The premise of this study, concluding that the arrest of future terror suspects on minor charges represent missed opportunities to “detect and deter an attack,” seems flawed to me:
One of the variables looked at by officials at the center, which is run by the New York State Police and brings together federal, other state and local agencies to analyze and share information about terrorism, was the terror suspects’ criminal backgrounds.
Center officials obtained the criminal histories of 77 of the 90 people arrested on terrorism charges for plots or attacks against the U.S. after 9/11. Thirty-four of those suspects, or 44%, had prior criminal records, according to the report.
A third of the charges were for possession or sale of drugs. All but one of those cases involved marijuana, according to the report. The next leading charge was for assault and battery, followed by weapons possession, the report said.
I haven’t seen the study yet, but the fact that most of the charges involved low-level drug possession suggests that these aren’t exactly “missed opportunities,” especially since most of them involved marijuana possession. Depending on when the individuals in question were radicalized or became determined to carry out an attack, they might not have even known what they would ultimately end up doing. The draconian sentences we hand out for non-violent drug possession are too long already, we shouldn’t be throwing more potheads in jail for longer because one or two might ultimately turn out to be terrorists.
We might draw a conclusion about the supposedly supernatural lure of terrorist ideology from these results though, which is that such groups draw their membership from the kind of people who are already prone to getting in trouble. That suggests the emotional motivations of some recruits, far from being alien and unrecognizable, might be similar to the reasons people end up in gangs and the like.
