Malik Siraj Akbar stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Lone wolves and home-grown terrorists: Experts warn of a growing threat from unusual sources

United States — 2012-08-22T08:03:42-04:00

As the United States commemorated the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, terrorism experts stepped up warnings that authorities must look beyond the usual sources of terror, to the lone wolves stirring with anger and seeking out big-impact weapons.

Isolated and underestimated, lone wolves might go unnoticed even as they try to get chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons – collectively known as CBRN – that can spread terror and spark psychological chaos.

Anders Breivik is the latest of the lone wolves and a point of concern among terrorism experts. His devastating attack in Norway in July spurred researchers to mine his 1,500-page treatise in search of evidence that unconventional, free-agent terrorists may now have greater potential to inflict damage and ignite panic.

Breivik’s manifesto was more than just the ramblings of a lone nut.

“Dismissing Breivik’s “[weapons of mass destruction] idea” as unrealistic is dangerous and overlooks important nuances that give his warnings about greater weapons added validity. Moreover, his writings might spur other extremists, according to a little-noticed report from the Washington, D.C.-based Federation of American Scientists.

Acknowledging the threat

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, in an interview on ABC News last week, said one of the biggest challenges she had seen as DHS secretary, “is movement toward the home-grown violent extremist. The person who, for whatever reason, decides to attack his fellow citizens,

She warned citizens to be vigilant of “the lone actor that we may not know about, who may already be in the United States and so it requires us to be vigilant and the public be vigilant.”

Adding to that official urgency is a sense among terrorism experts that the path to destructive weapons is easier.

“It is not that difficult to acquire radiological materials. There are different ways people would disseminate them. The most likely way is to mixing them into conventional explosive devices to cause further damage,” said Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale, of the Graduate School of International Policy and Management at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS).

Bale, who directs the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program, said attacks with unconventional weapons are not likely to cause massive causalities. Instead they’re supposed to deliver disproportionate psychological impact.

“An attack with chemical agents that kill only twenty people will probably have as much or more psychological impact as a conventional explosive which kills two hundred people because the lay public does not know much about their capabilities and qualities,” he said.

Charles Blair, director of the Terrorism Analysis Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that, for example, the public often confuses a radiological device, a so-called “dirty bomb,” with a nuclear explosive. Extremist groups and individuals are significantly less able to acquire the latter.

“Of all CBRN attacks, a low-level radiological is the most likely,” Blair said., “These are weapons of mass disruption which cause great panic, psychological impact and economic impasse …

“The threat that comes from the within is the scariest. The insider threat is a topic that nobody still wants to talk about,” added Blair, cautioning that he believes there has yet to be a candid, public discussion in the national security community about domestic terrorist threats.

In a January 2011 story on iWatchnews.org, House Speaker John Boehner pushed the Department of Homeland Security to back away from a report that noted a rise in right-wing violence which could motivate "lone wolves."

And the White House, to avoid offending the Muslim community, has opted for the general term “violent extremism” to describe the threat of Islamic radicalization.

“The administration is understandably apprehensive about identifying Islamist extremism as the primary extremist threat to the United States for fear that the broader Muslim community will take offense,” said terrorism expert Jonathan Kennedy.

New sources of terror

The dimensions of internal threats have diversified in the recent times.

Peter Boogaard, the deputy press secretary at the Office of Public Affairs of the US Department of Homeland Security, said that a decade after 9/11, America is “stronger and more resilient … ” but that threats persist:

Homegrown Islamist terrorism remains a threat.

And in the past few years, al Qaida and its affiliates have become more effective at recruiting and radicalizing would-be terrorists.

So far the United States’ growing counterterrorism capacity has led to arrests and a thwarting of planned attacks, like the failed car-bomb incident in New York this summer.

But Jeffery Bale of the Monterey Institute warned that “Terrorists have to succeed only once but we have to succeed 100% of the time. There will be future terrorist attacks inside the United States. But the question is how successful and frequent these attacks will be.”

New tools for terror

The Internet has become a powerful recruiting, fundraising and planning tool for terrorists -- and a monitoring and investigative measure for law enforcement and governments.

“I think many people would be surprised to learn about the range and diversity of terrorist and extremist groups operating in the United States,” Kenney said. Terrorism experts propose “major focus of efforts” to track down unusual suspects.

"Perpetrators of terrorist violence increasingly rely on the internet for recruitment and planning purposes. As the internet and related technologies evolve, the instrumental power of the internet – for fundraising, recruitment, financial transactions, and so on – expands and diversifies,” Kennedy added.

Two areas of concern for terrorism experts are the lack of public awareness and what they say is “mediocre” research on the subject.

“In the United States, public awareness of terrorism is mostly limited to Islamist terrorism,” said Kennedy, who consults with government agencies on terrorism. “I don’t think the average person in the United States would know that Colombia is a country with one of the highest rates of terrorism in the world.”

Charles Blair of FAS recalled that months before 9/11, a television show called the Lone Gunman featured a plane crashing into New York’s World Trade Center. Similarly, the teens behind the Columbine Massacre in 1999 had included in their planning a plane crashing into the twin towers.

“People tend to ignore terrorism warnings. They frantically scream saying they were not expecting an attack when it has already struck,” Blair said.

Corruption, the war on terror hindering food aid to southern Somalia

Somalia — 2012-06-01T14:40:33-04:00

As the famine in southern Somalia worsens, aid experts fear that corruption and the politics of terrorism are crimping the flow of humanitarian relief to areas where starvation is worst.

Abundant U.S. aid targeted for the Horn of Africa cannot directly reach starving people in southern Somalia because it’s blocked by Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda-aligned Islamist group labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. That tag, in turn, also prevents any U.S. citizen from conducting business or distributing materials that could benefit suspected terrorists.

Right now, $580 million in aid designated for the Horn of Africa by the U.S. government – the most from any one country – is directed at the Somali refugees who have migrated to camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. The aid is distributed by a variety of international aid groups.

Help is also being trucked into Somalia via United Nations and non-aligned humanitarian programs – but a lot of the foodstuffs and other material are siphoned off by theft and corruption by officials in the country’s nominal government, according to aid experts.

Mutual distrust between the U.S. and Islamist militants has made matters worse.

EJ Hogendoorn, International Crisis Group project director for the Horn of Africa, said corruption is widely acknowledged as a problem, but it should not be the main debate at the peak of the famine.

“Now the challenge is how to minimize corruption so that at least some assistance goes to those who urgently require it,” he said.

“Al-Shabaab is not the only threat in Somalia. Even if the Federal Transitional Government (FTG), whose powers are restricted barely to the capital city, Mogadishu, gains full control of the relief assistance, the possibility of corruption in distribution will still remain there,” Hogendoorn said.

Hogendoorn added that Al-Shabaab is not as powerful as depicted in the media. The organization is internally divided, he said, between hardliners who spurn international aid and more pragmatic leaders who seek foreign assistance.

“The best way to operate in that country is to build partnership with the local authorities rather than working in isolation,” Hogendoorn said.

Al-Shabaab is a splinter from a larger militant faction forced out of power in Somalia by Ethiopian and African troops a few years ago. Militant power in Somalia grew rapidly after the United States withdrew the forces it had sent to Somalia to protect food distribution in the early 1990s. U.S. troops left a power vacuum in the wake of clashes that led to a bloody shootout made famous by the “Black Hawk Down” book and movie.

Al-Shabaab is suspected of carrying out a terrorist attack in Uganda in 2010 and of being associated with the authors of other bombings in Kenya and Ethiopia. A U.S. military drone strike this summer was aimed at leaders of the militant group. U.S. Special Forces also have targeted Al-Shabaab.

U.S. government officials say the blame for delays in relief efforts must be put on Al-Shabaab, which has not allowed enough aid to enter territory it controls.

At this point, “Access remains the number one obstacle to providing life-saving assistance to more than 2.8 million people in southern Somalia,” said Matthew Johnson, a spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “It is the presence of Al-Shabaab that prevents aid from flowing into Somalia, not U.S. sanctions.”

Last week, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said death rates among new refugees coming from Somalia to Ethiopia had reached “alarming levels”. Since June when the Kobe refugee camp in Ethopia was established, at least 10 children under the age of five have died every day. The death rate has been compounded by an outbreak of measles.

According to U.S. government estimates, at least 29,000 children under age five have died in the past three months since famine reached acute levels in the Horn of Africa. Some 12 million people are facing starvation while 3.2 million Somalis are in “immediate need of assistance.” The UN says it requires $2.4 billion in aid supplies to assist drought victims, while an additional $1.4 billion is needed to contain the famine. But the UN has only received $1.1 billion in response to its appeals.

What’s the hold up?

U.S. officials recently hinted at softening the restrictions it has placed on direct aid to parts of Somalia, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). That rule forbids Americans from doing business with designated terrorist individuals and organizations. But the restriction remains and the pace of providing assistance to the famine victims has frustrated many in the aid community.

Critics of U.S. policy point to the International Committee of Red Cross, which is active in the famine zone. The organization says it has not been threatened by Islamic extremist groups. The ICRC has managed to reach to 162,000 starving people in areas controlled by Al-Shabaab.

Yves van Loo, an ICRC official based in Somalia, said his organization made sure to include local leaders in setting aid plans, emphasizing the organization’s principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence.

“ICRC’s security was insured by the ICRC itself. Our main protection is the acceptance by all,” van Loo said.

It is not enough, though, to convince U.S. officials that Al-Shabaab won’t sabotage relief efforts.

“Al-Shabaab has given mixed signals on whether it is lifting its ban on humanitarian agencies,” said USAID’s Johnson.

What’s clear, other U.S. officials said, is that Al-Shabaab is the problem in this crisis. “Despite promises to improve access for aid workers, Al-Shabaab continues to block humanitarian assistance to the hungriest and neediest in Somalia,” said Hilary Fuller Renner, press and public affairs officer at State’s Bureau of African Affairs. “The answer [to the current situation] is not to further militarize Somalia. The answer is for Al-Shabaab to put down its weapons and allow food to reach the hungry.”

U.S. officials said aid restrictions to Somalia are in place to prevent diversion of relief assistance. They fear that Al-Shabaab will further consolidate its grip over the region if it gains control of international relief supplies.

While the U.S. has withheld some funds from the U.N. relief agency, the world body has moved forward with aid to Somalia, policing its distribution through an internal mechanism called post-distribution monitoring, rather than strictly follow American rules on aid.

Spokesman Andreas Needham said the UN’s accountability and transparency measures fulfill U.S. government requirements.

“We are hopeful that there will be U.S. funding for UNHCR Somalia in the context of the current emergency,” Needham told ICIJ.

Death is one Pakistani reporter's constant companion

Balochistan,Pakistan — 2012-01-11T12:57:42-05:00

On May 29, Sayed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan bureau chief for the Asia Times, headed to a television studio to be interviewed. He had just written a story linking the Pakistani military with terrorists believed to have orchestrated a recent raid on a Navy base.

He never arrived.

Two days later, his battered body was discovered about 150 miles south of Islamabad.

Of the growing list of Pakistani journalists killed for doing their job, Shahzad’s death has focused international attention on the country’s horrific reputation as one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be an independent, inquisitive reporter.

Pakistan’s enraged journalist community directly blames the nation’s secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, for killing one of the country’s most respected investigative journalists. On Wednesday, the ISI denied any connection to it.

Shazad’s death is a cold reminder for me of the danger that underscores my own work.

In August, I moved from Pakistan’s insurgency-stricken province of Balochistan to the United States to start my Hubert Humphrey Fellowship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In Balochistan, according to veteran U.S. journalist Selig Harrison, the central government is engaged in a “slow-motion genocide” of the native Baloch people. In the midst of a conflict between the government and native people on the issue of natural resources and succession, truth and press freedom have become the biggest casualty.

About a dozen journalists have been killed, kidnapped or tortured by the government secret services and insurgent groups since 2009. A few broadcast journalists have met their deaths in crossfire or bomb blasts. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently ranked Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world for reporters, ahead of Iraq, Mexico and Honduras.

During the past nine months, I have lost six colleagues in the conflict. I spent time with all these journalists, working on stories, participating in training programs or developing source networks in the country’s largest province bordering Iran and Afghanistan. Family members and professional colleagues back home in Pakistan attribute the reporters’ targeted murders to state secret services and death squads. The authorities have not investigated or punished those responsible for these killings. Worse still, official pressure on media outlets has led to a complete blackout of the news concerning their deaths.

Jacqueline Park, the Asia-Pacific Director of the International Federation of Journalists, has described Balochistan as a “notoriously dangerous location to work as a journalist.”

A team from the Committee to Protect Journalists called on President Asif Ali Zardari in Islamabad last month demanding an official inquiry into the murders. While the CPJ shared a list of fifteen reporters whose deaths it wanted probed, it did not mention most of the correspondents who were killed last year in Balochistan.

From 2005 to 2010, I covered the fight against secular nationalists for Pakistan’s leading English language newspaper, Daily Times. Mohammad Khan Sasoli, president of a local press club complained to me that an underground anti-nationalist group, the Baloch Musla Defai Tanzeem was constantly threatening him and other members. The group, nationalists allege, is sponsored by the Pakistani secret services and paramilitary forces.

“The threats are consequential,” he whispered in my ear over tea at a teashop in Quetta, Balochistan’s capital. “The government-backed groups will kill me if I cover the Baloch nationalist parties, something that I am committed to do as a journalist.”

As my 36-year-old friend feared for his life, we wrote letters to the editor at some of Pakistan’s top English language newspapers urging the government to provide security for him. To no avail. Sasoli was shot dead in December while returning home from the press club.

I worked with Siddiq Eido, another journalist friend, to develop a network of reporters in the coastal area of Mekran where China has constructed a multimillion-dollar deep-sea project. Eido focused on human rights reporting. The government was annoyed with his coverage of the disappearances and extra-judicial killings of political workers from the Baloch ethnic minority at the hands of the secret services. His friends later disclosed Eido had received threatening phone calls from “private numbers, which are often used by the secret services, and was warned to stop reporting on “sensitive issues.” Eido continued to fearlessly report from Balochistan, and was kidnapped by suspected government officials on Dec. 21,in front of several eyewitnesses.

In an editorial in The Baloch Hal, the first online English newspaper of Balochistan, I urged the government of Pakistan to respect and protect journalists and human rights activists who are covering the conflict. The government snubbed our appeals for Eido’s safe release. Four months later, his bullet-riddled body was discovered in a mountainous area in his native Mekran. His corpse also showed signs of severe torture.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the most respected human rights watchdog in the country, directly held government authorities responsible for Eido’s murder.

In a statement issued soon after his body was discovered, the HRCP said, “The uniforms of his abductors and the vehicles they had used gave credence to the belief that state agents were involved [in the murder]. Siddique [Eido] had been abducted in the presence of several policemen, but despite such clear evidence no action was taken to publicly identify or prosecute his abductors and secure his release.”

Another murder was that of twenty-five year old Lala Hameed Hayatan, a correspondent of the Urdu language newspaper Daily Tawar. On Oct. 25, he was kidnapped by security forces and kept in illegal detention without criminal charges or access to the courts. After a month-long disappearance, Hayatan’s body was recovered from a local river on the eve of the Muslim festival of Eid. His killers left a message in his pocket describing the murder as a “gift of Eid” to further agonize his friends and family members.

According to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, Hayatan had been shot in the head and chest. “Marks on his body clearly indicated that he was tortured before being killed,” said the group in a statement. “Hayatan was probably murdered by members of the security forces (who are fighting Baloch armed separatists)… Balochistan is by far the most dangerous region in Pakistan for the media.”

The government has not investigated any of these deaths or the many other killings of reporters in Balochistan and elsewhere in Pakistan. Over the last decade, the only journalist murder case brought to justice was Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Pakistani authorities were forced to act only because of mounting U.S. and international pressure to punish his killers.

Beside murders, torture and arbitrary arrests, Internet censorship is another increasing problem faced by Pakistani journalists. Online newspapers with an independent editorial policy have seen their web sites blocked for not following the official line. Last November, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which is responsible for Internet regulation in the country, officially blocked the Baloch Hal reportedly on the order of the Pakistan army. The government did not provide a clear explanation for denying access to our readers inside Pakistan. It simply accused us of publishing “anti-state” material, a charge that was never substantiated.

In February 2009, the editor-in-chief of a popular Urdu language newspaper, Daily Asaap, narrowly escaped an attempt on his life in Quetta city. His newspaper was forced to shut down after paramilitary forces took over its office for several days. The offices of two more newspapers, Daily Balochistan Express and Daily Azadi, were also occupied by the paramilitary forces for criticizing government policies.

As Pakistan descends into chaos and further political turmoil, journalists and the free media continue to suffer at the hands of an increasingly intolerant military that overshadows a powerless political government in Pakistan. Protests by journalist advocates, such as the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists are oftentimes selective and restricted to urban parts of the country while reporters working in rural Pakistan have to face the threats alone.

Malik Siraj Akbar, a visiting journalist with ICIJ, is the Humbert H. Humphrey fellow at Arizona State University. He is the editor of The Baloch Hal, Balochistan's first online English language newspaper.