckon would be the margin of error in it, because that’s really quite a small sample, the actual real number of offences that have been going on could be considerably higher, and I didn’t hear you address the lady’s question about the potential for Hizbullah to come – to suddenly start up if you like, and that could potentially put all your research [inaudible]…

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Okay…Converts first, who wants to go first…Robin?

Robin Simcox

Sure. Lord Anderson…The converts…The motivations I think differ. What I looked at was the period, how long the period was between the conversion taking place and the offence beginning and generally it was any time between 3 and 7 years after conversion taking place so it wasn’t always – in fact it rarely was a case of conversion and then immediately beginning offence so it wasn’t always – the idea about – and that’s what I thought it may be actually when I started at it…I thought people were converting because they were maybe susceptible to this kind of idea anyway, but actually it turned out not to be the case. I think people have…and the reasons behind…was it the reasons behind – motive behind conversion or the motive behind the offence?

Question 4 – Donald Anderson

What were their motives? Was it the zeal to prove something? And the prison [inaudible]… Robin Simcox

Yeah.

I think the motives are so hard to discern. You’re going to get people who say it’s to do with foreign policy and Muslim suffering, but then I think most of the converts generally…the people that converted weren’t completely rounded adjusted and happy people, they were people who were generally struggling and looking for a different path and they found it in a radical manifestation of faith, and so I think that was the beginning point. Now obviously not everybody’s going to go on to commit a terrorist offence but that, to me, was that search for a different path.

Converts and prison…[Points to Emily Dyer]

Emily Dyer

I mean US…I can’t say for the UK as much as Robin, but for the US we didn’t see a huge, in fact barely any…?

Robin Simcox

No…

Emily Dyer

Really…Converts who have got radicalised in prisons as far as we know.

Question 4 – Donald Anderson

Because I think in France, and Julian, in the UK, there’s quite a…

Dr Julian Lewis MP

There’s a big problem, there’s a big problem in the UK. It seems to suggest that the Americans are doing something in their prisons that we’re not doing in ours…

Robin Simcox

I don’t know whether it’s just a case of it hasn’t fully worked its way through the court system yet because there may be - this may be a phenomenon that isn’t quite…because I know a lot of radicalisation takes place and people talk about it very often but we haven’t seen it particularly played out in courts yet, but that may be something that’s five years down the line or so…

Emily Dyer

And sorry in terms of the converts, what we saw was if you have a look at the statistics afterwards, there’s a very interesting trend where you can see…we’ve separated out non converts and converts and how this, year on year…rate, and what’s really interesting is that the non-converts, there’ll be a spike in non-converts, for example 9/11 and then a couple of years later you’ll see a spike in converts, and the converts always follow the non-converts. I don’t know – I think this could be significant to show that, rather than sort of being repelled and disgusted and whatever by these huge terrorist – NCO terrorist attacks taking place, they’re actually drawn towards then, and we see a spike following in the next year or so.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Second question?

Robin Simcox

Yeah, Hizbullah - Sorry, margin of error, and Hizbullah. The margin of error in terms of, in terms of getting all the cases that were prosecuted in federal or military courts I think is, I think is zero, actually, I think we have everything, but in terms of the overall picture of people who have gone abroad and fought and been killed, I mean, I, I wouldn’t like to speculate. I guess there’s probably hundreds to thousands of individuals from America who, in the time period we’ve studied have been abroad and, and may not have been convicted in the US courts, may have been killed abroad, unfortunately I wouldn’t know, but I would guess it’s those kind of figures. On the Hizbullah stuff, I mean I’m not, I’m not a Hizbullah expert but I guess all I can say is that if they do I’ll probably have to think about a career change [audience laughter]. Become one of those people you know, that become Hizbullah experts overnight, I don’t know.

I know it’s obviously a big problem in Bulgaria and everything, it’s very clear that Hizbullah is a significant security risk, and it’s potentially, potentially maybe could outflank al-Qaeda in terms of threat but at the moment they seem to have their hands full with what’s happening in Syria and I guess I wouldn’t be…

Question 4 – Donald Anderson

And West Africa…

Robin Simcox

Yeah. I mean, and al-Qaeda also is obviously in Syria and so there are lots of things for… areas where Hizbullah are focused and maybe we haven’t seen a manifestation of it yet in Western Europe but it could be one for the future.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Okay, the next two questions were over here… [the] gentleman at the back and then the gentlemen [inaudible] at the front.

Question 6

You discussed the terrorist attacks by British and American residents, in particular in their home lands, but what about the relatively new trend of people like the ISI [inaudible] using American citizens [inaudible] to actually, because they are American citizens, to escape the radar so to say and go and commit terrorist activities and terrorist reconnaissance in places like Mumbai? Do you think that is a trend we are likely to see increase more? Emily Dyer

I was actually going to…

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Hold on, second question…Yes?

Question 7 – George Grant

It’s actually for you, Robin. I just wondered if you could have another crack at giving your thoughts on the motives of the – those convicted of these offences, generally nothing to do with converts or non-converts because it is such an important question in policy circles and specifically, how important foreign policy grievances are in presumably they must be references made to it in the court document, and a very quick sort of follow up question which is do you have any theories as to why there is such a discrepancy in the profile of those convicted of Islamist offences in the UK and the US?

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Good. Emily first, then…

Emily Dyer

Yeah, I was actually…that’s an interesting point, and I mean we’re all aware of the numbers of foreign fighters going abroad to Syria, joining al-Nusra, ISI. Whether they, I mean…this kind of report, it creams off the top those few who have actually returned home and been charged and convicted so I’m sure it will, it will greatly alter the picture in terms of the rate of people who have received combat experience for example, as in they’ve gone to fight jihad in Syria and they then pass through the US legal system, but it just hasn’t filtered through yet, but I think as I said in my presentation if we were to do this report in 10, 15 years’ time, I’m sure you’re right and the picture would look extremely different.

Robin Simcox

Yeah, so the motives…This is where we get into my opinions as opposed to what’s just in the report where we don’t discuss this. I think primarily, I certainly think the ideological; the ideological pull of this, of the movement is what…is at the bottom of everything here, I think that’s what attracts people, it’s an ideology which tells them they are, that people are being mistreated around the world and that there is a very clear problem with a very clear solution; I think the simplicity of that is appealing to people. But, at the same time there’s…So I would put ideology as number one but I feel at times there’s an attempt by people to think…some people think it’s only the ideology and at some point we have to say how many of these individuals who commit their offences say it’s foreign policy before we think ‘well, maybe that has something to do with it.’

Now the follow up question to that…So I think foreign policy and the kind of economic grievances can play a factor but the problem is of course, is that eventually you come back to ‘so what’? I mean is the best foreign policy the one that makes the most amount of potential terrorists happy? The most amount of…So it’s really, I don’t think there’s much constructive that can come of it because your government follows the foreign policy it sees best for its strategic interests and if that has a radicalising effect I’m not really sure if there’s much you can do about that, so I would say that the ideological element is the main component and you have a few other things like Muslim suffering in foreign lands and perceived foreign policy injustice and economic issues floating in and around it.

The US-UK discrepancies…there’s a few reasons. I think first of all there’s the different historical experiences with the countries, really. America…let’s take two examples in terms of the ancestries, so America had a quite significant amount of white converts and African American converts and that was partially because strangely enough the influence of nation of . One, one name I always…I expected, doing this study, to have the bin Laden’s and the Abdullah Azzam’s and the Awlaki’s and all these kind of ideologues and theologians appearing but one person I didn’t expect to see coming up very often was Malcolm X. A lot of people cited Malcolm X as a starting point to introduction to religion that eventually turned into extremist thought and terrorism offences. Now we don’t really have direct analogue with that so I think that’s part of the reason in terms of the ancestries and obviously we have a, we have a higher, higher population of second and third generation Pakistanis and British Pakistanis. But also, in terms of historical experience, I think you end up having…America takes a different path because it has to reconcile itself. It doesn’t appreciate the scale of the problem but it has the World Trade Centre attack of ’93, it has Mir Qazi in 1997 attack a CIA base – attack the CIA in fact, not a base, the CIA itself in Langley and so there is a…there is a recognition from the early 90’s that this can be a very severe problem.

I don’t think Britain quite understood the manifestations of it and the evidence of that would be that…there isn’t…We seem to be entirely relaxed about the fact that we had the Abu Qatadas and the Abu Hamzas radicalising huge amounts of people in the mid to late 1990’s and Finsbury Park mosque especially being used as a clearing house to send all sorts of…to send young British Muslims and foreign born Muslims to – all around the world to fight in these jihadist war zones and I don’t think we really understood what we were doing at the time and we didn’t understand how this could manifest itself upon their return, so we only arguably woke up to this properly after 7/7 I mean that’s…it’s debatable when we woke up to it but they’re kind of a couple of reasons I would give.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

I’ve got two questions over here, can I just see hands because we’ve only got about ten minutes left for Alan and a couple more. All right, well we’re going to have to be very concise then, I’m going to take three together first then, 1, 2 and 3 and can we be concise in questions and answers? You first please [points to audience member]

Question 8 – Harold Foreman

Thank you. My name’s Harold Foreman, and I’m from the London Jewish Cultural Centre. I’d like to draw a curtain which seems to me has not been turned in the sense that, has - through your data, I mean your opinion, are there more women being brought into this fear of al-Qaeda and does al-Qaeda doesn’t want this women – these types of – these women in their organisation, is it a mind-set? Will it change? Of course there’s a vast number of women out there who are as radical indeed as many men, if not more so…

Dr Julian Lewis MP Okay, thank you very much. The second one, let me see the hand again…Yes, the gentleman at the back.

Question 9 - Euan Grant

Yeah, thank you very much. The name’s Euan Grant, a border control consultant; I will, in the next few weeks be on a project in the Ukraine with the agencies there, I suspect a little of this will come up in the routine. The question leads on from the, one of the last points about whether the UK woke up quickly enough and also the earlier point about people – a sign of radicalisation is people going off the radar rather than appearing on it. Are there any measures – specific measures within the US as an example for the UK, or within the UK in raising the profile of identification in civil society and in particularly in schools, universities, and the like because I know there has been some criticism, I suspect justified, of universities there.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Thank you very much, Alan Lee Williams.

Question 10 – Alan Lee Williams

Thank you very much, Alan Lee Williams, former Labour MP. I co-authored with – so I know the problems of co-authorship, with my twin brother, a pamphlet on international terrorism. It was said in the concept, in the concept of the Irish problems, the failed response was aimed at America because a lot of Americans were raising huge sums of money for – quite relative huge sums of money which were being used for terrorism. Now, do I sense in what you are saying that there’s no response? I mean I know the limitations of your study but what should be a response in this area which gets right to the heart of the matter in our cities, because I believe that work’s already being undertaken and I’m not sure how successful it’s proving to be.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Thank you. Can we try and keep it concise and then I can squeeze some more in. Emily?

Emily Dyer

If I could just deal with the first question. We had 5% women in our study so that’s eight individuals and they varied in terms of their roles. So, we had one woman, Aafia Siddiqui, [who] was very high up in al-Qaeda, and had very strong connections with its leadership. She didn’t have a supportive role, she was the driver behind her actual offence. But then we had other individuals who were wives of the terrorists, we had Nadia Rockwood who was married to Paul Rockwood and she, she played much more of a supportive role so she enabled him to commit his offence but she didn’t… she wasn’t the leader of the plot if you know what I mean.

Then we had more, sort of, matriarchs of quite closed communities within the US; we had Amina Ali and Hawo Hassan, who were raising money in their Somali community of Minnesota and saying they were going to be raising money for charity but in fact were wiring money off to al-Shabaab in Somalia. So we had a big range of the different sorts of roles that women play, but I agree there was a very small percentage, I was surprised at how small the percentage of women was, and I know that there are women [who] play a key role in many terrorist operations around the world, many terrorist groups, extremist groups, whether that’s in a parallel group where there’s the struggle for women to form some sort of identity as a ‘Muslim woman’ in their actions. But it didn’t feature as heavily as I thought [it would] and I couldn’t tell you why, I think it’s just the way it was.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Okay, Robin?

Robin Simcox

Yeah, Harold. Just very briefly, I think it’s a really good and interesting question, I think it’s – I hope – it seems you’ve realised it’s an issue - I hope al-Qaeda also don’t realise [inaudible]. Euan and Alan’s question; I’m going to try and answer I guess slightly together. I think the specific measures – the UK is obviously wrapped up in Prevent and all that’s good, and all that’s bad around that. I mean the universities…it’s certainly something there’s been a lot of resistance to and that’s part of the problem, I think, in terms of a state response, is that you always naturally come up against a lot of resistance from people who think it’s overbearing.

My preference would be generally that the state takes a… there’s a lot of things the state can do wrong in this and a lot of people, a lot of bad people you can support and fund and elevate and a lot of good people we can discredit by being too close to so my preference is kind of for a small state approach to this problem which may or may not be successful. I mean the US for example, the US, they’re having huge problems with developing a Prevent equivalent because they’ve got to roll it out across 50 states, there’s something called the county of Islamic Extremism Programme which is almost a direct replica of the UK’s Prevent but much harder to, much harder to put in place. I think that Prevent has done some good work, and has done some important work in a lot of de-radicalisation we’ve probably not seen because it’s behind the scenes and there’s probably been some really worthwhile things but it can also I think do harm at times.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Time is against us but I’m going to squeeze a couple more in. That gentleman here, 2 and 3, but you’ve really got to be two sentences each please.

Question 11

Success rates on surveillance. I have read reports of some claims in the UK that there has been great success amongst our security services, is there any corresponding material from the USA?

Dr Julian Lewis MP

That was a question I would have asked if I hadn’t run out of time, next one? Yes [points to audience member] Question 12

You collated data on the addresses of the offenders at the time of their arrest; did you collate data on their intended targets? And if so, where, where there any patterns you could identify?

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Yes, and at the back…

Question 13

Did you get any kind of data on failed attempts by terrorists to initially integrate into Western society?

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Very good three admirably brief questions, let’s see what we can do. Robin, would you like to go first?

Robin Simcox

Okay, yeah, I’ll give a one answer to all of them then Emily can jump in. Success rates of surveillance; definitely in the UK, Omar Khyam, [the] fertiliser plot… there are loads of examples of why surveillances have become useful. America, obviously the Boston case recently, it was crucial but there seems to be a lot more reluctance at the idea of obviously things like CCTV, and there’s a lot more, there’s a lot more scepticism around it which I think probably hinders counter terrorism more than it helps it.

Intended targets; yeah, we did get the information, it’s all in the report, one thing that is very common is US soldiers and US military facilities, local army bases and things like that were very often. I wrote something in The Atlantic about it a month or so ago, you may want to look it up. It’s a real trend of attacking soldiers in military bases, and finally, in terms of initial integration; there isn’t much data on it, and I would suggest not because it probably didn’t happen but we were dealing with court documentation and official government documentation. When we couldn’t get what we needed from that we went into news sources and I feel like that part wouldn’t really be reported, as opposed to the sharper end of the terrorist planning so it’s tough to get data on that.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Good, and finally…

Emily Dyer

If I just touch on the last question…As Robin said, we didn’t collect data on this but what I think is really interesting was [that] there were several individuals who were within the government, or working for the CIA, or within the military who then completely did a U-turn and targeted the US State so I found that really, really interesting. There was one individual whose mother was actually in the twin towers and 10 days, I think it was, after 9/11 he then went abroad to a training camp. So it’s very interesting to see these people who are really at the heart of US society and they live through the same things as other Americans do, they then turn against America; I find that really interesting. It’s all in the report.

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you’ll agree we could have gone on for at least another hour with this, it’s absolutely fascinating, this has been a phenomenal piece of work and it only goes to show that when they say you can’t make bricks without straw, well there is plenty of straw here, and I hope that the bricks that are being made will be erected into a super structure that will enable good people both in America, and in the United States to be that more effective in understanding, and therefore countering, the terrorist threats which we face. Can I ask you to show your real appreciation for a magnificent presentation?

[Audience applause]

Dr Julian Lewis MP

Off we go, thank you.