02/06/15 – Matthew Harwood – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Same as always.
Next up is Matthew Harwood.
He's a senior writer and editor for the ACLU and a regular writer for tomdispatch.com, which means we run pretty much everything he writes at antiwar.com as well.
You know how it works under Tom Englehart's name there.
The latest is, I think it's on the site today, in fact, The Fear of Lone Wolf Terrorism Rises.
Welcome back to the show.
Matt, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
Anytime.
Yeah, good.
And so, yeah, you're right.
The fear of the lone wolf is certainly rising.
I think part of it is just because the war on terror has gone on for so long and it seems like we've gotten off pretty lucky, actually, in terms of retaliation for the amount of violence our government has been dealing out lately.
And then especially since the war in Syria, it seems like that's a place where more Westerners have, many more have gone than ever went to go, say, fight with the insurgency in the Iraq war or something like that.
And so, you know, and there's just kind of little ones here and there.
You're telling me here not to worry.
Yeah.
I mean, when it comes to lone wolf terrorism, which we're basically talking about as a single solitary individual, and it's generally a male and a lot of times there's mental disturbance, you know, it happens.
It's one of those things.
It happened.
It doesn't happen all that frequent, frequently.
On the definition, let me ask you, does that include, say, Faisal Shahzad, who was working in cooperation with the Pakistani Taliban who sent him back and he was on his own at the time?
Or you're talking about just goofball in his mom's basement decides that now's the time kind of thing.
Well, generally, the goofballs in the basement are usually caught in some sort of sting.
But yeah, no, and we usually like, say, Faisal Shahzad for me and, you know, I'm just a guy to tell you I'm a writer.
But when I look at I look at the literature, I would say Faisal Shahzad is not a lone wolf because he was trained abroad.
And there seems to at least been knowledge that he was supposed to go back and do this.
When you look at a more purist definition of it, it really is someone who does it themselves, you know, goes, gets either performs a training himself or maybe it was in the distant past.
So, you know, it could be, say, someone coming back who was in the military, say, or got some sort of training in some other way.
But what we're basically talking about here is that there is no command control.
There's no one saying you go out and do this, right?
Yeah.
And then, you know, even there's times where you'll see with the literature, too, you want to push back and say, is this person clearly, clearly mentally disturbed that they actually can't even be responsible for their actions?
It's just it is just one of these things that it's really hard to figure out what we call lone wolf.
And that's kind of one of the points that I wanted to make in the piece is that this is I mean, this has been going on for a long time, but researchers have only really started to focus in on it now.
And so the definition itself is still under contention.
But for me, it would be always an individual.
So the kawachis in the Paris attack, for me, at least, and for many others within the literary, I mean, within the academy, would say they're not lone wolves.
And that's simply just based off that there was two of them.
And now we're, you know, we're getting through reporting in the intelligence agencies that these guys were on the radar for a long time, and they do have deep connections to extremist movements overseas.
All right.
Now, it has seemed to me that we're pretty lucky that there were, I believe, something like a couple of dozen Somali Americans from the Minneapolis area who went and traveled to Somalia to fight with al-Shabaab against the American backed government there.
And it always seemed to me pretty lucky that none of them decided if they were going to fight in that war, that they would just stay here and fight it.
Soft targets everywhere, Minneapolis, you know, kind of thing.
And I don't mean to give anybody bad ideas, but I'm just saying if they're motivated enough to go and fight in a jihad in Syria or in Somalia, I don't know, you're saying...
I mean, the only thing I can say is maybe they don't see the United States as the enemy.
Especially when it came to al-Shabaab going overseas.
I know the fear of the United States government was going to be that some of these guys are going to come back and attack, but it hasn't happened.
Yeah.
Well, maybe they didn't put two and two together as to who was backing the African Union in their occupation in that country or something, but good for us.
I mean, don't give them...
Who knows?
I don't want to give them bad ideas, but anyway, so now when you talk about, you know, mostly they're mentally ill, what does exactly that mean?
Because, I mean, there's not really a checkbox for saying if somebody's going to kill innocent people, there's some kind of psycho, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're, you know, not so out of their minds.
Well, I don't know if you see that.
I mean, soldiers kill people all the time.
We wouldn't consider them mentally disturbed.
Well, I mean, that's why they make them yell, kill, kill, kill a thousand times first, you know?
Yeah, there's some sort of psychological programming going on there, of course.
You know, it's funny when you look at the, again, I can only go off the lips from a psychologist or psychiatrist, it's really not really clearly defined, and again, we're getting into an area that is incredibly fuzzy and gray.
Yeah, you can use the word seams wherever you like here, but you're saying usually these people are more nutty than politically motivated, seemingly.
What's really interesting, too, is, and this has to do with terrorism in general, when you look at people who engage in terrorist acts and join a terrorist group, a lot of us would think that it has everything to do with ideology, but researchers have time and time and time again found that it is incredibly a complex mixture of why someone joins a terrorist group or engages in terrorism, whether that be a lone actor, which we're talking about, or through, say, the Irish Republican Army or Al-Qaeda.
And one of the things that we always get concerned about is, you don't want to make a linear line between ideology and violence, because there's tons of people who have what we would consider crazy beliefs or have crazy violent beliefs, but they never lash out violently.
So what's always, you know, the first thing that you'll find in the literature and what we always push back at the ACLU is that there's no profile for these people, you know?
So get that out of your head.
There's no way, at least yet, where you can say this person has this percentage or, I should say, this amount of likelihood to engage in such and such an act.
It's just impossible.
God help us all when they claim they're here.
I'm sorry.
I was just saying, God help us all when they claim they figured out the algorithm to pinpoint who's who and who's to be preventively detained or whatever.
I mean, what was funny was, you know, when I was doing research for this piece, I found, you know, a piece of literature of researchers basically talking about algorithms for this type of thing.
And of course, the first thing they say, which, you know, any government says or any researcher says, as long as the appropriate civil liberties and privacy constraints are put upon this.
But how often does that happen?
Yeah, yeah.
They're talking pre-crime here.
So it's kind of...
Yeah, I mean, we are.
You know this, you cover this all the time.
We're getting the minority report type of stuff all the time now.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and then so and then see, here's the other thing about it.
And obviously, this is my obsession with it is you look at the Charlie Hebdo attack is terrible and everything, but we're still talking 14 people.
I think it was something right around there.
And people think this is just like September 11th.
And it's taken as seriously as though it was September 11th, which, you know, gives way too much credit to our enemies in the first place.
But it also just goes to show how how easy it is to turn people back into that climate of fear and that their willingness to surrender liberty for security just happens that quick.
So, you know, maybe that's the lesson of all these attacks and kind of half-assed attacks and failed attacks that we've had in America, is that it doesn't take a September 11th.
It only takes maybe a nut with a rifle or a half a truck bomb in Times Square or something to really cost us, you know, whatever clauses are left in whichever parts of the first 10 amendments there.
Well, I think what you just said is really interesting because I think there's a counter-narrative to this.
There's a there's another lesson we can take from this.
And that's what happened in Norway with the Brevik attack.
You know, that was in the thing of it.
Think of it.
You know, it was a coordinated attack performed by one guy.
You know, there's a vehicle-borne explosive explosion in Oslo.
I believe it killed somewhere, you know, around seven or eight people approximately.
Then he goes to the island and basically massacres a youth camp.
I want to say about 69 people died there.
In the end of the day, Norway basically said our response to this is to criminally prosecute Brevik, put him in jail.
And at the end of the day, we're not going to change anything about us.
We're going to go on.
Actually, I believe the prime minister said something along the lines of, you know, our response to this is to be more democratic, to be more open, to love our liberties more.
We need to.
I think that's the type of message you want to send to violent extremists, whether they belong to a group or whether they act out individually.
You're not going to change us.
We're stronger than this.
Right.
All right.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back.
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See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
All right, guys.
Welcome back.
Sorry, I'm no good at watching the clock.
Poor Matt.
I'm talking with Matt Harwood from the ACLU.
Man, you're saying something really great there about how in the aftermath of the Nazi, well, whatever, white supremacist massacre, a perpetrated massacre in Norway, their reaction was ain't going to work on us, pal.
And then they pulled that off.
They did that.
It didn't work on them.
Yeah, as far as I know, no new security type of legislation was passed.
I'm not even sure any was offered.
And so you always have to say, can you imagine that something like that happens here?
I mean, you know, generally one thing we haven't really spoken about yet is that, you know, a lot of times lone wolf attack is a stand in for Muslim.
And that's just not true, especially in the United States.
At least since, you know, if we can take pre 9-11, most of the attacks were generally perpetrated by from the right.
It was a right wing, mostly a right wing phenomenon.
And then post 9-11, there's the mixture of what would be considered, you know, in the literature, anti-government, also extreme right wing, which is generally anti-Semitic or white supremacist.
And then there's the Al-Qaeda ideologies.
And what's also interesting with that is that generally the Al-Qaeda type ideologies are inflated because what they're finding out is that a lot of them are FBI stings, which run very close to entrapment, if not cross the line into entrapment.
Right.
And dozens of those.
One research they found about 15, which accounted for 25 percent of the so-called lone wolf plot.
Oh, yeah.
No, Trevor Aronson's got 50.
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
But this is, I think, 2001, 2013.
And remember, what we're talking about is just lone wolf that I'm talking about.
So not, not a lot of these entrapment cases, like Newburgh sting stuff, stuff wouldn't even come into this because there's about three or four guys involved in that.
Right, right.
Yeah, it suits me.
All right.
So, I mean, the latest one probably we don't know enough yet, but would be the Christopher Cornell thing in Ohio.
It's always weird to say that and not think of Soundgarden, but we're not talking about Soundgarden.
And that was a gentleman who apparently was going to set off pipe bombs around the Capitol and then kill members of Congress as they as they fled out the building.
I still am fascinated at a government acting like they understand that the purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction.
And so the smart play is to not overreact, but to be a grown up about it for a minute, even when something horrible happens.
I mean, again, like you said, this guy, he massacred an entire camp full of kids, 60, 70 kids he killed.
And and yet no matter how horrible it was, they refused to exploit it.
Basically, that's another way to put it.
They did not cynically take advantage like the Americans who, as I like to say, might as well have done 9-11 as an inside job because of how cynically they exploited it for every last bit of extra power, an extra war that they could get away with taking and launching.
And so.
But I would agree.
I mean, it doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be.
I mean, it's not even doesn't have to.
We're not even talking theoretical here.
We have an example of it.
This is the way you handle these type of things.
I mean, even think in Norway, Norway, I mean, you know, their society, he wasn't even he's not going to jail for the rest of his life.
I mean, he was sentenced to, I believe, 21 years because that's the maximum sentence in Norway.
Now, you know, when it comes to times where it's near 21 years, they can keep him if they think he's still a threat.
And apparently he's still he's trying to form some sort of fascist party in prison.
So, you know, maybe they're going to make the designation that he's still a threat.
I might be underreacting a little bit there.
Well, I mean, again, it's not that they're just going to open up the prison gates at 21 years.
They're going to they're going to revisit it.
And, you know, if there is a continuing security concern, they can keep him in.
But again, it's just another interesting thing, the difference between the United States and other other other cultural cultures in other countries, especially when we have the problem of mass incarceration and sending people away, you know, almost for the rest of our lives for ridiculous things such as drug crime.
So, I mean, again, there's it's always interesting to do some kind of comparative analysis between how we act as as Americans or at least our government acts and then what happens overseas, generally, usually in Europe.
Right.
Well, you know, back to the algorithms.
Can you talk to me a little bit about who's claiming that they can solve this problem?
These are the people.
You know what?
I don't even have the research in front of me.
I didn't even quote in the thing, but I can certainly send it to you if you're if you're interested in it.
I don't know if it has any traction.
It's just one of those things where, of course, when there's something it's the normal thing.
And again, it's something you probably cover all the time.
It's a homeland security industrial complex.
And, you know, if there's money to be made, there's going to be researchers are going to stand in to make money for it.
I mean, who knows?
But the only thing I can say is, you know, from from the way I use the Internet and I'm sure the way you use the Internet, there'd be red flags probably all the time on what we look at and what we serve.
And so this gets to the point where you have to warn people to to to really, you know, be vigilant on this type of stuff is because there's tons of false positives.
And again, this comes down to what we were talking about before with profiling.
There's no way to profile people who are who are going to commit political violence.
It's just it's not going to happen.
It's such, you know, an exceedingly small amount of people do these type of things.
Right.
So there's just really no way of doing it unless you're comfortable with ruining people's lives to do this.
Right.
Well, and as you say in the article, too, if you really want to stop somebody who's dangerous in this, that or the other community, the way to do it is have it where the average people don't consider the police, their occupying army enemy oppressor, but actually officer friendly on the corner who they might be willing to talk to.
Hey, you know, I think Jimmy is getting serious about using that AK on somebody, but people would just as soon not go to the cops or have anything to do with them.
And obviously, especially this is a problem in Muslim communities where where obviously they have a huge incentive to distance themselves from anyone who might do anything crazy at all and be the first to naturally want to say, hey, we have a problem with this guy.
But if the cops are treating them all as enemies, then who wants to have any part of that?
You know, well, I mean, the one the one case that I think is the extreme case that we that I highlight in the piece is that's what Ferdis, who was clearly mentally disabled.
I mean, I mean, he was literally by the time of the end of this thing, wearing diapers because he was so far gone.
But this this was a young gentleman who the FBI entrapped into concocting a plot of flying what they quote unquote called drones or unmanned aerial vehicles into the capital in the Pentagon.
They were you know, they're basically just small makeshift remote controlled airplanes.
But what's really interesting here and which completely destroys any trust, you know, the various American Muslim communities can have in law enforcement is that this is clearly, again, someone who was coming undone and what should have happened is there should have been an intervention and the kids should have been given to physicians or some sort of community that could help him out rather than create this terrorist conspiracy that didn't exist.
And again, what was always interesting about this is that they called him a lone wolf.
He was not a lone wolf.
And one of the things he was charged with was conspiracy to commit terrorism.
So once again, I mean, you have the idea that the definition doesn't you know, that the law enforcement is taking advantage of this definition or this phenomenon, right, rather than really concerned about making sure that it's defined properly and that we come up with some sort of solutions to it.
Right.
They just like saying wolf.
That's why I think so.
I mean, one of the things, too, even with our article, my article is that we're we're trying to tamp down the lone wolf.
And the one the problem is you have to use it if you want people to even understand what you're talking about in the beginning.
But as we go through the piece, we start to try to call it, you know, solo actors, lone actors or even just individual terrorists, because it is I mean, it's used to fear monger.
Yeah, that was Bush's crowning achievement campaign ad or the crowning achievement of his campaign, actually, for reelection in 2004 was that last ditch, I think, minute long commercial of a bunch of wolves on a rock about 50 yards away starting to decide to get up and come after you.
And only Bush can save you now.
I don't even remember that.
Oh, yeah.
No, that was it was that and a bunch of other things.
That's why he did.
Liam Neeson come out and, you know, kill all the wolves.
Yeah.
And that's oh no.
You just knew that you could trust Bush to keep you safe.
You know, that's how it went.
But but no, I mean, it's perfect propaganda.
And of course, it means it implies total randomness that like, however, will the state figure out how to protect us?
That's the insurmountable challenge that they must face instead of, you know, this is kind of ridiculous and overblown.
And please don't go too far trying to protect me from it.
You know?
Yeah.
Again, I mean, one another point, you know, another point raised in the article is, you know, we have rampage shooters all the time.
But we don't want to see the national security state getting involved in trying to stop.
I mean, maybe some people do, but, you know, I'm sure I would hope a majority of Americans wouldn't try to stop violence like this, because, again, it's unpredictable.
It comes out of nowhere and there's really no way to do it.
And you can create a police state and then you'll be in danger from it.
Thanks, man.
I kept you over time, but I got to let you go.
But I appreciate it.
No problem.
Thanks.
Anytime.
All right.
So that's Matt Harwood.
He's at the ACLU and at Tom Dispatch dot com.
And this one's under Tom's name at antiwar dot com slash Engelhardt.
It's the fear of lone wolf terrorism rises.
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