MI5 talks sense on terrorism
For those familiar with the scrupulous research of MI5′s Behavioural Science Unit, British intelligence’s in-house smart posse, the news that terrorists are just like us will come as no surprise. For many others, politicians, public and press alike, the BSU’s conclusions are likely to make uncomfortable reading.
Presumably leaked to The Guardian – and congratulations to whoever did so – the June 2008 briefing note reported on by the paper yesterday challenges many of the myths and assumptions which frame perceptions of home-grown terrorism.
Essentially, and without stealing The Guardian‘s thunder, the BSU concludes that most terrorist profiling is misdirected. Their interviews and accompanying research suggest that terrorists, potential and actual, reflect the British communities of which they are an indigenous part. Whilst there are some indicators of similarity, extremists for the most part lead normal lives in normal places with normal people. They stand at the bus-stop with the rest of us.
The Home Office has declined to comment, and the even-handed approach of the BSU and The Guardian‘s reporting seems to have stunned even the Daily Mail into a form of respectful silence. Wait until Melanie Phillips gets her teeth into it though. How will she respond to the news that terrorists are neither illegal immigrants nor religious extremists?
In an accompanying editorial, Alan Rusbridger applauds the “generally thoughtful and emotionally mature approach to the complex causes and textures of violent political extremism in the United Kingdom today”. He also correctly concludes the following:
Nothing in the MI5 briefing note offers easy answers for the service’s agents as they try to spot the actual or potential suicide bomber in our midst. Inevitably any shift of emphasis away from often fruitless profiling and modelling implies an unstated move towards longterm infiltration and accumulation of data. So liberals who find the briefing note reassuringly sensible and restrained are likely to find the other side of the MI5 coin – the implied importance of surveillance and data accumulation – much less comfortable.
This, I’m afraid, is a deeply unpalatable truth. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. More bobbies on the beat is not going to cut the mustard, nor is getting me to take my belt off as I go through an airport scanner. Community and open source intelligence are much more likely to bear fruit but the murky world of intelligence-gathering remains just that to most of us: dark, unfathomable, and eerily silent until 200 cops surround your house at daybreak.
Luckily for liberalism’s conscience then that New Labour has been so busy trashing civil liberties in recent years that it is unlikely the MI5 findings will trigger any new legislation – the tools are already there. There will perhaps be a renewed call for increased security service resourcing, but many of those guys already know what the BSU has been saying for a while. It’s politicians that need to understand the real nature of the problem, so they can respond accordingly and constructively.
One of the most important and sensitive recommendations in the BSU note hits at the heart of inadequate and misguided policy of the post-9/11 years:
We cannot make assumptions about involvement in terrorism based on the colour of someone’s skin, their ethnic heritage or their nationality.
Know thine enemy? Know thyself, the man said.
[h/t Porcospino]
Update 22 August 2008: read Matthew Levitt’s CTBlog take on this. He thinks the leakage is A Bad Thing, forgetting that the British public desperately needs this, but otherwise is similarly impressed. Also at CTBlog Roderick Jones gives his speculative take on the non-role of religion in an über-urbanised future century.
Update 22 August 2008: as an example of why the British public needs this kind of research, check out the British National Party’s hysterical and self-pitying response to this news. Tragically, the author was so breathlessly indignant at finding out that not all brown people are terrorists he appears to have misspelled ‘Britain’.
The Norwegian government sponsored a conference in Oslo from 9-11 June 2003, which gathered 30 international experts to present their findings regarding root cause of terrorism. They came to the same conclusions as has MI5. The Oslo presentations are now in a book, Root Causes of Terrorism, published in 2005 by Routledge.
@Jallen
I’ve neither seen nor read that volume before and can’t possibly do the latter before replying to your comment, unfortunately. Would you care to elaborate on the findings, and why it’s taken five years for the Brits to catch up? How does this volume account for the specific position of the UK, which has very different factors at play than the rest of Europe? Without wishing to sound narky at all, do the Norwegian findings apply to the British situation based, as they must inevitably be, on a (slightly) different data set?
Tim, I’d be glad to provide a summary when I finish the book. I have to return it to the library by the end of next week so I’ll post something by then.
In the meantime, I would not assume the Brits are just now discovering these trends because they are just now reporting about them and leaking them to the newspaper. I can’t speak for them.
Each chapter in the Norwegian book is by a different expert. I’ll do my best to identify the various data sets they use for their analysis.
In the meantime, I would not assume the Brits are just now discovering these trends…
Yes and no. The survey only finished this year, so the data was still in the process of being recovered until very recently. This doesn’t mean, as you say, that certain elements within the security services weren’t aware of the likely trends, etc. I would suggest that policy tells us that there are other sectors of government that didn’t have a clue about this.
“Wait until Melanie Phillips gets her teeth into it though. How will she respond to the news that terrorists are neither illegal immigrants nor religious extremists?”
Some of us non-asymptotic analysts of the problem have been saying all along that the problem of Muslims becoming involved with terrorism is a much wider problem than one of merely “illegal immigrants” and “religious extremists” — since many of them have been in fact legal immigrants and/or citizens, and have appeared to be “moderate Muslims” (for, after all, our politically correct delineation of “moderate” among Muslims provides such latitude that it pretty much covers any Muslim who does not actually take out a sword and say “I want to behead you now!”).
Somehow, though, I doubt this is what you meant. I think you mean more that the next 7/7 attack could be perpetrated just as much by blue-haired octogenarian Methodists from Leeds as it could be by those who pullulate from among the “vast majority of peaceful Muslims”.
P.S.: We are officially in a situation where, apparently, we bend over backwards to avoid the rational bias against Muslims when investigating potential terrorism.
Case in point:
“New York: Egyptian national with Sudanese passport builds unmanned drone designed to carry 600 pounds of explosives — FBI says no terrorism”
http://www.wnbc.com/news/17266645/detail.html
Andy McCarthy comments:
“…it is the practice especially of the FBI to find “no ties to terror” in any case involving Muslims where there is no known evidence of a relationship between the subjects of the investigation and any established terrorist organization (such as al Qaeda or Hezbollah). Because of concerns about “profiling” — despite the fact that we are under siege by Muslim terrorists — the fact that investigative subjects happen to be Muslims is deemed irrelevant (as if, in a Mafia investigation, you would have to ignore whether a subject was Italian or not for fear of being accused of Italophobia.) There is no concession in the report that the subjects of this investigation are Muslims.”
Hesperado,
I have little to add to your comments. As ever, I am merely stating that irrational government and media labelling and profiling is no substitute for a bit of objective and reasoned research. The leaked MI5 report is a step in the right direction if it persuades policymakers and the press to think a bit harder about who terrorists really are, why they exist, and what can and cannot be done about it. In other words, let policy catch up with practice and with relevant research. Above all, I think we can try and avoid fear-mongering, stereotyping, paranoia and the sowing of social discord, no matter what the political imperatives to act.
Tim, here is a bit from the book I mentioned. I’ll add more in a few days.
Root Causes of Terrorism
edited by Tore Bjergo, 2005
Compilation of presentations from 2003 psychology of terrorism conference in Oslo, Norway.
Jitka Maleckova, working with Alan Krueger, through study of terrorism in the Middle East, finds only a limited indirect link between poverty and participation in terrorism (no causal link found) and that living standards above the poverty level are positively associated with terrorism participation. They use a variety of source data from their own interviews of terrorists and supporters, terroist biographic data gathered by Eli Hurvitz, historical crime data, and public opinion surveys. You can find their research paper, with sources, online at http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/terrorism2.pdf.
Here is a quote from John Horgan’s chapter concerning the lack of an emergent terrorist profile, “Many of the personal traits or characteristics we attempt to identify asbelonging to the terrorist are neither specific to the terrorist nor serve to distinguish one type of terrorist from another.” Horgan’s data comes from his own interview of terrorists in the UK/Ireland, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He also sites data from Post, J.M., Sprinzak, E. and Denny, L.M. (2003), ‘The terrorists in the own words: interviews with 35 incarcerated Middle Eastern terrorist.’ You can get this in pdf here, http://www.pol-psych.com/downloads/Terrorists%20in%20Own%20Words%20Terr%20and%20Pol%20violence.pdf.
Thats it for now. More to come . . .
@Jallen,
This is hugely useful, so many thanks for taking the time and trouble to point this stuff out to me. Although I’m fairly well-acquainted with more recent iterations of some of this research the Oslo conference is news to me.
John Horgan has also done some interesting work on why people don’t become radicalised which I would suggest is possibly of more counter-strategic relevance than why they do.
I look forward to hearing more from you.
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