The new issue of Strategic Insights from the Center for Contemporary Conflict contains an article by Kathleen Meilahn, The Strategic Landscape: Avoiding Future Generations of Violent Extremists:

Psycho-social and political factors play an important role in radicalization. Where Islamist Violent Extremist Organizations (VEO) are concerned, these factors play a significant role in recruitment—versus just theology. However, once recruited, theology becomes the justification for violent actions. In the initial stages of al-Qaeda’s ascendancy, theological values that became politically radicalized were a driving factor motivating the core actors. As al-Qaeda (AQ) and other VEOs aim to increase in size, their recruitment process has become more oriented toward—or broadened to include—political issues, and those foot soldiers who volunteer are often psycho-socially motivated. Yet, in effect, AQ is “engaged in an unprecedented exercise of corrupting, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the word of God to generate support for their political mission.” [PDF]

I’m not given to anniversaries or other attendant numerology, but it caught my eye that it’s exactly 12 years since the Khobar Towers truck bombing of 25 June 1996 in Saudi Arabia.

From the FBI indictment of the 14 men charged with offences relating to the bombing:

At about 10:00 p.m. on June 25, 1996, a tanker truck loaded with at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives was driven into the parking lot in front of the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran. Moments later a massive explosion sheared the face off of Building 131, an eight-story structure which housed about 100 U.S. Air Force personnel. Although rooftop sentries were immediately suspicious of the truck - parked some 80 feet from the building - and attempted an evacuation, few escaped. Comparable to 20,000 pounds of TNT, the bomb was estimated to be larger than the one that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City a year before, and more than twice as powerful as the 1983 bomb used at the Marine barracks in Beirut.

The attacks were attributed to Hizballah Al-Hijaz (Party of God in the Hijaz), with alleged links to al-Qaeda, presumably before the factional Shia/Sunni split. The 9/11 Commission report alleges that Osama bin Laden was seen being congratulated on the day of the bombing, and perhaps acted as a facilitator for the group. Iran has repeatedly been fingered by the US as the state sponsor behind the attacks. None of these allegations has been substantiated by publicly available evidence.

Joshua Woody’s Memorial Site.

Despite accusations that the UK is going to hell in a handcart following the release of “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, Abu Qatada, and the delightful Jordanian’s subsequent renewal of the call to violent jihad, there are signs that the British judiciary at least retains a semblance of common sense.

On Tuesday 17 June 2008, the UK Court of Appeal quashed the conviction of Samina Malik, the “lyrical terrorist”, for possession of information useful for terrorist purposes under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Originally convicted on 6 December 2007, Malik was handed a nine-month suspended sentence, partly one suspects because the judge felt under obligation to do something. Judge Peter Beaumont confessed that Malik was an “enigma” to him and that her offence was “on the margins of what this crime concerns.”

The Crown Prosecution Service will not seek a further retrial despite their obvious feeling that she’s guilty as charged, so Samina Malik can return to her life in West London an innocent person under the law. This being Britain, the press will probably hound her until her dying day - this is the country in which paediatricians are harassed for being child molesters, lest we forget. Apparently, the perpetrators of this act of staggering ignorance thought her ‘job title’ was paedophile. They should just have googled her:

I digress, and flippantly at that. The judiciary is evidently having some problems enforcing recent ‘terror’ legislation, at the appeal stage at least. In February 2008, five Muslim students’ convictions for possession of extremist material were also overturned. The ruling in both cases determined that prosecution must show intent to commit terrorism arising from possession of extremist literature. Malik owned a service manual for a 7.62mm semi-automatic Dragunov sniper rifle, but no weapon. Nor had she shown any attempt to obtain one. Ergo, not guilty on that charge. You can download the manual as a PDF if you wish, or indeed the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook [PDF], Essential Provision of the Mujahid [PDF, h/t Marisa], OBL’s “Declaration of War” (take your pick), or any number of other seditious documents in Malik’s house.

Malik may have been heading down an undesirable path, but she had to be acquitted. It might be true that her arrest and subsequent remand halted her progress along the track of radicalisation, but there is the problem of evidence, which in her case and others simply did not qualify as such. Of more concern should have been her relationship with Sohail Qureshi, who at least admitted preparing for terrorism under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act. Intelligence apparently showed that Qureshi had ‘previous’, through his attendance at jihadist training camps, and seemed to be actively gearing up to commit a terrorist offence. Malik allegedly supplied information about Heathrow Airport security procedures to Qureshi, although I’ve seen nothing in this vein that wasn’t publicly available. Qureshi is currently serving a 4½-year sentence in a British prison.

Malik’s acquittal is a mixed bag. Her defence’s argument that her (dreadful) poetry was akin to Wilfred Owen’s WWI complex horrors seems not to have been challenged by the Appeal judge as a spurious legal tactic, let alone a gross miscarriage of literary criticism. Her release helps curtail frivolous and desperate uses of the 2006 legislation, and may strengthen the central provisions of the Act. It also avoids the creation of another martyr, and the British legal system avoids another accusation of being a recruiting sergeant for violent extremists. Will it deter further abuses? Undoubtedly not, but as long as the Appeals Court continues to do its job, hopefully this will create in time a body of sensible applications of the law. If the evidence does not exist, drop the charges, and ramp up your intelligence and policing activities. Don’t bully the judiciary to cover up evidential inadequacies.

Proper commentary on Regina vs. Malik can be found at the following:

NEFA: TerrorWatch on Fatah al-Islam and Samina Malik Powerpoint - Evan Kohlmann at CT Blog

R v Malik [2008] All ER (D) 201 (Jun) - CyberLaw Blog

CPS Response to Salima Malik Appeal - Crown Prosecution Service press

Is It Safe to Download Al Qaeda Manuals Yet? - The Register

‘Lyrical terrorist’ wins appeal - BBC Online

The nation’s red-topped bastion of impartiality and absolutely-not-xenophobic reporter of immigration and multi-cultural issues, The Sun, accidentally found itself a bedfellow it can’t kick out. Today The Currant Bun ran a story, Grant for Muslim hate bloggers, which I reproduce in full below. I did add the link though - the editors obviously can’t be seen to be aiding and abetting this VILE FILTH!

AN Islamic website which backs suicide bombers got a £35,000 Government grant – a month before the anniversary of the 7/7 attacks.

Muslimyouth.net carries dozens of rants by fanatics on its “support group” site.

One member wrote of suicide missions: “If you can blow dozens of people up at the same time, great, absolutely great.”

And in another vile message a member PRAISED a beheading video of British hostage Ken Bigley.

It said: “I like the beheading videos of the prisoners of war – especially the Daniel Pearl and Ken Bigley one.”

But the Department for Communities and Local Government agreed to fund the group’s film on problems faced by UK Muslims.

A spokesman said: “We can’t prevent violent extremism if we aren’t prepared to talk about the issues.”

VIPs will see the film in London tomorrow, including Cabinet minister Hazel Blears.

Rizwan Hussain, of Muslimyouth. net, said: “We’re conscious of a few people venting anger on our site. If there was a direct threat made we would alert authorities.”

Four suicide bombers killed 52 people in the 2005 7/7 London attacks.

Wonderfully, if you put ‘grant muslim hate bloggers’ into Google it returns The Sun article first. The second hit is none other than Stormfront which, for those who don’t know is the world’s premier white supremacist website. They also ran The Sun article in full, which elicited the usual trite responses [thread here].

I realise I could have chosen a different search string but The Sun and Stormfront really aren’t that far apart ideologically. For example, The Sun’s recent decision to launch a Polish version of the newspaper, and that other right-wing rag The Telegraph’s support for Poland in Euro 2008 (in England’s absence), are such crass examples of anti-immigration xenophobia as to be barely worth comment. A clearer message of exclusion could hardly have been sent to the government and to a public daft enough to lap up this sly, exploitative nonsense. As for Stormfront, I’m sure a quick search would reveal that Poles are actually ‘dirty Slavs’ or some such lazy racist slur.

So what’s the truth of The Sun’s story? Well, MuslimYouth looks pretty benign and with production values like that it’s fairly safe to say it’s not actually as radical and underground as made out. There are indeed forum posts about jihad, etc, but it’s not one-way traffic. See this thread, for example. I wish we could have youth-led debate on such sensitive issues in the national press, but that’s never going to happen. Mind you, one of their sponsors, the Ansar Youth Project is advertising a summer camp on the Isle of Wight. I suppose the island’s inhabitants might have their backs turned during Cowes Week allowing the little jihadists to hone their combat skills, like “sleeping outdoors in tents, cooking meals and taking part in a range of messy and not-so-messy activities”.

Did they receive a grant, and what for? I’m not sure, as I haven’t managed to track down a sensible source yet. Far be it for me to defend New Labour’s policies on anything but it doesn’t sound unreasonable to fund such a project. If anything else crops up on this story I’ll update as appropriate.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

Jihadica wrote the following

On May 10, 2008 Ekhlaas member mohanad57 posted a link to Encyclopedia of Modern U.S. Military Weapons in pdf format. Like most illicit material shared by Jihadis, the link takes you to an independent file sharing site (in this case, rapidshare.com). This keeps the forum managers from getting in trouble, reduces bandwidth consumption, ensures that files can be shared rapidly, and makes the links temporary. For all you jihadologists out there: If there is a download you want on a Jihadi forum, get it immediately – the link will stop working in a few days.

And keeps intelligence services on their toes, to boot. The digital mobility of jihadis, and other terrorist and insurgents, contrasts wildly with the atrophied institutional outlook and methods of those attempting to monitor their activities. This might be a slightly unfair criticism - the advantage is most definitely with he who acts first when it comes to utilising the web - but the point still stands.

Andrew Exum has an excellent article over at Arab Media & Society, The Spectacle of War: Insurgent video propaganda and Western response [also as .pdf].

… while the ponderous American defense bureaucracy has been slow off the mark, the enemy – the insurgent groups against which the U.S. has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan – have proved more than proficient at the art of propaganda, media manipulation and shaping the way operations and events are perceived by enemy, friendly and neutral populations. In the same way, though the U.S. and its allies talk of the “comprehensive approach”, it is more often than not groups like Hizbullah and Jaish al-Mahdi who best understand military operations as part of a combined effort incorporating “political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication” efforts.

To a large degree, though, the U.S. military cannot be blamed for being caught off-guard by their enemy’s sophistication in managing the way battles and campaigns are perceived. In the past two decades, insurgent, terrorist, and guerrilla groups in the Middle East have grown exponentially more sophisticated in the way they use the media available to them in order to affect the way battles are perceived. From the perspective of someone who studies military innovation, it is a remarkable achievement.

This paper focuses on the evolution of insurgent media operations in support of political-military objectives. Groups like the Taliban and Hizbullah did not start off, from the beginning, as sophisticated manipulators of popular perception. They learned, over time, how to shape the way in which military operations are perceived, and in the process, have taught Western militaries a valuable lesson in the nature of war itself.

Read the rest of the article here.

Similarly, Brigitte L. Nacos writes on Media Power and Terrorists at Complex Terrain Lab, with particular emphasis on Hezbollah:

… modern-day terrorist organizations’ impact on domestic and/or international spheres depends to a large extent on their ability to establish their own means of communications or find alternative modes to communicate their messages directly to friend and foe.

Without taking the centrality of communication in the terrorist calculus into account, counterterrorism cannot succeed.

The burning of TV stations in Beirut (Counterterrorism Blog)

IRG member Neville Bolt has responded to John Mackinlay’s The Taliban’s Propaganda of the Deed Strategy over at the IRG blog, and it’s well worth reading. Neville’s PhD is on PoD and has also published recently on PoD and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (more about that here). An extract from his comments:

The Western counter-narrative has to live with a permanent dilemma. The Taliban and other insurgents will continue to piggy-back on Western (and non-Western) media outlets. Indeed they will do their best to control them, shaping campaigns within a strategy of ‘political marketing’, completely cognisant of the demands of what makes a ‘good story’. Why are we so surprised? After all, our own political parties and lobby groups do that to each other every hour of every day. However censoring footage from a Taliban ‘spectacular’, crosses the line in the sand. Moreover persuading news editors to remove the violent spectacle from a news compilation (one ingredient of a ‘good story’), and merely replacing it with talking heads recounting what they witnessed, offers a new take on the myth of Sysyphus. Media outlets already exercise discretion, periodically self-censorship. But even if these images were to be self-censored and removed from our screens, we know they will get out somehow from bystanders, non-Western news networks, NATO troops or Taliban propagandists. Consequently the damage to journalistic credibility, built on fair and truthful reporting, with Western domestic and foreign audiences and readerships, risks being even more far-reaching. It’s a dilemma.

Neville also mentions that Peter Taylor will be addressing the IRG later this year, which I’m looking forward to. Taylor is responsible for the current BBC series Age of Terror which, thus far, has substituted dramatic re-enactments and survivors’ tales for explanation and analysis. I hope it’ll improve.

While this blogger was resting his digital-weary brain, Abu Muqawama, who blatantly never sleeps such is his vigilance, posted Calling All Readers: RFI. In full:

So Abu Muqawama got into a semi-public argument with one of the world’s leading al-Qaeda experts today about a subject he wants you guys to weigh in on. Basically, Abu Muqawama advanced what he did not think a controversial proposition: that the internet is used by terror groups and guerrilla groups to spread TTPs — tactics, techniques, and procedures.

The world-famous al-Qaeda expert, meanwhile, rubbished this claim. He said that while the internet was certainly central to the radicalization process, you need an actual physical space to spread tactics and know-how. He then challenged Abu Muqawama to come up with an example where a terror group had either used the internet to plan an attack or had used the internet to spread tactics.

Okay, so Abu Muqawama’s RFI (Request For Information) is two-fold. One, who out there smart on diffusion theories - that would be you, Mike, and you, Erin - can either support or dispute the claim that the internet has been used to spread tactics? All the diffusion literature Abu Muqawama has read is a little dated in its case studies and examples. The best example Abu Muqawama can come up with is the way in which different terror/guerrilla groups have all begun to use Google Earth to target sites from Israel to Iraq. But did the internet drive that diffusion?

Two, who do you think is right here? Abu Muqawama or the famous (and very intelligent) al-Qaeda expert? Because Abu Muqawama trotted out Thomas Rid’s line about digital natives versus digital immigrants and how younger U.S. Army officers have used sites like platoonleader.org to go around the traditional top-down lessons learned process. And let Abu Muqawama tell you: this esteemed expert did not like being called a digital immigrant - with all the you’re-too-old-and-I’m-young-and-hip connotations that go along with it. But Abu Muqawama thinks he’s right. Folks over a certain age are much less likely to intuitively understand the way in which younger people - digital natives - share information and use the internet.

Thoughts?

Now, this is an issue dear to Ubiwar’s heart, which should be apparent to any readers of this fledgling blog. I’m not going to say much more here, except to suggest that everyone weighs in with their two-penn’orth here and let AM know why he’s right.

One of many questions that keep popping into my mind is: why exactly do certain heavyweight thinkers on COIN, and military affairs in general, consistently ignore the importance of ICT to the global insurgency? One answer might be, as AM suggests, that they are ‘digital immigrants’ and, like many a grandmother who simply refuses to learn how to use a mobile phone, would rather ignore what they don’t understand. A more subtle answer might be that we didn’t all understand nuclear weapons either but their kinetic and strategic effects were readily apparent - it didn’t stop us jumping enthusiastically on that particular technological bandwagon. It’s the social effects of ICT that terrify many policymakers and practitioners, and which drive the jihad. Much harder to counter, as AM would surely agree, and increasingly harder to ignore.

Robert Poe at COMOPS Journal has an interesting post, Do Terrorists Really Believe? in which he outlines the arguments of Slavoj Žižek, the prolific Slovenian psychoanalyst, in addressing the issue of whether jihadists are true Islamic fundamentalists. An answer in the negative would not be unfamiliar to readers of Olivier Roy, for example, and Žižek comes to a similar conclusion:

How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation daily Danish newspaper … To put it simply, a fundamentalist does not believe in something, but rather knows it directly. In other words, both liberal-sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept these statements as such, while sceptics mock them. What is unthinkable for both is the ‘absurd’ act of a decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision that cannot be grounded in the chain of ‘reason’, in positive knowledge.

As Poe says, ‘[t]his passage illustrates a very important point, namely that fundamentalist terrorists measure themselves by the standards of their secular enemies in the Western world’:

True fundamentalists are not bothered by the lost path being walked by others, nor are they provoked to violence by it. Žižek wonders whether in fighting against the sinful other one is not really just fighting against one’s own temptation to that sinful lifestyle. The violent outbursts of fundamentalist, Islamic terrorists are examples of resentment and envy for Žižek and mark their lack of true conviction/belief.

Žižek is a fascinating character, and Poe’s post adds yet more depth to the growing body of analysis on the true motives of many jihadists, if indeed they are aware themselves. What is clear is that labelling them ‘fundamentalists’ is erroneous. Mind you, we can’t even call them ‘jihadists’ now.

My copy of Žižek’s 2008 book, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, is currently languishing in my antilibrary, so in the meantime I’ll continue reading this op-ed he wrote for the New York Times a couple of years back, Defenders of the Faith.