Sultan Knish
Means, opportunity and motive are the three crucial elements of
investigating a crime and establishing the guilt of its perpetrator.
Means and opportunity tell us how the crime could have been committed
while motive tells us why it was committed. Many crimes cannot be
narrowed down by motive until a suspect is on the scene; but acts of
terrorism can be. Almost anyone might be responsible for a random
killing; but political killings are carried out by those who subscribe
to common beliefs.
Eliminate
motive from terrorism and it becomes no different than investigating a
random killing. If investigators are not allowed to profile potential
terrorists based on shared beliefs rooted in violence, that makes it
harder to catch terrorists after an act of terror and incredibly
difficult before the act of terror takes place.
The roadblock isn't only technical; it's conceptual. Investigations
consist of connecting the dots. If you can't conceive of a connection,
then the investigation is stuck. If you can't make the leap from A to B
or add two to two and get four, then you are dependent on lucky breaks.
And lucky breaks go both ways. Sometimes investigators get lucky and
other times the terrorists get lucky.
Federal law enforcement was repeatedly warned by the Russians that
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dangerous, but operating under the influence of a
political culture that refused to see Islam as a motive for terrorism,
it failed to connect the dots between Chechen violence in Russia and
potential terrorism in the United States, and because it could not see
Islam as a motive, as a causal factor rather than a casual factor, it
could find no reason why Tamerlan was a threat not just to Russia, but
also to the United States.
The missing motive factor has led to a rash of lone wolf terrorists
whose acts are classified as individual crimes. Nidal Hasan's killing
spree at Fort Hood was put down to workplace violence, but workplace
violence isn't a motive, it's a bland description. The motive was
obvious in Hasan's background and his behavior; but the military, an
organization that by its nature has to be able to predict the actions of
the enemy, had been crippled and left unable to see Islam as a motive.
The current working concept is that by refusing to allow our military
and law enforcement to identify Islam as a motive, we are stifling
terrorist recruitment by preventing Muslim from identifying terrorist
attacks with Islam. This ostrich theory of terror assumes that if we
blind ourselves to the motives of the terrorists, then potential
terrorists will likewise be blinded to their own motives.
Any law enforcement protocol that prevents investigators from
understanding the motives of the killers in the hope that this will take
away that motive from the killers is absurdly backward. The
investigators of terror are not the instigators of terror. A police
detective arresting a rapist does not create rape. An FBI agent
arresting a terrorist does not create terror. Identifying a crime does
not create the crime. It makes it easier for law enforcement and the
public to fight that crime.
The insidious infiltration of blowback theory into terrorist
investigations has dangerously subverted the ability of investigators to
get to the truth and to catch the terrorists. Blowback theory assigns
each act of Islamic terror an origin point in our actions. Everything
that Muslim terrorists do is caused by something that we did. To those
who believe in this linkage, the only way to fight Muslim terror is to
stop inspiring it. The only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is to defeat
ourselves.
Blowback theory has been dressed up in academic language and expert
jargon, but all it amounts to is Stockholm Syndrome with a lecture hall.
Its essential postulate is that if we become more passive in our
responses, a strategy that is usually described with the complementary
term, "smart", as in "smart war" and "smart investigation", then the
enemy will become more passive in response to our passivity because we
are no longer inspiring his violence.
Smart wars and smart investigations are those that don't offend Muslims.
The cost of the smart war in Afghanistan has been a very expensive and
bloody defeat. The cost of the smart investigation can be seen in the
streets of Boston or in Fort Hood.
Any smart tactic based on inaction and ignorance, on throwing away
advantages to seem less provocative, is not smart; it's stupid. When
things go unsaid because they are politically incorrect, then they will
eventually go undone. And when they are both unsaid and undone, then it
becomes impossible to think them. The concepts fade out of reach, the
connections in what, Hercule Poirot, called the little grey cells, are
no longer made and what was once a familiar mental shortcut becomes an
entirely alien concept.
Defeating ourselves in order to defeat Islamic terrorism is a dead end
because we are not the source of that terrorism; we are its target. When
we handicap ourselves out of a misguided notion that the best way to
fight terrorism is with one hand tied behind our backs and an eyepatch
on one eye, then Americans die.
Islamic terrorism, once the starting point of any rational
investigation, has become an uncomfortable endpoint uttered by
uncooperative suspects who refuse to go along with the stress-motivated
killing spree defense their lawyers are eager to put forward for them. It is the dark thing at the end of
every investigation that politicians don't want to talk about, reporters
don't want to write about and prosecutors grow reluctant to discuss for
fear of offending judges and stifling career prospects.
Without Islam as a motive, there is no way to fight the larger threat
except as a discrete collection of seemingly random events. What
connects a Tamerlan Tsarnaev to a Nidal Hasan to Ahmed in Jersey City or
Mohamed in Minneapolis plotting the next attack? The official answer is
nothing. One was a boxer and another was an army doctor and the third
is just an Egyptian student or a Somali bank clerk. They have no motive
in common except that of Islam.
Motives identify links. They make it easier to stack events together as a
trend. They make it possible to predict the next attack by looking at
the common denominators that matter as opposed to the ones that don't.
And above all else, they combine together to give us a rational picture
of the world so that we understand what we are experiencing and what we
have to do about it.
A man dropped onto a battlefield without having the concept of an army
or a war will be bewildered and horrified by the incomprehensible
experience of large numbers of individuals shooting at him for no
reason. "Why do they all want to kill me?" he thinks. "Was it something I
did?"
Crime is personal. War is impersonal. The murderer has personal motives
for his actions, but the motives of the soldier are irrelevant. In war,
it is the organization that matters more than the individual. Wasting
time predicting the movements of individual armies instead of soldiers
is not productive. Attempting to understand terrorists as individuals,
rather than members of a mass movement is equally a waste of time.
Media accounts have presented various exculpatory motives for Tamerlan
Tsarnaev ranging from the possible head injuries he may have suffered as
a boxer to the murder of a best friend that investigators suspect he
may carried out. All these motives are irrelevant, not because they may
not have some figment of truth to them, but because they stopped
mattering once he became what he was. One soldier may join the army
because his girlfriend broke up with him, another because he lost his
job and a third because he wants to impress his friends. Those motives
may all be true, but they don't matter. Once organized into a
collective, their individual motives stop mattering and the collective
motive takes over.
Islamic terrorism is a collective motive. There is limited variation in
the tactics and the thinking of terrorists. Whatever they may have been
before they fully committed themselves to the war against civilization
is an incidental matter. And the only piece of individual identity that
matters is still the collective one of their Islamic background. That is
still the greatest predictive factor of terrorism.
The Islamic terrorist abandons his individuality and takes on an
identity that asks him to love death more than life. His motives are no
longer personal, but collective. He is a soldier in the Islamic war
against civilization. His marching orders may come from Jihadi videos
and magazines, but they provide him with training and an esprit de corps
sufficient to the purposes of his campaign of terror. To strive to
understand him as a father or a son, as a boxer or a doctor, is a waste
of time. These biographical footnotes no longer represent him. They are
the things he has discarded to become a messenger of death in obedience
to a faith that values death more than life.
Without understanding that, the terrorist becomes a cipher, another nice young man who suddenly
turned violent, and the trend of terrorist attacks ceases to be a
pattern and becomes a rash of horrifying incidents that can happen at
any time.
Terrorism is a form of war. It cannot be won without understanding that
there is a battlefield and an enemy fighting for control of that
battlefield. Without that understanding, our superiority in strength and
our possession of the battlefield can only result in a temporary
stalemate leading to a permanent defeat.
Terrorism denial turns terrorist attacks into a cipher without a motive.
If Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev had not carried out their attack at a
public event in the age of the ubiquitous camera, then how long would
law enforcement have chased down dead ends or searched for the Tea Party
tax protesters that the political establishment expected them to find?
Without a motive, there is no place to begin searching. Without Islam,
there is no motive. Terrorism denial isn't just an intellectual error;
it is a grave danger to the lives of Americans. Terrorism denial created
a space in which the Tsarnaev brothers were free to plot and kill.
Terrorism denial cost the lives of three Americans and the bodily
integrity of hundreds of others. Denying the Islamic motive for terror,
makes it harder for law enforcement officer to do their job and easier
for Muslim terrorists to do theirs.
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