Today, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins released their report on the Ft. Hood Shootings, which concludes that they could have been prevented. The report offers strong evidence that Major Nidal Malik Hasan's radicalization was ignored by military superiors and colleagues. While radicalization isn't in and of itself a crime, there are certain behavioral standards in the military that Hasan was violating and would have warranted discharge.
I just want to focus for a second on one of the other points of the report, however, which is that domestic radicalization is a problem that is increasing in scope:
The Committee's 2008 staff report concluded that the threat of homegrown terrorism inspired by violent Islamist extremist ideology would increase due to the focused online efforts of that ideology's adherents and how indiv iduals were using the internet to access this propaganda. Indeed, the incidence of homegrown terrorism has increased significantly in the past two years as compared to the years since 9/ 11 . From May 2009 to November 2010, there were 22 different homegrown plots, contrasted with 21 such plots from September 200 I to May 2009.
Here's the thing: While it's true that there were more domestic plots in 2009 and 2010 than 2001 to 2009, the frequency of plots actually went down in 2010. The Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security released a report yesterday that identifies the number of Muslim-Americans engaged in terrorist acts with domestic targets declined from 18 in 2009 to 10 in 2010*. So in the past year, homegrown terrorism perpetrated by Islamic extremists or wannabes actually decreased by a significant amount. The author of the report, Charles Kurman, concludes:
Upturns in the pace of Muslim-American terrorism are particularly newsworthy, and have driven much public debate over the past two years. This report documents a downturn in the pace of Muslim-American terrorism -- it remains to be seen whether this is accorded a similar level of attention, and whether the level of public concern will ratchet downward along with the number of terrorism suspects.
I asked Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Defense of Democracies' Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization, what he thought of the report, since he has been critical of the Triangle Center's work in the past. He said he thought the study "makes a worthwhile contribution in helping to fill out our overall dataset of homegrown jihadi terror cases and to better understand trends in domestic radicalization."
In general, I think it is bad policy to massively adjust our policing policies in any one direction based on the last plot or last data that we have seen: so decreasing counterterrorism policing resources just because there were fewer homegrown plots in 2010 would be a mistake. But so too was it a mistake for some analysts to read into the 2009 data an extended increase in the homegrown terrorism threat.
The Lieberman/Collins report frames the issue of homegrown terrorism as an increasing threat, and presents the data that way. But the decline would suggest that since 2009, the threat has decreased or that the government is handling it better. That doesn't mean we should stop worrying about it, but it does mean that we should be careful not to draw too many broad conclusions.
*In the intial version of this post, I got this statistic wrong.
