© Goran Tomasevic / Reuters A U.S. soldier watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad, Iraq April 9, 2003.
A secret FBI study found that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of "homegrown" terrorism. The report also identified no coherent pattern to "radicalization," concluding that it remained near impossible to predict future violent acts.The study, reviewed by
The Intercept, was conducted in 2012 by a unit in the FBI's counterterrorism division and surveyed intelligence analysts and FBI special agents across the United States who were responsible for nearly 200 cases, both open and closed, involving "homegrown violent extremists."
The survey responses reinforced the FBI's conclusion that such individuals "frequently believe the U.S. military is committing atrocities in Muslim countries, thereby justifying their violent aspirations."
Online relationships and exposure to English-language militant propaganda and "ideologues" like Anwar al-Awlaki are also cited as "key factors" driving extremism.
But grievances over U.S. military action ranked far above any other factor, turning up in 18 percent of all cases, with additional cases citing a "perceived war against Islam," "perceived discrimination," or other more specific incidents. The report notes that between 2009 and 2012, 10 out of 16 attempted or successful terrorist attacks in the United States targeted military facilities or personnel.
Overall, the survey confirmed the "highly individualized nature of the radicalization process," a finding consistent with
outside scholarship on the subject.
"Numerous individuals, activities, or experiences can contribute to an extremist's radicalization," the report says. "It can be difficult, if not impossible, to predict for any given individual what factor or combination of factors will prompt that individual's radicalization or mobilization to violence."
The report is titled "
Homegrown Violent Extremists: Survey Confirms Key Assessments, Reveals New Insights about Radicalization." It is dated December 20, 2012. An FBI unit called the "Americas Fusion Cell" surveyed agents responsible for 198 "current and disrupted [homegrown violent extremists]," which the report says represented a fraction of all "pending, U.S.-based Sunni extremist cases" at the time. The survey seems designed to look only at Muslim violent extremism. (The FBI declined to comment.)
Agents were asked over 100 questions about their subjects in order to "identify what role, if any," particular factors played in their radicalization โ listed as "known radicalizers," extremist propaganda, participation in web forums, family members, "affiliation with religious, student, or social organization(s) where extremist views are expressed," overseas travel, prison or military experience, and "significant life events and/or grievances."
Among the factors that did not "significantly contribute" to radicalization, the study found, were prison time, military service, and international travel. Although, the report notes, "the FBI historically has been concerned about the potential for prison radicalization," in fact, "survey results indicate incarceration was rarely influential." The report ends with recommendations that agents focus their attention on web forums, social media, and other online interactions, and step up surveillance of "known radicalizers" and those who contact them.
The study echoes previous findings, including a 2011 FBI intelligence assessment, recently
released to MuckRock through a public records request, which
concluded that "a broadening U.S. military presence overseas" was a motivating factor for a rise in plotted attacks, specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That study also found "no demographic patterns" among the plotters.
"Insofar as there is an identifiable motivation in most of these cases it has to do with outrage over what is happening overseas," says John Mueller, a senior research scientist with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University and author of "
Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism."
"People read news reports about atrocities and become angry," Mueller said, adding that such reports are often perceived as an attack on one's own in-group, religion, or cultural heritage.
"It doesn't have to be information from a jihadist website that angers someone, it could be a New York Times report about a drone strike that kills a bunch of civilians in Afghanistan."Perpetrators of more recent attacks have latched onto U.S. foreign policy to justify violence. The journals of Ahmad Rahami, accused of bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey last month, cited wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. In a 911 call, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub earlier this year, claimed he
acted in retaliation for a U.S. airstrike on an ISIS fighter. Tamerlan Tsarnaev
told investigators that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated his and his brother's attack on the Boston Marathon.
In many of these cases,
pundits and politicians focus on the role of religion, something Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and author of "
Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century," describes as a "red herring," citing a history of shifting ideologies used to justify terrorist acts.
© Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesPresident Barack Obama speaks during the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism on Feb. 19, 2015, in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. government has announced plans to spend millions of dollars on "Countering Violent Extremism" initiatives, which are supposed to involve community members in spotting and stopping would-be extremists. These initiatives have been criticized as discriminatory, because they have focused almost exclusively on Muslim communities while ignoring political motivations behind radicalization."Politicians try very hard not to talk about foreign policy or military action being a major contributor to homegrown terrorism," Sageman says, adding that government reticence to share raw data from terrorism cases with academia has hindered analysis of the subject.
The limits of the CVE focus on community involvement are clear in cases of individuals like Rahami, whose behavior did raise red flags for those around them; Rahami's own father referred him to the FBI. In his case, authorities did not find enough concerning evidence ahead of the attack to arrest him, underscoring the difficulty of interdicting individuals who may be inspired by organized terror groups despite having no obvious actual connection to them.
Sageman says that the shortcomings of CVE models reflect a misapprehension of what drives political violence.
"Terrorism is very much a product of individuals identifying themselves with a group that appears to be the target of aggression and reacting violently to that," he says.
"Continued U.S. military action will inevitably drive terrorist activities in this country, because some local people here will identify themselves with the victims of those actions abroad."
and incomplete assessment, but why expect anything less from people who are living of the slavery taxation's of others? It's not their fault that they think those people begging on street corners is the result of laziness, or that they are all too young to know that the transformation of America's city streets into those resembling Calcutta is a relatively new development. They probably think it's normal. Like people choose to go hungry and live along side the freeways and underpasses.
So yes, their conclusion is manifestly obvious, and so it's no great leap to conclude that Immigrants from nations of countries where our military is off murdering peoples mom's, dad, brothers, and sisters are going to get upset, especially since they are being forced to pay for it as imported labor here in America. Seems only logical they may begin to have thoughts about their complicity in mass murder of the their family, friends, and the destruction of their own homeland and then think they need to do something about it. Hardly an earth shaking revelation one would think.
What the FBI and others, like say the propaganda channels for example, are missing, and probably not accidentally either, is that the whole idea is make this course of importing terrorism a reality, and of course here I'm not even bothering to address the 50 million American's now reduced to starvation wage slavery, and those presumably are the lucky ones since they actually still have a job worth going to. No, lets just ignore the fact that Congress, the Senate, and the President have done nothing but to help facilitate the complete evacuation of the material infrastructure which once made the United States a nice place to live, so that their employers can then go on to loot, corrupt, and destroy the next nation that their banks, insurance, and manufacturing plants will now call home. Lets just ignore all that for now.
Lets focus on the importation of the potential terrorists that the FBI is itself concluded might become a problem later on, and how interesting it is that this conclusion is suggestive of the later on part.
Building a wall across the Mexican border is pointless unless we also find a way to make it a wall which the organized corporate politburo can't also cross, and which they do rather freely right now, and even with the blessing of the elect. So it's fine to prevent house cleaners, orange grove pickers, and the like to not come to America, but it's perfectly acceptable to allow the 1% to loot our nation of it's wealth, then take their wealth and export it under the guise of manufacturing to another country, and then to once more repeat the same scheme to wreck and loot the unfortunates who stupidly imagine this is better way of life, as it's rather obvious now what a great and fine example these corporate politburo members have left as a legacy for the American People.
Yet as bad as all that is, as criminal and wantonly destructive and traitorous as those acts have been by the corporate leaders, it's nothing compared to their next move, and which brings us back to the insights of the FBI. Oh yes, back to that once more my friends. While we build walls, they fly airplanes, and fly them across and over the walls with the help of their corporate operated government in DC. Now of course they are telling all of us that they
need to import this help, because Americas Universities and Colleges have produced idiots and imbeciles, well that and a few other excuses, but while tens of millions of unemployed and indebted students hopelessly seek employment, these people are importing cheap labor, or is it really cheap labor that they are importing?
You know, maybe the FBI, and for that matter your own selves should take a good look at what the Billionaires are doing with imported labor. You have to ask yourself if it matters that a person with a world class reputation in physics, or any other subject will really react much differently when their own family is then murdered by the US Military back in their own nation, back in their own home, and so there's not a lot of point in preventing orange grove pickers from not crossing the Mexican border when the billionaire boys club like these one's here [Link] are importing people from God Know's where, let alone why, and I have to ask myself if this is all so accidental or if we are being played for fools.
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