During the 110th Congress, under the leadership of Chairman Joseph Lieberman (ID-CT), the Committee continued its investigation into the threat of domestic radicalization and homegrown terrorism inspired by violent Islamist ideology. The Committee has held five more hearings exploring a range of subjects, including an assessment of the homegrown threat in the United States, the European experience with domestic radicalization, the federal government’s efforts to counter the homegrown terrorist threat, the role of local law enforcement in responding to the threat, and the Internet’s role in the radicalization process.

This staff report concerns the last of these subjects – how violent Islamist terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are using the Internet to enlist followers into the global violent Islamist terrorist movement and to increase support for the movement, ranging from ideological support, to fundraising, and ultimately to planning and executing terrorist attacks. In the second section of this report, we examine the increasing number of homegrown incidents and the judgments of the intelligence and law enforcement communities that there will likely be additional homegrown threats in the future. The third section explores the four-step radicalization process through which an individual can be enticed to adopt a violent Islamist extremist mindset and act on the ideology’s call to violence. Section four identifies the disturbingly broad array of materials available on the Internet that promote the violent Islamist extremist ideology. The availability of these resources is not haphazard, but is part of a comprehensive, tightly controlled messaging campaign by al-Qaeda and like-minded extremists designed to spread their violent message. The fifth section of the report examines how these materials facilitate and encourage the radicalization process.

Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat

The Islamist movement is a mixture of forces comprising many strands of tradition, culture, allegiance, and belief. Its most noxious ingredient is a style of religious imperialism fueled by Arabian petrodollars. As Feldman points out, Saudi Arabia is unique in not having inherited the Ottoman state system. Its scholars influence state policies while also having the freedom to propagate versions of Islam that diverge from the interests of the ruling family. By helping to supply the religious arguments that support jihadist trends, the Wahhabi scholars have a political impact well beyond their intellectual and theological weight, even when specific outcomes, such as attacks on Western targets, run counter to the Saudi state's policies.

The dangers of jihadism, however, have been needlessly exacerbated by the "war on terror" and the folly of the US invasion of Iraq, which, as Sageman suggests, galvanized a whole new generation of "third-wave" jihadists. Yet the "leaderless jihad" he discusses is inherently self-limiting. As a trans-national social movement—rather than an ideology with a coherent political agenda—it generally lacks the organizational capacity to gain and hold power. The exceptions lie in the atypical situations of Iran, where the Shia clergy constitute an "estate" comparable to their equivalents in early modern Europe, and of Gaza, occasioned by the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Contrary to the alarmist views of Henry Kissinger, who insists that "radical Islam rejects claims to national sovereignty based on secular state models," Islamist attitudes toward the national state are ambivalent. There are no insuperable obstacles, historical or theological, to the de jure acceptance of the postcolonial state that most of the Islamist movements already acknowledge, de facto, as being the arena of politics. The challenge for policymakers in Islamic and Western worlds must be to harness these movements' positive energies (including their democratic aspirations and social concerns), while criminalizing terrorism and relentlessly exposing the bigotry that drives it.

The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists

Thomas Powers:

There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in any program or policy, and therefore free—at the very least in constitutional theory, and perhaps even really and truly free—to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the current presidential campaign have promised to do just that—not precipitously, not recklessly, not without care to give the shaky government in Baghdad time and the wherewithal to pick up the slack. But Obama and Clinton have both promised that the course would be changed on the first day; ending the American involvement in the Iraqi fighting would be the new goal, troop numbers would be down significantly by the middle of the first year, and within a reasonable time (not long) the residual American force would be so diminished in size that any fair observer might say the war was over, for the Americans at least, and the troops had been brought home.

The presumptive Republican candidate, John McCain, has pledged to do exactly the opposite—to "win" the war, whatever that means, and whatever that takes. Politicians often differ by shades of nuance. Not this time. The contrast of McCain and his opponents on this question is stark, and if they can be taken at their word, Americans must expect either continuing war for an indefinite period with McCain or the anxieties and open questions of turning the war over to the Iraqi government for better or worse with Obama or Clinton. Which is it going to be?

Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out?

The U.S. does not often look north to gauge its own security prospects. But over the past few months, Canada has been quietly embroiled in one of the most revealing political and international-security debates since the end of the cold war. It's a debate critical to the future of NATO. And its outcome may tell us a lot about the fate of the U.S.'s struggle against terrorism.

Keeping Canada in Afghanistan

The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

The Price of the Surge - Steven Simon

Lacking a tangible homeland—other than, perhaps, scattered outposts in the wilds of Waziristan—Al-Qaeda has established itself as a virtual state that communicates with its “citizens” and cultivates an even larger audience through masterful use of the media, with heavy reliance on the Internet. For every conventional video performance by Bin-Laden that appears on Al-Jazeera and other major television outlets, there are hundreds of online videos that proselytize, recruit, and train the Al-Qaeda constituency.
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The Al-Qaeda media machine has grown steadily. Qaeda and its jihadist brethren use more than 4,000 web sites to encourage the faithful and threaten their enemies. The Al-Qaeda production company, As-Sahab, released 16 videos during 2005, 58 in 2006, and produced more than 90 in 2007. Like a Hollywood studio, As-Sahab has a carefully honed understanding of what will attract an audience and how to shape the Al-Qaeda message.

The Al-Qaeda Media Machine

Robert Kaplan:

All the debate about Colombian free trade has obscured something important: Colombia is far safer now than it was five years ago. In fact, if Iraq were reclaiming terrorist-controlled areas as effectively as Colombia is, even the most die-hard opponents of the Iraq War would admit error. Colombia is, after Iraq and Afghanistan, our third-biggest nation-building project, and it is by far our most successful.

Colombia demonstrates the value of the indirect approach in our overseas military deployments. Our military role there, started by Bill Clinton and continued by George W. Bush, has been significant: Army Special Forces have trained elite Colombian units, who have in turn engaged the narco-terrorists. When I first visited Colombia in early 2003, the border with Venezuela was a no-go zone. Now new businesses are opening, and the streets are crowded, even at night. Parts of the south and east are experiencing the same success. Indeed, by 2006 I could visit large swathes that were inaccessible before.

Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has fought -- and is winning -- a counterinsurgency war even as he has liberalized the economy, strengthened institutions, and improved human rights. Nuri al Maliki and Hamid Karzai could learn from him. The failure of Congress to pass a free-trade pact indicates that the greatest threat to our power is our own domestic dysfunction. What should be the icing on the cake to a successful nation-building program has become an embarrassment.

A Colombian Vision for Iraq

The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) is about defending against relentless ideological enemies who are bent on destroying the American way of life. However, the methods employed by the members of the homeland security, intelligence, law enforcement, and military communities that are charged with protecting the United States must be carefully measured. American citizens’ individual civil liberties must be safeguarded from infringement against a backdrop of evolving intelligence requirements. This paper will examine several related questions. First, what laws, judicial rulings, executive orders, regulations, policies, and precedents govern U.S. intelligence gathering related to operations that could affect American citizens? Are governmental departments and agencies operating in compliance? Does our current legal framework permit the sort of intelligence collection, sharing, and dissemination needed? If not, how can the agencies charged with doing so continue collecting the domestic intelligence needed to meet homeland security requirements, without trampling on the very Constitution those of us in the military are sworn to defend? Thoughtful consideration of these issues is the key to a true “victory” in the GWOT, lest we sacrifice our way of life along the way.

Balancing the Pendulum of Freedom

It's not easy to remember that terrorists, too, are in politics, with all the insecurity and ambition that implies. Certainly that's true of the four famous Islamic killers, two of them dead, whose statements, distributed on the Web, fill Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (Harvard University Press), published this week. Their messages rally the troops and attempt to recruit new soldiers, but also read like the pleas of politicians for status within the loosely defined and always changing jihadist movement.

In their own fanatical words

HRC goes Giuliani.

Hell's Kitchen