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Al-Qaeda in the United States: a Complete Analysis of Terror Offences

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Al-Qaeda in the United States: a Complete Analysis of Terror Offences Al-Qaeda in the United States: 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, London, 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 Middle East - 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.
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