Prisons and the Education of Terrorists Ian M

Ian M. Cuthbertson is a senior fellow and director of the Counterterrorism Project at the World Policy Institute. Prisons and the Education of Terrorists Ian M. Cuthbertson Prison reformers have long been aware ings, while Trashorras supplied the explo- that the cellblock is a school for criminals, sives and helped plant the 13 backpack the shadow campus where the petty of- bombs that killed 191 people and injured fender graduates into organized crime. Yet hundreds of others on four Madrid trains strangely, the same insight has for the most crowded with early-morning commuters. part eluded jail keepers in countries now The use of prisons as a means of recruit- targeted by Islamic terrorists. The useful- ing new members into terrorist organiza- ness of prisons as universities for terrorists, tions while providing advanced training however, has not escaped Islamic radicals. to existing members is hardly a new phe- They have become increasingly sophisticated nomenon. For more than 30 years, Euro- in their operational methods, especially in pean countries have been beset by a variety devising ways of recruiting and training of nationalist and leftist terrorist groups, those who spearhead their assaults. some of them highly sophisticated organiza- Last spring’s devastating train bomb- tions with large rosters of combat and sup- ings in Madrid, the mishandling of which port personnel. led to the electoral defeat of the sitting Two groups in particular stand out: the Spanish government, illustrate the phenom- Provisional Irish Republican Army, or enon. A principal conspirator, José Emilio Provos, which has waged a sustained cam- Suárez Trashorras, a Spanish mineworker, paign to achieve a united Ireland, and the was not religious or politically aware when Basque Euskad Ta Askatasuna (ETA), which he was jailed in 2001 for a drug offense. In- first fought against the Franco government carcerated in the same prison was Jamal Ah- and now battles Spain’s democratic govern- midan, a young Moroccan living in Spain, ment in its quest for Basque autonomy. also convicted of a petty crime. Once in Both are classic paramilitary terrorist organ- prison, however, both the nominally Chris- izations, with integrated command struc- tian Trashorras and the nonobservant Mus- tures and a high degree of group cohesion, lim Ahmidan enthusiastically embraced rad- characteristics that persist in a prison set- ical Islamic fundamentalist beliefs and were ting. Leftist revolutionary groups were or- recruited into an al-Qaeda–linked Moroccan ganized differently. The Red Army Faction terrorist group, Takfir wa al-Hijra. in West Germany, Action Directe in France, The imprisoned Ahmidan quickly and the Red Brigades in Italy, which were gained a leadership position in the cell- active from the late 1960s until the early block, and on emerging from prison both 1980s, eschewed the paramilitary model and men were absorbed into an extensive and relied instead on a looser cellular structure, well-organized radical Islamic organization with collective decisions guided by charis- that trafficked heavily in drugs to support matic leaders. its terrorist activities. Later, Ahmidan led Targeted governments countered with the cell that carried out the Madrid bomb- extensive antiterror legislation and intern- Prisons and the Education of Terrorists 15 ment policies for segregating captured ter- for radicalization. This practice finds its rorists. European parliaments adopted legis- parallel in the current policy of many Euro- lation that curtailed a wide range of civil pean countries of detaining illegal immi- liberties while simultaneously increasing po- grants alongside career criminals and terror- lice powers of surveillance and arrest. In- ist suspects. tense and longer interrogation procedures While the situation in other European were sanctioned against terrorist suspects, jails never became as extreme as those in sometimes involving outright use of torture British-ruled Northern Ireland, terrorist and extended detention. Suspects were de- groups were able to retain a large degree of tained without arrest warrants, held without cohesion within the prison setting, which being tried, and even denied access to coun- they discovered to be a favorable environ- sel. It became part of the standard police ment for training members in new skills repertory to thwart future attacks by build- and planning future operations. It was only ing a clearer understanding of a group’s ide- when the authorities decided that terrorists ology, leadership, and capabilities.1 Prison- were to be treated according to the criminal ers’ rights were also sharply curtailed as pe- acts they committed, rather than according nal institutions adapted to the new breed of to the ideological beliefs that had inspired inmate. Mail privileges were suspended and them, that the use of prisons as terrorist prior restrictions on routine prisoner sur- universities began to be curtailed. veillance were abolished in order to prevent Other major changes in prison policy jailed terrorists from waging their cam- also played an important role in the divide- paigns from behind prison walls.2 and-conquer strategy used against the ter- However, different countries coped with rorists. New “maximum security” prisons the same challenge in different ways. In were established to hold dangerous terrorist Great Britain, notably, captured terrorists inmates, both to increase security and to were isolated from ordinary criminals. This limit their ability to sow discord among the suited jailed terrorists, who commonly general prison population.3 Prison adminis- viewed themselves as political prisoners, and trators often further segregated prisoners, in the case of the Irish Provos demanded to separating committed terrorists from “con- be treated as prisoners of war. Initially, the formers,” inmates who had renounced their British government seemed to accede to this extremist associations.4 These steps had the demand; captured terrorists were confined salutary effect of freeing wavering members in separate facilities, enabling inmates to from radical peer pressure and protecting preserve their organizational hierarchy in them from murderous reprisals by former prison. As a result, cellblocks became large- comrades.5 ly self-governing enclaves for inmates, and no-go areas for prison authorities. The Provo The Current Danger leadership took advantage of this system by These past successful strategies are clearly turning their enclaves into training camps, relevant to the problem posed by Islamic where experienced veterans could pass on fundamentalists incarcerated in major West- their expertise in weapons and tactics to ern prison systems. Al-Qaeda and its net- their less experienced brethren. This advan- work of associated organizations has taken tage was given a further huge boost by the full advantage of the relatively lax practices British policy of holding suspected terror- in European, and even some American, pris- ists without trial. Many politically active ons. The pool of potential recruits is vast. In Catholic men who had no previous connec- the United States, at least 3,000 Arab and tion to terrorism were swept up and placed Muslim men have been detained in the in internment camps, where they were ripe crackdown on illegal immigrants that fol- 16 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • FALL 2004 lowed the 9/11 attacks.6 In Europe, while only 20 percent of the general population. there has been less of a focus on security, the Given Switzerland’s geographical proximity waves of economic refugees from Islamic to the Balkans, it is not surprising that countries has led to ever higher levels of in- many of these foreign prisoners are Muslims carceration for such migrants. from Albania, Macedonia, and the former The need to counter Muslim radicaliza- Yugoslav Republic.9 tion in prisons is underscored by recent This pattern is replicated in other Euro- population statistics and incarceration rates.7 pean states. Official statistics show that for- There are around 13 million Muslims living eigners account for 28.5 percent, 34 per- in Europe (about 2.5 percent of the total cent, and 28.5 percent of the French, Ger- population); of this number, over 7 million man, and Italian prison populations, respec- live in Western Europe (about 2 percent of tively, proportions far in excess of the for- the total population). Initially, Western Eu- eign component of the general population. rope’s Muslim communities were made up Although precise figures are hard to come of workers drawn largely from former Euro- by, anecdotal evidence strongly suggests pean colonies. These mostly male laborers that a large percentage of these foreign pris- were later joined by family members arriv- oners are Muslims. In Britain, one of the ing from abroad. West Germany was also few countries that makes a breakdown avail- home to a significant number of Turkish able, 8 percent of the prison population is guest workers, whose status was more for- Muslim, compared to only 2.5 percent of mally defined. More recently, these estab- the general population. In 2002, the last lished Muslim communities have swelled year for which statistics are available, this with the arrival of economic and political translated into 5,495 Muslim inmates out of refugees from the Balkans, Iraq, Somalia, a total prison population of 71,218.10 The Afghanistan, and North Africa. The num- British government has also disclosed that ber of Muslims living in the United King- since 9/11 only 97 out of the 562 people ar- dom grew from about 23,000 in 1951 to rested for involvement in terrorist activi- 2 million in 2000. In 1961, there were ties—a group made up almost entirely of about 6,700 Turkish Muslims living in Muslim men—have been charged with of- West Germany; the Muslim population fenses under the Terrorism Act passed in of Germany now also stands at about 2 mil- 2000, and of these only 14 have been con- lion. Other West European countries, par- victed.11 It is Muslims such as these, men ticularly France and the Netherlands, have imprisoned then released for lack of evi- seen similar increases in their Muslim popu- dence or detained on lesser charges, who are lations.

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