Preventing Another Violent Act by a Deranged Terrorist

The signs were all there, glaring, waiting to be seen.  The predisposition to violence, time spent in prison, emotionally unstable,  website postings.   Alton Nolen was not an aberration.  He was if anything a ticking time bomb with a short fuse.  His firing from Vaughn Foods was simply the catalyst that tripped the trigger in his mind to move from jihadi thoughts to violent action.  One small switch, one perceived slight and he was gone.  Doing what he had heard and seen of others, specifically ISIS members beheading innocent victims in the Middle East.  The call to him was clear, at least in his twisted mind.  Several radical Islamist groups had recently urged American “lone wolfs” to act in the name of Allah and attack innocents where ever they could.
Could this action have been stopped before it started.  Should authorities have known beforehand what an individual like this could do.   Is there a profile or tell tale signs that authorities should have picked up on?   The answer is yes.
Over ten years ago a US Intelligence agency report on the profile of potential terrorist (violent extremists) was issued that stated in part;

"Based on a variety of reporting - including a preliminary analysis of a small sample of US converts to Islam who become associated with extremist violence...we assess.. Some individuals, particularly those who convert in prison, may be attracted directly to jihadi violence at the outset of their conversion for opportunistic rather than ideological reasons.  For this group, jihad represents a convenient outlet for aggressive behavior."

The report goes on to say:  "In an apparent play on this psychological vulnerability...extremist groups are actively recruiting prisoners…"

  Read more.....in the New York Post

NYPD Commissioner Agrees with Author on Questioning Individuals Arrested

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton
Photo: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM

In a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post,
New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton defended the right for police to ask pertinent questions to arrestees.  This comes on the heels of a recent New York Times article criticizing the PD for asking Muslim inmates if they had specific knowledge of  possible criminal activity, including terrorism that they would be willing to divulge to the police.

In response to the accusations of a prejudicial policing policy when it comes to Muslims, Bratton stated that the technique is " an essential element of policing."

He went on to say, "I created this policy back in 1994, in New York City last time I was commissioner, where every person arrested was interviewed by detectives about not necessarily the crime they committed but do they have information about other crimes and is there an ability to develop these people into confidential informants,”

The Commissioner's position was further reinforced by his Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism, John Miller.   Miller, sitting along side Bratton in the interview stated;
" I think the basic tenet of policing is that when you take people into custody, you try to get information from them. This is how we take guns, this is how we seize narcotics, this is how we solve murders every single day. In the area of counterterrorism, this is how you are going to gain insight and visibility where you would otherwise have very little.”

One terrorism expert compared the comments made by the Commissioner and his Deputy to a recent article in the New York Post by the author of "The Fertile Soil of Jihad" saying: "Bratton's comments underscore what Patrick Dunleavy pointed out... Using suspects to try to learn about other crimes and conspiracies is an everyday police practice, has been for years, and simply is common sense."

Now if only the New York Times would agree...but that maybe asking to much

Scurrilous NY Times Informant Story Ignores NYPD Successes

Exaggeration is often the tool of a disingenuous person, but when it comes to reporting, there seems to be no bounds. Case in point, the most recent article in The New York Times on the NYPD’s counterterrorism program, “New York Police Recruit Muslims to be Informers.”


The reporter goes on a mission to expose what he claims is the improper questioning of individuals arrested and being held in jails. Specifically, he decries the singling out of a specific group of criminals, Muslims. The reporter gets it dead wrong — and in the process puts in jeopardy the lives of many who have helped police fight terror.

The article claims that law enforcement personnel changed their focus of questions to home in on a specific area, religion. The writer states: “They [NYPD] showed that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city’s holding cells and lockup facilities.”

     A new technique of interrogation? I think not. As the former deputy inspector general of the New York State Department of Corrections, I can state emphatically that arrestees have been asked the question “what is your religion” for more than 40 years. It is a core part of the initial intake assessment of an individual about to be admitted to a jail. It goes part and parcel with height, weight, color of eyes, ethnicity, etc.

The writer wants the reader to believe that this type of questioning only began after 9/11. Why? It goes along with the mantra that Muslims were being singled out arbitrarily by police and intelligence officials when it comes to crime. Not so. I doubt the reporter has ever really sat in on an intake interview of an arrestee. If he had, he would have seen the line of questioning of an arrestee/inmate is founded in the historical fundamental belief by cops that, whenever a crime is committed, either someone in jail did it or knows who did it.

In gathering intelligence on specific threat groups — be they the Mafia, the Latin Kings, the Chinese Ghost Shadow Gangs, the Russian Mob, etc. — you’re going to ask a specific group of people about a specific group of criminals, and radical Islamic terrorism is a form of criminal activity. My good friend John Cutter, former deputy chief of NYPD’s Intelligence Division, put it most succinctly when he said, “I know we’re the Police Department, and we deal with crime, but terrorism is just a higher level of crime, and we have to know about it. If it’s in our midst, I need someone to investigate it.”

There are numerous examples of successful cases where terrorist acts were thwarted due to intelligence gathered from speaking to an individual in jail.
READ MORE...

Dismantling a Unit - NYPD Succumbs to Political Pressure

In a move designed to placate a small minority of New York City residents, the NYPD announced that it was disbanding its Demographics Unit.

The unit, which was a small segment of the NYPD's Intelligence Division, came under fire following a series of articles published by the Associated Press using leaked documents showed widespread surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere. Following the articles, several Muslim activist groups protested against the NYPD's Counter Terrorism strategies.

What came next was a series of lawsuits filed by "victims" of the Department anti-terrorism policies.
The "victims" claimed that the NYPD program had "caused a series of spiritual, stigmatic, and pecuniary losses." The last being better translated as monetary losses.

But what had the unit actually done to deserve such castigation? It collected open source information of various neighborhoods in the greater New York area – i.e. "demographics" – where it was believed the greatest likelihood of Islamic terrorists would seek to assimilate themselves while plotting terrorist acts.

This belief was not based on conjecture but on solid precedent. In the late 1980s and early 90s, a small group of Islamic terrorists congregated in several area neighborhoods and frequented a select group of mosques that were in alignment with their radical theology.
The result was the first World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 23, 1993. The investigation into that attack uncovered an additional plot to blow up several national landmarks in the New York area, including the Statute of Liberty. John Miller, the new Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence for NYPD knows these facts. He wrote about them (in part) in his book, "The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It." 
But in comments reported this week regarding the disbanding of the unit, he said the unit wasn't necessary and that the police did not need to work covertly when it comes to gathering information on a specific group.

If that is true, then the next NYPD unit that could be disbanded is the Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB). Formed in the 1970s, the OCCB has had enormous success against the Italian Mafia, "the Westies" of the Irish mob, Chinese Mafia, East German Mafia, and Russian Mafia and Colombian Drug Cartels using similar techniques and strategies as that of the Demographics or Zone Assessment unit. Those include surveillance, mapping, infiltration, use of informants, and covert operations.

Such a move by the Police Department would be deemed ridiculous. Is terrorism any less a threat to the city than organized crime?


The mayor and the department should listen to the entire New York City community and not a select few, or those who cry the loudest...... Read more

Why Extremists Have Access to U.S. Prisons

A Prison Yard in the U.S.

An interview with Patrick Dunleavy, author of  "The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism's Prison Connection."

BY RYAN MAURO

Tue, April 1, 2014

• The following is Clarion Project National Security Analyst Ryan Mauro’s interview with Patrick Dunleavy:                                                                                      
Ryan Mauro: We recently wrote about Dar al-Hijrah, an extremist mosque attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers, has engaged in prison outreach in Washington D.C. for 10 years. Based on your experience, is this an oddity or are Islamist extremist groups commonly given that access?
Patrick Dunleavy: No, I do not find it to be an oddity. On the contrary, it is quite common. For years, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Ashburn, V.A. provided funding, training and literature to correctional institution imams, under the direction of Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani.
He was also at times the head of the Fiqh Council of North America.Before coming to the United States, Alalwani was a professor at a state-run Wahhabi university in Saudi Arabia. He worked closely with Warith Deen Umar to see that literature, clergy and visiting speakers adhered to a strict Wahhabi/Salafist form of Islam.
Umar was a former New York State inmate who went on to become the head of Islamic Affairs for the New York State Prison’s Department of Ministerial Services. He was also the founder and head of the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, the chief certifying body of Islamic clergy in the prison system. He was later caught justifying the 9/11 attacks and terrorism to prison inmates.
Mauro: How does this happen? Is there not a vetting process for these groups and preachers that are given access to inmates?
Dunleavy: The reason this continues is that, contrary to the Department of Justice Inspector-General’s recommendation for a certifying body for the hiring of Islamic clergy, there remains a vacuum in the certification process.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has sought to fill that void, but the FBI has refused to endorse CAIR and no longer works with CAIR on outreach because of its background.
Mauro: There was a study done by a Sufi Muslim a few years ago that found a stunning number of videos and books by Islamist extremists in prison libraries. Is there any process in place that can be used to get them removed?
Dunleavy: In regards to the literature, there is a two-fold problem.
One, in my opinion, is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) enacted by Congress in 2000 and its predecessor, the Religion Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. In essence, these allow for literature for various forms of religion practiced in correctional settings, including Wahhabism.
Note that this is the same law cited by John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, in his successful lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons to relieve certain security conditions of confinement imposed on him.
The second part of the problem is the lack of understanding by some correctional officials as to the radical theology of certain forms of Islam. Without that knowledge, they lack the ability to discern between literature calling for a holy life and literature calling for jihad against infidels.
Mauro: Bert Useem’s research in 2008 concluded that “the rate of prison radicalization is not just low but falling.” How do you respond to detractors that believe the threat of prison radicalization is grossly exaggerated?
Dunleavy: Bert Useem’s research in 2008 was flawed both in its methodology and its findings.
In 2011, Mr. Useem appeared along with myself at the House Committee on Homeland Security hearings on Islamic radicalization. During questioning from Rep. Thomas Marino from Pennsylvania, Useem acknowledged that inmates are not “overly truthful when interviewed and have a tendency to tell the interviewer what he wants to hear.”
He also agreed with Rep. Marino that a committed jihadist would never admit if there was a recruitment mission in the prison system. Useem relied extensively on inmate interviews conducted by him and others for his findings.
But more importantly, coming on the heels of Useem’s published work in 2008 was the May 2009 arrest of four former New York State inmates for terrorism. The four—James Cromitie, Onta Williams, David Williams and Laguerre Payen—conspired to shoot down military aircraft and bomb Jewish synagogues in the greater New York area.
The most interesting aspect of this group was that the four had never actually met in the state prison. It was after their release when they met at a mosque, Masjid al-Ikhlas, in Newburgh, New York, that had a post-incarceration program for inmates.
The mosque was founded by Warith Deen Umar. At the time of the subjects’ arrest, at least nine of the members of the mosque who had leadership positions were also employed by the prison system as chaplains.
This case was an example of the radicalization process that had begun in the prison being brought to fruition after the suspects’ release. Mr. Useem’s study never focused on post-release radicalization or the maturation process necessary to groom a terrorist.




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