 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Berger and I run our national security program. It's a lot of the great deal of pleasure that I get to introduce J. M. Berger, who is the author of, I think, what is really an authoritative, definitive account of Americans who make the choice to go overseas to fight in overseas G-hats. And I think it's particularly timely right now. We have the Kenyan government alleging that one of the four attackers in the East Gate Mall was Somali Americans. So far we only know an alias, but I think hopefully we'll find out a real name at some point. We have the recent death of Omar Hamami, who J. M. Berger was in regular, almost, I mean, more than regular contact. I mean, very, very close contact with over Twitter. And J. M. is a former business reporter. He's written one book. He has been involved in a number of documentaries for National Geographic and other TV channels. And he's going to talk about the big themes about his book for about half an hour, and then I'm going to engage him in conversation, and then we're going to throw it open to your questions. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. I always enjoyed talking about the book, which has been out here for a little while now, and has really been a big help to me in getting to know people and working in this field. The motivation for the book, how I really got interested in this subject, sort of came in the mid-2000s when the mainstream media discovered that Americans were joining Al Qaeda. And I think it was Adam Gadain, the Al Qaeda spokesman, who's from California. And when he first kind of came on the scene very visibly, I would turn on my TV pretty regularly and there would be somebody talking about this startling new development that Americans were joining Al Qaeda. And eventually I went from shouting at the television to writing about this because they had been Americans in Al Qaeda from the very first day. The founding of Al Qaeda, the meeting at which that took place, there was an American citizen there who was taking notes. And throughout the entire history of the organization and what we think of as this sort of modern jihadist movement, Americans played a pretty important role. The first Americans that took part in what we would consider to be sort of this modern age of jihadism and terrorism were at the Siege of Mecca in 1979. A group of about 400 militants took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca and they came from a lot of different countries and there were two Americans in that group. One was killed and the other one was sent home. I put some energy into trying to track down the second one but never did. I heard rumors but I never heard anything that I could I could take to press. And you know that that event sort of marks the transition, the Siege of what we now see as Al Qaeda. It's not necessarily a direct ideological line but it was the kickoff of something. At the same time that the Siege of Mecca was happening, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Americans were among the first foreign fighters to to start going over there. There was at least one American fighting in Afghanistan in 1981 which is before almost anybody was there in terms of foreign fighters. I was able to document several dozen American nationals, citizens and long-term residents who went to fight during the Jihad against the Soviets and it would extrapolate that there were hundreds based on what I saw because at the time of the Soviet Jihad no one was really targeting these guys, no one was keeping track of them, pretty much no one cared. There was no count of all the foreign fighters in Afghanistan, let alone the Americans who went there but a really key recruiting network went through the United States. So the Al Qaeda Center in New York City and also with branches in Tucson and Boston was the first and biggest recruiting hub for the Soviet Jihad. Abdullah Azam who was the spiritual leader of the foreign fighters in Afghanistan came to this country over and over again, gave speeches and openly recruited people to go and fight and attracted very little what we you know investigative scrutiny from from the US government. People were aware of him but they weren't tracking him as they would somebody with the same message today. At the same time the US really was very supportive of this effort. The State Department was putting out propaganda. I went to the National Archives and watched several videos that the State Department had put out on the Afghan-Mujahideen struggles and they are quite compelling arguments for Jihad. You know they had no idea what they were looking at what this was going to become and so a lot of these people flew under the radar until toward the end of the war. In the late 80s the FBI and New York and New Jersey police started to notice that some of these guys were engaging in heavy training in this country, firearms training. There had always been some commerce in the training training of Mujahideen in this country. Afghan Mujahideen came here under different auspices possibly with the at least with the blind eye of government if not with the support of the government but these guys were going to rifle ranges on the weekends and they were talking about maybe robbing a casino to fund the Jihad and robbing banks to fund the Jihad and the first scrutiny really started to come around that time. The group of people who were engaged in this training turned out to be pretty notorious by the end. They came to the attention of the authorities who eventually decided they didn't have enough evidence to to arrest them or to continue the investigation and so a lot of them slipped away. One of those people was a Egyptian immigrant named El Sayid Nasser who was a follower of the blindshake, Abdel Rakhman and who assassinated a radical rabbi named Meir Kahane in the early 90s. Another couple of people involved in this were involved in the World Trade Center bombing later and one of the ring leaders of this training was a guy named Ali Muhammad who was a naturalized American citizen who came here from Egypt, got a visa through slightly unclear means and joined the U.S. Army. He became a sergeant, a supply sergeant at Fort Bragg and so during the day he did logistics things and would occasionally be solicited for his opinions on affairs in the Middle East and you know when he wasn't doing that he was Xeroxing army field manuals and maps and sending them back to Al Qaeda. He wrote the first, an American citizen wrote the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Jihad which is the most notorious Al Qaeda training manual and a lot of that was cribbed and in some cases Xeroxed out of army field training manuals by Ali Muhammad. He spent four years in the army and before he left in 1989 he took a leave of absence to go fight in Afghanistan which uphold his commanding officer who sent it up the chain of command and never heard back from anybody. He's like you know we really shouldn't have this going on here and you know the diplomatic consequences of an American active-duty American soldier fighting with the Mujahideen would have been pretty severe but it was a different world then. So Muhammad left the army and began conducting training for for various groups here and he trained a lot of people who were involved in the World Trade Center bombing some of whom were American nationals and most of whom had been here for some time. These were not people who kind of parachuted in with the exception of the guy who knew how to build the bomb Ramsey Yusef. Most of these guys had been living here for a while they were they were somewhat integrated into the United States and after the World Trade Center bombing another group of followers of Omar Abdel-Rakman wanted to take to upstage the World Trade Center bombing with an even bigger plot and that one had an even higher percentage of Americans in it including people who were born here people who had lived here all their lives and all of this landed as a kind of an aberration up until the World Trade Center bombing there wasn't a real strong investigative focus on Islamic extremism. Religion was considered a hands-off topic and there were a handful of FBI agents who were very interested in the subject and they would they were conditioned not to report very much about it because headquarters didn't like seeing references to religion in a report that went up the up the chain. After the World Trade Center bombing that started to change and while it did start to change it changed slowly. The initial investigation into the World Trade Center bombing and the follow-up plot which was called the landmarks plot because they were going to destroy truck bombs, US landmarks, New York City landmarks. After that investigation the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York found themselves overwhelmed with leads. They had an unbelievable mountain of information and they weren't able to pursue all of it. One of the things that that was going on beneath the surface of this that no one really took note of was that Americans were being recruited to fight in Bosnia as Mujahideen. US military veterans in particular were in high demand for this. People connected to the landmarks plot were working with people who had been in the military had relationships with people in the military and they when they found out about Muslim soldiers who were rotating out of the service they would tap them and say why don't you come to Bosnia and train the Mujahideen in Bosnia and at least 25 Americans went went to Bosnia and took part in that conflict it's possibly more. About half of them came through this program which had fallen on the desk of investigators and had fallen by the wayside because they just had too much too much to investigate make them do it all. Even at that time even though the World Trade Center bombing had kind of changed our attitude toward this it was still a conflict in which the United States had a vested interest. They were interested in the plight of the Muslims in Bosnia who were under threat that the world community perceived as emanating from the Serbs. It was most definitely that it was not quite as one-sided as it was sometimes depicted in the media but basically the Muslims in Bosnia were the victims and the United States wanted to help them but there was no will to do so in the political arena for a very long time and so again as in Afghanistan we just kind of looked away and a number of people went and came back and while they were in Bosnia some of them made connections with al-Qaeda and those connections would take on increasing importance over the years. So more than 50 Americans have been part of al-Qaeda in some way. There are about two dozen that we know by name and then there are a number more that you know we know by reputation or we know in alias we see references to them. In the very early days these guys were there from the very beginning Ali Muhammad was involved in al-Qaeda from the very beginning. There was a guy from Kansas City named Muhammad Loe by Azad. He was the one who was taking notes at the meeting that al-Qaeda was founded and he was involved with them for some years before finally retiring believe it or not people do retire from al-Qaeda. Another was a guy named Wadi al-Hajj who had been living in Tucson and went to fight in Afghanistan. He had a crippled arm so he ended up performing administrative support instead of getting into combat and he was kind of an executive secretary to Azam and he became that same function for bin Laden over as the years went on. All of these guys were involved in various ways in the 1998 East African Embassy bombings and that's when U.S. authorities first really became aware in a full way of the threat of Americans being part of al-Qaeda. You know there were a number of Americans who helped with that plot whether it was in the planning stages in training. Ali Muhammad cased some of the locations it was involved in the planning although he while he was doing this he was also acting as an intelligence operative for al-Qaeda he was offered himself up as an asset to the FBI and then tried to pump them for information. He was trying to double cross the intelligence community and people were aware of him well before this plot happened. At the same time al-Qaeda was watching his activities and thought that maybe I don't know maybe this guy's like in over his head and maybe he's been turned the other direction and so he by the time the actual World Trade Center bombing took place Ali Muhammad was on the outs but he was arrested anyway as were several Americans. I'm gonna just briefly show this this is a some of the networks related to al-Qaeda and to other other jihadist movements that have been operating in America over the years and this is the same map with some of the attacks that they've been connected to. This is slightly out of date but you can get a sense that you know this wasn't a small thing and even though after the East African Embassy attacks it became a higher priority for the United States it's still until September 11th it really didn't rise to the level of having large dedicated investigations. All of this activity took place some of this is before 9-11 some of it is after 9-11 but the structure of al-Qaeda and the secrecy around it made it difficult for people to understand that there was a real continuum of activity here that this was all kind of related to each other. As we approach 9-11 we approach you know one of the most famous American jihadists which is Anwar al-Laki. Al-Laki had been a preacher he was born in the United States he was raised in Yemen which is where his family was from came back to the United States to go to college and this his story is a pretty interesting one that is often confusingly represented in the coverage that we've seen about him. He was involved in radical networks pretty early he had contacts with people who are known to be part of al-Qaeda and part of the blind shakes network but he presented himself as a moderate and he was often hailed as sort of an example of a moderate Muslim he did a lot of interviews in the immediate wake of 9-11 as sort of that iconic figure of you know somebody speaking up against terrorism when in fact the 9-11 hijackers had encountered him repeatedly after they came into the United States and the FBI had been investigating al-Laki they on a suspicion of a Hamas connection they closed the investigation a couple weeks before the hijackers arrived so we don't know what the real connection was we don't know if he actually played a direct role in inspiring them and we don't know if and this is what I think is more likely is that one of his radical friends called him up and just said there's a couple guys coming into town and we want you to take care of him and he did that no questions asked and the reason I think he did that no questions asked is that he was actually on a flight back from San Diego on September 11th so I don't think he would have chosen to fly that day if he had known what was coming but certainly in the immediate aftermath he knew who these guys were and the investigation into him took a lot of troubled terms he left he left the country returned briefly was detained at an airport while the FBI figured out if they had enough to arrest him they decided they didn't and then he fled the country again he became a very prominent and very effective spokesman for al-Qaeda and for jihadism he was extremely articulate he his power was not is often described as being he's fluent in English and he had a really good command of English and that's why he was so scary why he was scary in my opinion is that he had a really uncanny ability to relate the theological ideas of jihadism to real life examples he would take the story he would tell you a story from history and then he would say so it's like this if you're over at a guy's house for dinner and this happens and this happens and you know he was really good at making examples that people could could latch on to and he was a powerful speaker until he was killed by us drum he was involved in inspire magazine English language magazine that combines ideological support for al-Qaeda with practical instructions on how to build bombs and and to carry out terrorist attacks inspire is not by any stretch of imagination the first jihadist magazine targeting English recruits although it certainly was been one of the most effective and one of the most best known but mujahideen monthly that's the 1990 edition it was published throughout the 80s was one of several English language publications so that targeted Americans tried to recruit them into jihadist paths so alaki was a good frontman for this organization but he was definitely not a trailblazer in attracting trying to attract Americans Omar Hamami is another person who I talked about in my book he is an American who joined al-Shabaab in Somalia which at the time that he went to Somalia there was no al-Shabaab and even throughout most of his tenure with al-Shabaab it was not directly associated with al-Qaeda until it made its formal declaration just a couple of years ago after death of bin Laden there were informal ties earlier Hamami was a pretty interesting case I did not I gave him short shrift in the book because his notoriety of the time that I wrote the book was basically that he had appeared in a shabaab video doing a rap song that was intended to recruit Americans into fighting with al-Shabaab what became more interesting about him was that he broke with al-Shabaab very publicly he released videos saying al-Shabaab was trying to kill him his dispute with them was multi-layered but it had to do with corruption in the ranks and the fact that according to him al-Shabaab had tried to assassinate al-Qaeda members who were in Somalia trying to guide the organization Hamami became a little bit of a celebrity on Twitter after this he got online and he was using Twitter to to air his grievances and try and drum up support among other shabaab members in Somalia who were also on social media and he was killed just a couple of weeks ago by al-Shabaab after a very long period of conflict his cause eventually ended up being conflated with some of the most senior members of al-Shabaab and some of the sounding members and unfortunately for them the emir of al-Shabaab Ahmed Qodhan is a pretty bloody guy and he basically killed almost everybody who was standing against him we're running short on time I'm just gonna quickly talk about this and then I think we'll turn it over for the Q&A there was no profile of the Americans I looked at I looked at about 300 cases for the book I've looked at more since then it's there's no single type of person who gets attracted to this and there's no clear profile for why Americans join al-Qaeda there is the perception these these these traits are a list of qualities that appeared repeatedly in the in the sample group but you can't sort of say take one from column A one from column B and if you see that you should call the FBI because this guy's into it the universal kind of perception that these guys share is that there is a war on Islam that is being carried out by the West and very few of these guys would argue to you that they are fighting a defensive war they are they feel they are defending themselves some of them see and hope for an offensive war at the end of this process after they have finished testing the United States out of Middle East but when you get pulled in you get pulled in because you feel you're under attack and not because you're necessarily because you're out to attack someone some of these are also inconsistent so you know some people will have one end of the spectrum and some people have the other so on the one hand you have people who are very idealistic and altruistic who get into this because they're utopian beliefs about what Islam can do for the world or their connection to the to the Muslim ummah then on the other hand on the other far end of the spectrum you get people who are just thugs or are violent tendencies they have a past of history with violence and this gives them an outlet for that violence that has some moral cover ideology is usually present it's hard to look at this and point to cases where ideology of religious ideology is the one thing that sent somebody out the door to actually take part in violence but it's a huge reinforcer when you when you have the idea in your head and you're looking for reasons to do it that's when the ideology comes into play and it's an important magnifier of your attraction to that identity politics is a pretty universal you you take part in these movements because you have an overwhelming sense of identification with your your religious or political religious organization and that's one reason that we don't see more lone wolves and we don't see more effective lone wolves is that if it a movement is based around a overwhelming feeling of connection to a community it's very difficult for somebody to stay at home and never talk to anybody and never reveal their plans to anyone you you always want to reach out you want to be surrounded by people who are like you so it makes it much harder and much more of an anomaly when we see these lone wolf cases alienation is present sometimes some of these people are social misfits of one kind or another but that is definitely not universal Omar Hamami was a very good example of that he was a very popular kid who had a lot of charm and charisma and he was he was well liked by his peers and he took off on this path anyway he could have done other things he wasn't stilted or stunted in that sense but you do see that sometimes but it's not as common as I think some of our early assumptions about terrorism think Arabization is just one thing that you see pretty consistently with people who get enough involved in these movements commit violence is that they will adopt traits of our culture that will start dressing in Arab ways you will see a lot of these guys like Adam Godain and Hamami start to speak with a sort of strange nowhere accent that that you know is not really an Arabic accent but they're just trying to sound foreign one thing that was interesting with Hamami is last interview with Voice of America before his death he did a radio interview with a reporter and he you could hear the Alabama and his voice so clearly he was under duress and you could hear him he sounded American for the first time in in some years so and finally fetishization of sex and women so there's you know there's a pop psychology approach to this sometimes people like to talk about repressed sexual impulses having to do with this movement and you know there's not there's not good evidence to support that theory but the fact is is that what you do see as a pretty common theme in this in other extremist movements too is the role of women as sort of emblematic victims of the oppression that you're trying to fight and in addition to that I think that you do see for some of these guys you do see some motivation of sexual impulse so a Bosnian government official told me during the war that people would come up to the embassy and they'd be like I heard there are a lot of widows in Bosnia for anybody who's going to go fight we could go marry them and you know and you see similar kinds of strains throughout this it's not a universal trait I think it's something that probably deserves some examination in a kind of serious minded way that hasn't gotten yet so I will stop that and we'll have conversation thank you very much for jam for that extremely clear history and analysis of the phenomenon first question is presumably joining a I mean this if you're an American citizen you join an al-Qaeda affiliate you know it's that's clearly illegal right I mean or yeah you will be charged with a crime but talk to us about that there's the new neutrality act right so Americans are not supposed to engage in overseas combat what so when Ali Muhammad for instance went to Afghanistan to fight with a mojideen we didn't know that he was associated with al-Qaeda at the time and it wouldn't have been a crime because we didn't even know it existed at that point so but it would have been a violation of the neutrality act it's strange because law enforcement hates the neutrality act for reasons that aren't quite clear to me I've asked that question several times in relation to this into other cases in more recent cases too such as in Syria and they do not like to bring new prosecutions under neutrality act why why is that I'm not sure I haven't been able to get a real clear answer on that I know this guy I mean they were neutrality act investigation was the one that first spotted Ali Muhammad huh and but then it was quickly transformed from a neutrality act investigation to a criminal investigation and what does the neutrality act say it's illegal for an American to take part as a combatant in a conflict that the United States it's not part of I think is yeah that sounds yeah so so for instance this guy is it Eric Haroon who was he was by his own account associating with al-Nustra in Syria in 2013 so do we I mean he's been indicted was it under the neutrality act or joining al-Nustra or material support or I want to say it's material support yeah that sounds right want to look that up yeah Eric Haroon is a pretty interesting case because the guy did not seem to be particularly really ideologically involved he seems like more in the mold of a Hemingway type adventurer who would like wanted to go take part in a fun war that seemed like you had right on its side yeah it was happening at the time so I'm gonna join it so in his tells us a little bit about him I mean one thing is that he was also publicizing on Facebook and Twitter and he wasn't keeping any of this to himself no in fact his case probably if you just kept quiet he might be still yeah yeah I mean you know there are some Americans fighting in Syria we don't have a real good inventory of them the estimates I see are run from at least 10 to as many as 60 could be more most of them keep a pretty low profile Eric Haroon did not he was he had a Facebook page that he just like continually updated with pictures of here I am with the guys from al-Nustra and here I am with the guys from our al-Sham and he didn't seem to comprehend that he was doing anything wrong and in fact when he came back to the United States and was arrested he was kind of floored he was like wait a minute I didn't think I was doing anything wrong well because there is some similarity to the Afghan case where our stated goal at the time seemed to be the overthrow of Assad regime particularly but when he was initially going right I mean and there's I think it's there's a social stigma attached to this now I think people Americans are educated about the adjacent dangers of this movement and the fact that al-Qaeda is involved there I mean during the Afghan jihad there was nobody fighting on the side of the Arabs who was clearly classified as an enemy of America and that's different now and so I mean even if there are 60 Americans fighting in Syria that percentage-wise is probably less turnout than what they were able to accomplish in Afghanistan now this comparable stage in the your book is called jihad Joe there are very few jihad Jains there was me had Nicole Mansfields who was a 33 year old who from Flint Michigan who was killed in Syria earlier this year maybe associated with al-Nusra the al-Qaeda affiliate is that correct I've heard that but I haven't investigated it directly but she's a outlier they are there are a handful of women who get involved in the movement Western women the there are pockets where for instance and I'm sure you saw the stories out of Russia over the last week about their excessive concerns over female suicide bombers there are little pockets of women who take part in the movements generally and then there are a very small handful of Western women such as another one who's been written about a lot lately is Samantha Luthwaite yeah she's been written about in great quantity who is not quality she was married to one of the 7-7 bombers in London and she's a British woman a white British woman and she is believed to be involved with Al Shabaab in some capacity and then once you get past that basic statement I've read a lot of stuff about her and I don't know how much of it to believe well a lot of it turned out to be I mean she was there was early reporting that she might have been involved in the Kenny attack but it's clear from the video that that has been recovered that there's no white female directing the operation and then like a lot of reports of these kinds of things when they I was asked about it on CNN I was like that doesn't sound right at all and I you know it's news to me and because because your point you know for a start these guys are huge misogynists they don't want they and Al Shabaab was tweeting through and it seems like a legitimate tweet that we did we don't have females in these operations and it wasn't I mean the idea that she might have been on the sidelines helping with financing all that seems plausible but that she would be involved in an operation didn't didn't feel right I mean we don't still there's still a lot of things we don't know about it but it doesn't seem to be true yeah the reporting on hers been really bad I get a lot of questions you know so much of it is being British reporting yes of course it's part of the problem not exactly it's a little spotty you know there's a report one of the things that the British have reported is that there's a Twitter account called NYC press which is a Kenyon based Shabab sympathizer and they claim that that is Samantha Loofway and I've had some exchanges with her on Twitter tried to get her to admit that she was Samantha Loofway but she would not well this is an Al Shabaab this is interesting because this is an Al Shabaab Twitter account this one you're talking about it's Al Shabaab friendly Al Shabaab affiliate yeah but I mean whoever is writing this is writing in a kind of English that you pick up in in London or many app that means very kind of yeah it's not somebody speaking English as a second language at all yeah well Al Shabaab's main Twitter account also seemed like they seem that way that account has been permanently deleted at this point I think tell us a little bit about your role in getting Twitter to take down these accounts and and what what is the Twitter because you know Twitter isn't kind of in the same space that in a way that YouTube was a few years back where you know people are you all sorts of people are using it including terrorists and suddenly they go to make some hard decisions about kind of how they deal with this in their terms of use so what are their terms of use and how do you you've had the Al Shabaab Twitter account taken down how many people are following how quickly does it get taken down and why so Twitter it has a very permissive terms of use they allow a really wide range of content and they are extremely reluctant to suspend accounts for their content direct specific threats of violence has until now been the standard that you have to meet to to get your account suspended so unless and when they say direct and specific they are highly stringent I mean I'd have to tweet Peter Bergen I'm going to kill you and that would be specific enough for them to not I'm going to come to New America Foundation maybe kill somebody there right well if I said that that might be specific enough if I said somebody should kill all those people at the New America Foundation that would not be that would not be enough interesting so this became this had come up before I had written about it before and had written about Twitter's standards for for termination and I started watching the Al Shabaab account I watch a lot of Al Shabaab Twitter accounts that are used mostly are used by actual members which I'll come back to the the primary PR account had accumulated a lot of followers about 24,000 followers as of January of this year and during when they were holding some French hostages they tweeted that they were going to execute those hostages so I saw this as an opportunity for an experiment and I reported it to Twitter because it was extremely specific and when you reported it you reported it through their kind of yes site they have a yeah extremely arcane system for reporting abuse which is designed to discourage you from doing it basically how quickly did they take it down they took it down probably 24 hours after I put that report in so that was January Shabaab came back on one of the reasons I was interested in this is there's a lot of discussion in the community about countering and violent extremism and how to do it and there's a lot that's been written by very well respected academics in the field some of whom are my friends who say there's no point in trying to get these guys knocked offline because it doesn't accomplish anything they just come back and it's status quo it's whack-a-mole is the joke it's like playing whack-a-mole at the arcade and so I didn't I suspected this wasn't true and so after Alshabaab was suspended after I reported them and got them suspended I tracked how their followers came back and the rate at which their followers were coming back and their followers came back at a much slower rate there the projection that I did after the first couple of months was that it would take them at least a year to get back up to 20,000 if they ever did so so take downs for the Twitter I mean because the counter argument going back three years the YouTube argument be look if you take down an out loud key video on YouTube is this going to be posted somewhere else and that seems like a very plausible well yes but so Alshabaab did come back after about a week after this first suspension but the followers were down right we it's limiting their rich their reach it's you know when you weed your garden you don't expect that weeds will never come back you are trying to manage the problem and this is a way of managing the reach that these guys have now during the Eastgate Kenya mall attack you said I think you told me that there were five accounts were up and taken down during that right so they started live tweeting during the mall attack which is by the way I think the first time in history that a terrorist attack is being tweeted it's well live they have tweeted attacks in Mogadishu they have some of the tweeted some alive but they were small yeah roughly real time I mean this this thing in this case was that the actual siege went on for so long right that it overlapped but they have tweeted while they've been attacking and in fact it just this week they were tweeting well there's no official account anymore but members of Alshabaab were tweeting about some of the attack on the Kizmayo Airport just yesterday as it was happening so yeah but because their that account was known to reporters so there's there's an official Alshabaab account after the first count was terminated they have spokesmen who have the phone numbers of reporters and they call the reporters they know and they say this is our new official account so and they call you no they don't call me why not I have not made contact with their spokesman and of course so now I'm also known as the guy who's constantly trying to get them knocked off Twitter so they would have additional reasons have they tweeted about you NYC press has Samantha Lothwaite in fact I have it linked from my Twitter bio her complete complaint that I was on their most hated Kuffar's list so sounds like a good list to be on yeah well heads it's frozen cons I guess but yeah I mean and I have talked to some of them in the course of interacting with Hamami to talk to different members how did you start engaging with Hamami and what was the process and how many you mean you he was a prolific Twitter right he was so you and some other and how did that all happen well he started off he showed up to post this video saying that Alshabaab was trying to kill him which was news to all of us and Alshabaab was trying to kill him yes he posted a video on YouTube and then he created a Twitter account to promote that video and and by the way do you have any you know how is he you know I'm presuming he's like in Somalia in the middle of nowhere you know with no access to anything I mean by the count of his biography he's not like he's living so how was he setting these things up mostly phone and Somalia has like very high cell phone coverage it's erratic but there are a portion so when he was on the run sometimes he would go silent for a while because he was out of coverage area okay but yeah there's decent enough coverage that he was able to do particularly Twitter it became easier after he really went on the run he mostly use Twitter because it's easier to use on a bad connection so he posted this video he made a Twitter account to promote it and he started following me and several other people who read about terrorism on and started trying to get our attention and at first I ignored this because I didn't want to my general policy is not to promote accounts associated with extremists people always ask me for like lists of accounts and stuff and I almost never provide that because I don't see why I should do these guys jobs for them and then Hamami posted his autobiography he wrote a pretty extensive autobiography his life up to 2007 which was he had embedded within this what he thought were clues to why alshabab wanted to kill him now and he embedded them so deeply that nobody noticed them and so he's I tweeted about the autobiography which had a lot of humorous bits about being bit by bugs and explosive bowel movements and it's like a 150 pages that means it's very detailed like starting with his first high school teacher how everybody loved him everywhere he went and it was a strange thing and so I tweeted about it making fun of it and he was complaining to me on Twitter about this and I was still not interested in engaging him but I emailed him and said okay why don't we do an interview if you know he was complaining that nobody nobody got what he was trying to do and so I didn't interview with him in which he explained to me all the coded references was this a phone interview or Twitter interview is his email before he was he was he was hiding out but he wasn't on the run at that point so he still had access to a computer he could write longer emails and longer pieces and so we had several email exchanges I published a story about it in foreign policy and after that we had sporadic contact so he would get annoyed with me and sort of go away for a while and then he would come back and we would exchange direct messages which are private exchanges on Twitter he lost his email access at some point so this was all on Twitter how many messages do you exchange with him hundreds yeah hundreds I mean we were in contact it was off and on for a while after we did the interview there were a few exchanges that were private and then did you come to like him it's it's hard to describe exactly he was engaging and he was funny and but he was also very committed to Al Qaeda and had made terrible terrible decisions about his life and we had an exchange at one point and where you know where he's like you know worried about getting killed and you know my and I actually said to him it's like I you know it's hard to root for you in this situation because I think your story ends with you know blowing up a bus full school children or something and and there is evidence we think that he killed somebody he said in an interview with Spencer Ackerman at Wired that he had killed a prisoner if he opened prisoner that Al Shaba had taken in a battle beyond that he did not seem to have taken part in anything that resembled combat or terrorism despite many intelligence sources saying otherwise and Al Shaba his critics and Al Shaba said the same thing so I'm inclined to believe it both he and and the people who came out of the woodwork to to blast him when he started criticizing the organization agreed that he had not had any significant military role so he was sort of a wannabe with a high profile a lot of Westerners end up in that situation especially in Al Shaba but also in a QAP the Americans go over they are prized for their media value more than their operational and Adam Gadan seems to be a classic example of this yes the kind of classic counter example would be Shukra Juma who is seems to be the head of Al Qaeda's operations now who is responsible for the Aziz plot yeah Shukra Juma was about him born in a police Saudi Arabia right yeah was raised there came here as a teenager so he's not as American as some of these other guys and when they want to put an American the reason they they put the white guys on basically because they want because they know that they're gonna get a lot of press in the United States when they put a white guy on videotape spouting Al Qaeda gibberish and so Shukra Juma is an Arab and he had only been here for some years in his upbringing so well and also he seems to be deeply involved in real Al Qaeda operations and therefore maybe keeping a really low profile right you know not not too many American Americans have been involved in Al Qaeda operations at a really fundamental level so he is an exception on that but again he's also arguably less American than some of the other you mentioned this guy by Aziz who was from Kansas City who was taking notes of the first meeting of Al Qaeda do we know what's happened to him as you disappear without Tracy wasn't didn't Larry Wright interview him and so Sudan Larry Wright interviewed him and I asked him Larry Wright to introduce me when I was writing the book he tried he reached out to him and he was very wary he had retired from Al Qaeda he was very wary of talking to anybody because every time the press came up he started getting a hard time from people in Sudan where he was living and his email account after after a while he didn't respond to the last message that I had passed through Mr. Wright and then he his email account started bouncing spam starts sending out spam and that was last week we heard from him so I'm not sure what his current status is you know on your slide you had a a reference to a group called Fuqra who are they and why are they interesting? Al Fuqra is a strange case they are it was a group that was founded out of Pakistan they follow a Pakistani shake but it's primarily African-Americans and it came out of the sort of black nationalist movements of the 70s really it's kind of a outgrowth of those movements in sort of the nation of Islam strain they are separatists like racial separatists they they want to live apart they have their own they have their own they do they have a number of compounds around the country which always amazed it yeah in Canada too I'm always amazed at how little press they get because you would think people would be more alarmed about that kind of thing but they I think maybe the reason they they they seem to have engaged in a lot of like anti-seek and anti sort of like in the 70s and 80s and then they seem to have stopped the violence and that may be the reason that they yeah they were they were pretty violent in the 70s and 80s they were attacking Sikh temples yes and they were involved in the murder of a liberal imam in Tucson yeah Rashid Khalifa who was that was also tied to al-Qaeda through Wadi al-Hajj who I mentioned was the executive secretary to bin Laden had scouted out the the mosque and then al-Fukar members assassinated the imam there was a that's a very complicated story why they did that but since after they were suspected of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing of having some members who were involved and then after that they really have kept themselves in a in a much bigger way and they haven't been violent so they have not gotten a lot of press scrutiny anyway before I throw it open just tell us a little bit about this is you know a massive piece of research that you had to do like when you show the bush monthly on the screen and tell us how you approach the research what were the most useful avenues to nail some of this stuff down get these materials well a lot of the sources I had the first half the book takes place really is the pre-911 era and a lot of my resources on that were court documents transcripts I had wiretap transcripts I talked to the investigators who worked on the landmarks case in the World Trade Center bombing they were able to share with me you know wiretap transcripts and and videotapes and stuff so I was really able to get the voices of a lot of those people and I also did a lot of Freedom of Information Act documents and then I interviewed several of them I talked to Clement Hampton L who's one of the more colorful people involved in the landmarks plot he's you know yes we emailed with him in prison he was interesting to talk to all the not inclined to answer any of my actual questions because he had fought in the Afghan war he lost a leg then he was indicted for the trade center attack the follow-up the landmarks attack well you know the thing one thing that really helped with him is that his attorney did something that's very questionable legally but was great for me was that he told this guy story and unbelievable death he'd like told this guy's life story he kept arguing that it was relevant to the prosecution which it really wasn't but to the defense yes yeah but unlike the other attorneys he he just lobbied and lobbied and lobbied to get the stuff in so there's like three straight days of testimony about his entire life story yeah including him testifying so I was able to really capture his voice and personality through a lot of that I interviewed his wife and she's living in the Bronx or yes she was she was actually a great character she tried to thought he was an idiot she loved him but she thought he was kind of a fat head so well it's a great book let's throw it open to anybody who has a question please identify yourself wait for the mic and who's gonna ask the first question start with Mike Rowlands here in front thank you very much for your time and for coming down today as we mentioned out in the hallway before you came in there's a fair number of people in and out of the government trying to figure out this whole countering violent extremism how to go about it who owns which lane in the road etc and a lot of the conversation comes to the indicators and the warnings that you some of what you put up there based on what you said and what others have researched and written about they're really being not even a common theme or no definitive here's the list in your view is that still worthwhile time spent trying to figure out what is it we're looking for and I'd be interested in your thoughts on what has the government or the private sector not done to try to identify these people you might think is worth doing thank you so yeah the the problem with countering violent extremism initiatives is that so far a lot of it has been focused extremely broadly so people are like interested in getting people before they become radicalized you see this over and over again they want to get them before they become radicalized and convince them not to become radicalized so there are a number of problems with this premise first of all being that there's no way to know which people are going to be radicalized and which ones won't the second one being that if you intervene with somebody you might push them the other direction because they might say the government's coming in here and busting me because I read a book online and like you know hell with this I'm I'm signing up now so I think there's you know there's a legitimate interest in in countering violent extremism because it's theoretically if you figure out how to do it it's cheaper and less destructive than fighting wars and and having to bust people but honestly crime prevention is is you know doing basic law enforcement work is the best way to prevent violent extremism preventing attacks after that you can also identify there are different ways and I've been working on this on the social media front and this kind of the golden goose that everybody in Washington is chasing is how do you diagnose where somebody is on the spectrum from what you can see of them in public so if you know there are 10,000 people in the United States who are following al-Qaeda related Twitter accounts how can you find the ones who are more likely to be getting involved I think there are you if you're going to pick your point of intervention you need to put it as close to the illegal act as possible because otherwise you're you're spending a lot of energy on people who might never might never go that said it's a difficult field and there's not a lot of good quality data about this so I've been you know kind of pushing to get people people or myself involved in in doing research that could give us you know better resolution on some of these questions one of the things that we've been doing here at New America which I think Mike knows a little bit about but is that one of our sort of for all the reasons you've just outlined one way of thinking about this was that we have convened people from Google and Facebook and also Muslim community leaders imams etc so that they have basic training to understand how the internet works because if you can't take down bad speech at least you can produce better speech and the the people who are going to counter the Aulaki message with any degree of you know actual impact of people who can engage with him feel theologically and speak English but a lot of them don't really understand very well how the you know some things like Google rankings or these other so it's not and I think as you say the indicators for what works there aren't none I mean if it were the indicator for something I mean a bomb that doesn't go off doesn't register a person who is merely a radical but not a violent radical doesn't really register so I think it's but I think having a common I mean clearly it's good to start having the conversation and I think that you know NCTC because I know you know they they would take they would go around the country and show pictures of Aulaki online and it was shocking to the Muslim community leaders that they were meeting with because they had no idea that Aulaki was out there and it was saying these things and was so persuasive I took part in a study a piece of research and published a paper on it about it's more than a year ago now I think it was April 2012 and we took we looked at the a set of followers of prominent white extremists white nationalists online and we were able to develop metrics that could take this group which was about 3,500 accounts Twitter accounts and identify with some degree of accuracy the people who are most heavily engaged in the ideology so based on publicly available information yes all open source all based on relationships network relationships social interaction not based on like a lot of people are working on linguistic approaches to this where we look for key words that indicate somebody's going to do this or that or the other thing this is content-blind approach it doesn't necessarily catch all the people who are heavily involved but what it does is it takes that list of 3,500 out of which about 44% were overtly involved in tweeting about white nationalism in a positive way and you could reduce that to a list of the top 100 that was 90 95% accurate and the top 200 list that was 87% accurate so there are ways to triage these systems and one of the this particular approach which I'm still pursuing more research on one of the things you could do for instance is if you are trying to put a link out that goes to a story that you think has a powerful counter extremism content you could measure how it goes into the system how it spreads to the people who are most engaged versus people who are less engaged different types of engagement and you can measure sort of quantitatively first you can measure how your message is received and secondly you can monitor this community over time and see whether the amount of engagement is going down because there's a quantitative number that is like there's this much engagement in the system and if you are succeeding in kind of programming against these guys then that number should go down so I think there are some promising ways to to approach this problem and I'm I'm trying to figure out how to do the next chunk of research basically how to get it funded and where to publish and for whom so gentlemen here thanks my name is Steve Hirsch I'm a journalist I was interested in your comments on black nationalist groups and then links what if you could tell us anything more about that I was also before you said that was going to ask you about what I thought might have been counterintuitive but the link with white nationalist groups that came up in regards to low wolf theory some years ago I was wondering if there's any but this is different than low wolves I understand it but I was wondering if there's that nexus there thanks sure very to keep this like condense a lot of history into a very couple of sentences the early strains of Islam in this country when it really yeah there were always Muslims Orthodox Muslims in America but when you really started seeing big numbers was when the nation of Islam became and its precursor groups like the Morse Science Temple became popular and they attracted people with a mix of racial separatism or superiority arguments and a pretty muddled view of Islam the translation of Islam into a vernacular that didn't much resemble where it had come from and during the 70s and 80s Saudi Arabia poured a tremendous amount of money into regularizing this community of sort of black separatists and black nationalist Muslims into Orthodox Islam which to Saudi idea of orthodox Islam so you know comes with its attendant complications so they would fly prominent leaders to Saudi Arabia and put them up and send them to college and to religious college and they for the most part succeeded in establishing orthodox Islam is as a alternative to nation of Islam so that that movement still there but it's increasingly irrelevant and it's when it is relevant it often resembles traditional Islam more as far as the white nationalist nexus there the key part of that really is comes down to this idea of leaderless resistance so loose beam was a famous Klansman than seditionist in Texas who has a long and storied history which is its own probably its own book someday he developed an idea that he'd actually cribbed from I think a South American revolutionary of leaderless resistance the problem that the white supremacists had in the 80s and 90s was that their movement was being heavily infiltrated by the FBI and the leaders were being arrested and going to jail and so his solution to this was we're gonna have this thing called leaderless resistance and everybody's just gonna self-organize into tiny cells of one or two or three people who are just gonna act independently without getting guidance from above and that goes back to what I said about identity politics it's very difficult to make that model work when you're an identity movement because if you're a white supremacist it's because you partly because you hate black people but it's also partly because you love white people and you want to associate with people who have the same values as you do and so inevitably you know you see these things that look like lone wolf cases and in a lot of cases they turn out not to be because the people have extensive contacts with with people within the movement the Oklahoma City bombing being a pretty prominent example of that where Timothy McVeigh regardless of whether he had additional help from people who have not been indicted yet which I think he did he definitely had a lot of contact in the movement including probably with Lewis Beam so this idea was rediscovered after 9-11 by Al Qaeda ideologue named Abu Musab al-Suri who recast it as leaderless jihad and it's basically the same idea and it's working out for Al Qaeda basically as well as it worked out for the white supremacists which is not all that well in the age of the Internet it's almost impossible to be a lone wolf because Major Nadal Hassan really I mean he was a social misfit he really didn't you know kind of community but he still reached out to our Waal Ki and I mean I'm wondering if the term lone wolf has any meaning anymore because I mean you had a pair of lone wolves in Boston but you know Tamilayan was reaching you know he kind of went to Dagestan to try and meet the great jihadi war heroes and it didn't really work out but there are very few people I mean we're social animals and they're very I mean Ted Kaczynski was a lone wolf right yes I mean that's a Brevik arguably and Brevik yeah but and both I mean Brevik and Kaczynski I mean and I guess you know Bruce Ivens was a lone wolf as well but these tend to be highly idiosyncratic I mean they're they really are social misfits they can't it just it's just interesting to me with I think with the internet it's a likelihood of you being a lone wolf goes down because you're gonna try and reach out to a like-minded well there are a few outlier cases of overlap overlapping interests extraordinary unusual it's extraordinary unusual there was a guy called Jeffrey Bryce who is a mire or both of Timothy McFay and Osama bin Laden who was recently he blew him see try to blow up well he was building a ballman he basically blew himself up but it was Ahmed Hoover who was a Muslim Brotherhood figure who was a former neo Nazi anti-Semitism can give these guys something to talk about there in terms of really recruiting in that pool no I mean you see the occasional crossover and you see the occasional enemy of my enemy kind of mostly talk and not very much action you know and the obvious case that it sort of everybody was always been interested in and I've been interested in too is the Oklahoma City bombing because as you may be aware I Terry Nichols basically I can put Terry Nichols and Ramsey Yusef within 300 feet and two days of each other in the Philippines but I can't tell you they were in the same room this has sparked a lot of speculation over the years and I mean I have after really spending a lot of time and resources on it I have come to the tentative conclusion that it didn't happen and also there are such a things that are merely coincidence there are merely coincidences I you know when I was investigating different relative of Jamal Khalifa actually the gentleman he was staying with when he was in San Francisco I discovered this was a case that I put a lot of time and energy into a whole separate can of worms but I found out that his nephew who he was staying with in California was living in an apartment complex that I lived in a couple years later so so coincidences happened Jamal Khalifa was a son of bin Laden's brother and all just and the subject of quite a lot of law enforcement interest who was mysteriously murdered in Madagascar in 2007 yeah I wanted to do a book on that but in the back hi media Benjamin with code pink I was interested when you talked about alalaki having been radicalized before 9-11 because the story that's come out by his family is that it was the response to 9-11 the invasion of Iraq the Abu Ghraib abuses those kinds of things if you could talk to that and also could you just say a little bit more about these Somalis from Minneapolis it seems like such a warm embracing city that would be welcoming of diverse communities you know why there and are these young men people who were born there or came there at a certain age and a little more about that thank you so as far as alaki this is a guy who left an unbelievable body of work behind him he did so many audio recordings lectures writings a lot of his sermons were recorded a lot of the people he talked to and what you see is prior to 9-11 is that a lot of the same themes that were already there you know that would later emerge in a terrorist contact we're already there in kind of a radical context so you know you got radicalism and you got terrorism and radicalism is this big and terrorism is this big and there's we understand there to be a relationship between these things but radicalism is not necessarily a good way to diagnose who's going to be terrorists because radicalism is so big and terrorism so small so his content stuff that he had done some of these religious lectures and stuff if you actually go and listen to the 20 30 40 hours of them which I did were they all the same no they're different he uses different kinds of subjects so he did one on the hereafter which is you know sort of the afterlife and that's like six hours and then he would do the lives of the prophets that would be eight hours and you hear sort of the rationalizations and the supportive arguments that that go into this and then in addition to this there's the FOIA documents that show that he had been in contact with Ziad Khalil who had been a procurement agent for al-Qaeda and there was some he was had some connection with al-Laki that it's been redacted out of the documents that I've read I find a FOIA process while it's great that we have a Freedom of Information Act it's often very difficult to get a really clear picture of what goes on so there's a lot of smoke on that but there's really no fire until some years after 9-11 and until really 2004 2005 you sort of became more radicalized yeah he went to prison in Yemen and so he sort of like there were things that would come up as themes in his earlier speeches that became more and more visible as you as you went through over time in addition to sort of the network connections that kind of suggests more and I did a longer piece a piece for the Atlantic on this a couple of years ago which is linked off of my website at jmberger.com that has more than has everything written down in more detail than I can remember it sitting here as far as Minneapolis the Somali diaspora community is is very close-knit community there's a lot of interaction back with the homeland and a lot of these kids that went at least some of them were involved in gang activity and kind of criminal activity and when you look at some of the court cases some of them went back to Somalia to take part in criminal activity for profit and then when they got there they found out they were being recruited into Al-Shabaab Al-Shabaab is a strange movement because it's very nationalistic for a jihadist movement that's very Somali centric in a way that some other jihadist movements usually are more about the global community and Shabaab talks that game pretty well but I think that they also have a really deeply nationalistic and tribal approach so a lot of these are tribal family community connections and I mean from what I've been able to see that that cluster is kind of all related to that to those sorts of really deep ties with diaspora Shabaab puts a lot of effort into recruiting Somali diaspora from around the world and when they get there they're treated a lot better than they aren't treated as foreign fighters they're treated as members of Al-Shabaab so there's one guy from Minnesota who I track online who you know if you look at his Facebook page you would think that jihad is a pretty great adventure because while Al-Shabaab was blocking famine relief efforts to the rest of the country he was posting pictures of his meals it's fabulous meals and pictures of him running on the beaches where it's not safe for people to go anymore but safe for him because he's in Al-Shabaab he's got a little pot belly at the Lahi Farah he was friends with Hamami and they had a falling out after Hamami fell out with Shabaab Farah basically stayed with Shabaab you know just following up on Medea's question about I mean a lot of these kids come from Cedar Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis which is probably one of the poorest parts of the United States I think average incomes are $17,000 a year for a family 20% unemployment I mean this is not the American you know most American Muslims really are living the American dream yeah this is not the case for the Somali American community in Minneapolis so that and then you have the Ethiopian army invading was I mean gangs you know and gangs really are gang dynamics are very similar to terrorist group dynamics in a lot of ways so if you have experience in gang culture and you can find a nexus to that more kind of religious extremism you kind of already have the some of the mental preparation that would get you into that space these guys to go was the Ethiopian army invading right yeah that was then that was the kind of switch point in 06 yeah there's there's a trigger there's a lot of different triggers Shabab likes to present itself as a defensive movement and the surrounding African countries have to some extent made it easy for them to do that so Shabab was the militant wing of the Islamic courts Union which was a predecessor group Islamist group that was basically doing a pretty good job of governing a pretty good chunk of Somalia prior to 2007 and because it was an Islamist group Western countries in general but also Ethiopia and Kenya who have to deal with this is a neighbor situation it's much more pressing for them sort of like no way we don't want these guys in there so they helped undermine and ultimately defeat the Islamic court Union which allowed the militant branch of that group al Shabab to rise up in its place and so you got something much more virulent after the after the ICU went down. Hi my name is Paulie Delgo I was wondering how effective you thought Hamami was with the rank and file you know as the drama was going on it was difficult to assess exactly what his effect was I know he ticked off the leadership obviously but in your opinion did it did it have a lasting effect well Hamami had been on the pro side when he was in the video that really made him famous with the rap song in it became insanely popular so he was a big draw for al Shabab in the early days so much so that they released subsequent rap videos performed by another member of al Shabab and put his picture on him and his name on him and said it was Somali even though it wasn't which is he got to be infamous for a bunch of videos that he didn't do so his his fall from grace has had a lot of reverberations some of which are kind of immediately apparent and some of which are less so you know the most obvious thing is just that it has created a lot of dissent especially in the online communities because when he first posted his video call for help people tried to post it to the forums the jihadist forums message boards and they were ruthlessly suppressed by the administrators of those forums and other dissenters have also been ruthlessly suppressed and so these kinds of incidents are one thing that has driven the growth in social media used by by jihadists because they want to talk in a talk in a forum where they they can't be censored so they go on Twitter and they go on Facebook instead he had supporters in Somalia who were on Twitter who were talking and he did not it did but from what I tracked I tracked everybody he talked to in addition to the things he said and people who directed tweets at him in addition to just the ones he responded to it did not seem to me that he was attracting widespread support from Western jihadis and Westernized jihadis and people who are sympathetic on that front he had support within Somalia many of those supporters are now dead a lot of them were also al-Shabaab knocked out the cell towers for a while so that nobody could get on Twitter so the rebellion that he was a part of was not did not start with him and did not really revolve around him even though for us it did because we were all obsessed with him but it was the senior members of al-Shabaab rising up against Godan and Hamami was part of that movement so he became a rallying cry for them so members of the movement Ibrahim al-Afghani and and then several senior leaders including OAs and Robo signed a fatwa saying that it was Haram to kill Hamami so they they used him as part of that media drive the issue is that now that all these guys are dead or in government custody except for Robo is there anybody left who's really got the is upset enough to stand up for this there are people in Somalia who are not happy about what happened but it's not clear that they value unity more than they value necessarily getting justice in this case if nothing else is a recruiter you know he's no longer a recruiting tool for them he's been taken off the board in that sense but you know I didn't see like a and he did he won a fair amount of support online but I don't see a huge movement you know kind of counter jihadi movement coming out of this right now but I think that we'll find ways to use this to bring that message to people and there is definitely a strong dissenting faction online and offline that that really was never visible to us before that has come to light because I have dissenting from Al Shabaab's really just was the attack on the East Gate Mall and Nairobi a sign of Shabaab weakness or strength I suspect that Shabaab's increased pace of attacks in the last six months both in Somalia and in the mall attack I would say that that is probably in part a result of the fact that they have faced an incredible amount of criticism from within the jihadi community really almost unprecedented amount of criticism from other jihadis over the conduct of this dissent and they wanted to change the story from Al Shabaab kills its own to Al Shabaab kills the crusaders well in that cheerful note we'll thank JM very much for that very interesting presentation and he's got books outside and he's willing to sign them thank you