A Case of Junk Justice: Light Sentence for Convicted Terrorist

Anjem Choudary

Law enforcement and counter terrorism experts in the United States and around the world are shaking their heads in collective disbelief after convicted Islamic terrorist Anjem Choudary's sentencing in London's Old Bailey courthouse last week.  
Choudary received a mere 5½ years in prison after being convicted of supporting the terrorist organization ISIS.
After calculating for good behavior, his actual time spent behind bars will probably be less than 30 months. Career criminals would call that a "skid bid" and say they could do that amount of time "standing on their heads."

British officials have stated that Choudary will be isolated from other inmates and held within a special "extremist wing" which will prevent him from radicalizing. 

                          Even the criminals know it's a joke.

The light sentence was imposed by Timothy Holroyde, a judge of the High Court of Justice of England, while describing the defendant as a "dangerous man."

What exactly did Choudary do? Well, for more than 20 years he preached, proselytized, and recruited people to a radical form of Islam that encourages jihad as a necessary tenet of the faith. He has done it on street corners, mosques, and in front of television cameras.

Sly like a fox, he avoided prosecution in the past because no direct contact between him and a terrorist organization could be proven. But then British authorities uncovered a video of Choudary pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. This is an organization that is responsible for such heinous acts as beheadings, drownings in cages, immolations, and throwing gay people off the roofs of buildings.

Pledging allegiance to the leader of this group of radical Islamic terrorists is not like joining the Rotary Club: it is more akin to taking an induction oath into the armed forces. He's now a soldier in the fight.
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The Choudary Quandary - Fox in the Hen House Redux

With the United Kingdom's successful prosecution of noted radical Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary for providing material support to ISIS, British officials are now faced with the dilemma of what to with him when he is sentenced September 6th.                                 While he is sure to receive a lengthy period of incarceration, that may create even more problems for counter terrorism officials. In going to prison, he is not actually moving from the frying pan to the fire. A more appropriate analogy is akin to the fox in the hen house. Anjem Choudary has spent the better part of 20 years preaching, proselytizing, and recruiting individuals to a radical form of Islam that encourages jihad as a necessary tenet of the faith. He has done it on street corners, mosques, and in front of television cameras. And like a sly fox, he avoided prosecution in the past because no direct contact between him and a terrorist organization could be proven until now. British authorities uncovered a video of Choudary pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.                                                                            

When he goes into prison, Choudary will have the opportunity to continue his evil work in an environment that guarantees him a captive audience of people who already have a disdain for government and a predisposition for violence. It is fertile soil.                                                                                                          How successful will he be?                                                                                 We already know of his effectiveness with ex-cons such as shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attended the Finsbury Mosque after his release from prison. Finsbury was one of the places that Choudary was allowed to preach his message of hatred and intolerance to all things non-Muslim. Many of his converts are already in prison for committing terrorist acts.
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WHO'S TEACHING THE CLASS ?

Ask any successful individual, "who was one of the most influential people in your life?" and very often the answer is a teacher. A good teacher can make all the difference in the world to an aspiring learner. But a bad teacher can have a disastrously adverse effect.

Such may be the case in Nashville, Tenn. where Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall recently announced that he was partnering with the American Muslim Advisory Council (AMAC) to provide an instructor to lead a class called "Islam 101"  that will be taught to correction officers and other prison staff. The Davidson County Corrections Department has about 800 personnel and an inmate population that exceeds 2,000 offenders on any given day. With a captive audience of that size, it is vitally important to know what is being taught and who is doing the teaching. AMAC grew out of a project, called the "Muslim Rapid Response Team," which was initiated by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC).

The rapid response team was formed to provide vocal opposition against an anti-terrorism bill being considered by the Tennessee Legislature. The bill, sponsored by Senate Republican Caucus Chairman Bill Ketron of Murfreesboro and House Speaker Pro Tempore Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma, sought to enhance law enforcement capabilities in preventing terrorist attacks by converted jihadis in Tennessee. The bill targeted people who provided aid or material support to the individual committing the terrorist act.

This bill was offered in response to the 2009 attack by Carlos Bledsoe on a recruiting station in Arkansas which killed Pvt. William Long and wounded Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula. Bledsoe, who was from Memphis, was raised as a Baptist before converting to Islam in 2004 at Masjid As-Salam in Memphis. Another incident motivating the Tennessee legislators was the February 2011 arrest of Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari for conspiring to blow up former President George W. Bush's home in Texas. Aldawsari had come to the United States from Saudi Arabia on a student visa and attended Vanderbilt University while living in Nashville.

That AMAC would oppose any law that would seek to protect the citizens of Tennessee from terrorist attacks by jihadists is disturbing. Putting the group in charge of teaching its version of Islam in the prison environment is alarming.

Why? Because we know that the potential for Islamic radicalization in the prison system is very real.  Tennessee Department of Corrections' Commissioner Tony Parker acknowledged the threat when he testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security in 2015. At the time, Parker was an assistant commissioner; he was later appointed Commissioner by Governor Bill Haslam in June 2016)

Since 9/11, prison radicalization has produced numerous people hoping to go to paradise,  willing to kill innocent men, women, and children in the name of Allah. That group includes people like Jose Padilla, Michael Finton, Kevin James, James Cromartie and more. In Europe, the perpetrators of the recent attacks in Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, and Toulouse were radicalized while incarcerated for petty crimes.
Investigators found that one of the radicalizing agents in the process came from clergy and religious volunteers holding extremist views of Islam, who had not been properly vetted by law enforcement.

This development first came to light with the exposure of Warith Deen Umar, former head  Islamic chaplain of the New York Department of Corrections, where I had worked for over 26 years as the deputy Inspector General in charge of the Criminal Intelligence Division. Umar was also a U.S. Bureau of Prisons chaplain. In 2003, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, in which he called the 9/11 hijackers heroes and martyrs. He went on to say that prisons were "the perfect recruitment and training grounds for radicalism and the Islamic religion." Umar also was an official in the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Muslim organization which sought to be the certifying body for Islamic prison chaplains in the United States, but was rejected by the FBI because of its connection to the Council on American Islamic Relations and the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing case. The Holy Land investigation unequivocally established that funds from Muslim organizations in the United States were being funneled to Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organization. Tennessee's AMAC is an affiliate of the Islamic Network Groups, whose founder and CEO Maha El Genaidi  previously advised American Muslims not to talk with FBI agents without an attorney present, and to contact CAIR  or MPAC of any investigative inquiries.

This type of response to legitimate law enforcement activity was also seen on a CAIR poster depicting federal agents as dark sinister shadows with the caption, "Build a Wall of Resistance." Resisting law enforcement activity when it comes to radical Islamic terrorism seems to be a long standing philosophy in these organizations.

Sheriff Hall and the Davidson county officials should follow the lead of fellow Tennessean Stephen Fincher before allowing the AMAC teach Islam 101 in their correctional system. Fincher, a three-term congressman from Tennessee's 8th congressional district, recently introduced a bill (HR 4285), the "Preventing Terrorism from Entering Our Prisons Act."  It would mandate the thorough screening of volunteers and religious workers for terrorist links before granting access to any prison. This was also the recommendation of the DOJ's Inspector General in 2004.. Failure to implement this requirement, the IG noted, would only exacerbate an existing problem.

Allowing Islamic clergy into the jail without proper vetting is akin to putting the fox in charge of the hen house. And we all know how that story ends.
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Disconnecting The Dots: Blurring The Lines

In my childhood, one of the fun games in the daily newspaper was a "connecting the dots" puzzle. A simple system of drawing a line from one numbered dot to the other produced a picture any child could see. Every now and then a typo would occur in the printing of the paper and the result was an unsolvable puzzle with a blurred image. The newspaper would issue an apology to its readers and that was that. A harmless mistake in an innocent game.


The same solution does not hold true in more serious fields.   Remove the smallest of elements and the outcome of an equation is changed.
Any physicist will tell you that E=MC is not the same as E = MC 2 .

In the war on terrorism, substituting hard facts with esoteric rhetoric blurs the picture and creates confusion. The latest example of this situation, coming on the heels of the terrorist attack in Orlando, is the Department of Homeland Security's interim report on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Subcommittee released this month.  This was not a wartime strategy report. On the contrary, this was the administration's latest initiative to move further away from the war on terrorism and blur the picture as to who the enemy really is.

The subcommittee was formed as part of the DHS's Homeland Security Advisory Council ("HSAC") last November. It was described by the department as "an incubator of ideas." It defines CVE as the actions taken to counter efforts by extremists to radicalize, recruit, or mobilize followers to violence.

Incubator of Ideas

Who is a violent extremist you ask? According to the report, it is an individual who supports or commits ideologically-motivated violence to further political goals. And what type of weapons would one use in this fight? The committee recommends using "soft power tools." Soft power is a conceptual idea that persuasive words are more important than the use of force in a time of war.

This formation of the subcommittee and its objectives coincided with the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 and injured more than 350 men women and children. The sophistication of the Paris attacks and the subsequent Brussels attacks led authorities to conclude that the terrorists had received prior combat training. Some had returned to Europe after fighting with ISIS in Syria.

One month after the subcommittee was formed, another terrorist attack occurred in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 people dead and 22 injured. The attack was carried out by a husband and wife jihadi team, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.                                                                            ISIS described the couple as "soldiers of the caliphate."

In Orlando at the Pulse nightclub, Omar Mateen, having pledged bayat, or allegiance, to ISIS, opened fire on the crowd killing 49 people and wounding 53 others. His goal was not political. It was to rid the world of infidels.

In the original 9/11 Commission report, the committee clearly identified the enemy: It "is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism..."

And lest we think that pronouncement has changed in the 15 years since 9/11, we should look at the supplemental report issued by the commission 10 years later. In it, the members informed us that the threat of Islamic terrorism had not been defeated but had grown stronger, and had evolved in methodology, tactics and leadership.

When the current administration removes the words "radical Islamic terrorism" from the equation, it is more than a semantic faux pas. It is an intentional erasure of one of the dots necessary to see clearly the threat facing the United States. It identifies who has declared war on us.                          Groups like al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, and ISIS are not looking to attract students to some philosophy or political science class.

They are soldiers, combat-hardened jihadists, sadistic killers. They are using every tool available to them to recruit more – social media, the internet, violent videos, fiery sermons. Soft power means nothing to them. They respond only to the sword.

When the president uses terms like "the full resources of the federal government" and "spare no effort" in responding to the latest terrorist attack by an Islamist, what exactly does it mean? To the average American it sounds like more rhetoric from the "incubator of ideas."

This administration and Congress must give the FBI and local law enforcement the necessary resources, including the additional manpower and equipment necessary to face the current challenge of investigating numerous leads on ISIS sympathizers within our borders. And they must restore to our intelligence agencies the ability to collect and analyze the data necessary to track Islamic terrorist organization like ISIS.

In a time of war we need decisive action, not soft power tools.
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Absurdity Reigns: Of Want Ads and Counter-Radicalization

The theater of the absurd seems to have found a place to perform in the current atmosphere created by the threat of Islamic terrorism in both Europe and the United States.

Belgium, which has seen its deeply-rooted radical Islamic nature exposed by the attacks in Paris and Brussels, thinks it has the answer to the phenomenon of Islamic radicalization. The Muslim Executive of Belgium placed an ad seeking counselors to deradicalize inmates.


The advertisement lists the following qualifications, looking for candidates with "sufficient religious knowledge" and a "resistance to stress."
In essence, Belgium outsourced hiring for this experimental state-run deradicalization program to the country's religious leaders.

It's a bad idea that cannot work, and is especially untenable if Americans tried to follow suit.
Can you imagine if, after any terrorist attack or plot in the United States, instead of responding with force against the terrorist organizations that perpetrated those heinous acts, we simply placed an advertisement in the help wanted section of a newspaper announcing the job opening for someone who could "cure the problem"?

We'd call it what it is, naive foolishness.

Yet 15 years after 9/11, we find that some have actually taken that approach to the threat of Islamic radicalization and the acts of terrorism it produces.
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