 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. Thank you for coming to this event We're really thrilled to have Dr. Anne Speckhardt here who is a adjunct professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University She's done as you can see just an amazing amount of research in areas that include Palestinian terrorists, Chechen terrorists and a wide variety of others and So she's going to present the Key findings of her book for about half an hour and then I'll engage her in a little Q&A and then throw it open to you And thank you very much Dr. Speckhardt for doing this and her book of course is for sale later I'm sure she'll be happy to sign it I will so ready Hello, and thank you Peter and thank you to the New America Foundation for having me Really delighted to be here as Peter said this is my book and I like to joke that it's not about my children talking to terrorists and I'm a research psychologist. My home is at Georgetown University And my research is based on a decade of in-depth psychologically based interviews and I interviewed over 400 terrorists terrorist family members their close associates and Even their hostages. I spoke to family and friends of suicide bombers I also spoke to so-called failed suicide bombers in prison and On occasion I talked to people that were being groomed to be suicide bombers My interviews took place in prison cells on the streets inside of slums in homes and Occasionally I even overnighted in the homes of terrorists when I was working in the West Bank and in Gaza I would be told by the people I was interviewing and my guides that You won't be able to make any more interviews unless you accept An invitation to stay overnight tonight in the home of these people you're interviewing because the checkpoints are Closing so I accepted their hospitality and that was a very interesting thing to Observe even on a whole nother level over a long period of time Chasing worldwide terrorists worldwide to get their interviews Ended up taking me And and taking interviews from Chechnya Russia Israeli prisons Uzbekistan The West Bank and Gaza Palestine are the occupied territories depending on how you name them Morocco Iraq Lebanon Jordan Belgium Netherlands France and the UK and I should mention that most of the time when I was doing this work I was living in Belgium and working at a university there. I lived in Belgium for seven years. My husband's a US diplomat and dragged us around the world my Goals in the research were to understand the radicalization process to get at the psychosocial Motivations mostly on the individual level. I was looking less on the group level and being a psychologist much more interested in Individuals what would motivate them into terrorism and I wanted to understand the trajectories I wanted to know what puts a person on the terrorism trajectory and what could possibly take them off and I did psychosocial histories with whoever I ended up interviewing the family member the friend the terrorist Themself in the case of dead suicide bombers. It was always with someone that had known them and known them closely One of the things that I found and I really always like to emphasize and it's the reason that I have this child's picture on the On the book. She's a little girl that We encountered in a safe house in Noblesse. We were there to interview Two senders of a recent suicide attack and she came out thinking that we were Israelis Interrogating her mother. She came out with a little pistol and aimed it at us It wasn't clear immediately whether it was a real pistol that she had picked up or if it was a toy One, thankfully it was a toy one, but someone immediately showed her I don't know if you can see from this far away, but they showed her how to hold it correctly. She was four years old and My contention is that no one's born a terrorist something put them on the terrorist trajectory their family their Circumstances the things surrounding them and my question is could we have prevented that and can we take them back back off? The terrorist trajectory as I did my work. It was ten years of research going to all these places that I named I started to attract the attention of governments. The Israelis weren't happy with me. They Basically threatened me not to come back threatened my student didn't like me going over to the West Bank in Gaza I thought they had enough of that information on their own and they didn't need me collecting it as well I attracted the attention of the US Department of Defense I will actually have before that I attracted the attention of the agencies that be FBI and others Because one time when I was crossing into Gaza and crossing back the Israelis called our embassy in Brussels Screamed and yelled at them You have a knock you have a undercover CIA agent undeclared going into Gaza And they said no we don't and that ended up that my husband early in the morning and the book starts out that way He was a US ambassador Got a knock on the door and they said mr. Ambassador sorry to disturb you, but do you know where your wife is? And he said yes, I do she's in Israel and they said no she's not and he said well, okay, Gaza But she is doing interviews and he gave some of my papers I've written a lot of academic papers the book itself is written as a trade book and it's written as stories And it's written with the idea to take you as the reader where I went and to hopefully help you to feel it smell it Hear it and make your own conclusions of to what you think of course the theories are woven in and So on but later getting back to who I attracted attention from the DOD approached me the US Department of Defense and asked me Do you know about De-radicalization programs and I said yes Saudi has the best one at this moment Singapore had also made one and I was working with NATO quite a bit on counter-terrorism issues And I was aware that in the UK. They were just starting one up. They were working in the prisons They were working with the moms But I told them all of the De-radicalization programs of today are based on Islamic challenge They rely on a mom to go into the prisons or wherever they happen to be doing De-radicalization try to make friends with the prisoner and try to talk them out of their beliefs based on You don't have the right Islam brother And I told them that I thought if they were going to do a better job because they were proposing doing one in Iraq That they should start to use psychological Rehabilitation as well and they asked me would you be willing to come to Iraq at that point my husband was already serving there He served for two years Me and the family stayed behind in Belgium and I was quite surprised when they asked me there 20,000 detainees 800 juveniles and they wanted to build a de-radicalization program I said yes, but I didn't go there to live I went back and forth because someone had to take care of the kids and Anyway, I was also asked by the home office recently. I've been asked by the Canadians Pakistanis have asked me different people have asked me to come and share what I've learned and I hope I can share some of it with you today In a half hour, I can't possibly say what's in this book And I'm going to leave things out and you'll think I didn't think of this or that but I'll do my best so what did I learn from these over 400 interviews worldwide and Listening to terrorists and actually trying to change them. Well, let's start with a very simple definition of terrorism So that we're all on the same page People have written books on what is terrorism Alec Schmidt? I think has 800 definitions and I'm only going to give you one and it's very simple and I'm going to refuse to argue about it Basically just so that we have a same similar understanding. It's a non-state actor. It's someone who's politically motivated and Bottom line for me that they're willing to attack civilians and that they're aiming to attack civilians for the purpose of creating terror and the purpose is to move the political process and to force it to respond as they desire They may also attack military. They may have mixed targets But bottom line for me is that they're also willing to attack civilians And what I found first of all and everywhere is that there's four ingredients to the lethal cocktail of terrorism First of all, there's always a group. There's an ideology. There's social support and then there's individual members of the group On the level of the group The group has many functions. So there may be people that are ideologues. They may not until very recently Been able to be legally prosecuted as terrorists. They may never Shed blood, but they encourage others to they instigate for terrorism There's people that are fundraising and until very recently. They also couldn't be prosecuted they were fundraising for charity groups, perhaps and Some of the money went to the terrorism are there's leaders. There's recruiters. There's people that are preparing for and Deciding what to do as far as their plots. There's people that execute the plots the actual operatives And on the group level the the terrorists are always aiming at six different audiences or there's six potential audiences That's the actual target. They may kill one person. They may only kill themselves if it's a suicide bomber They make may kill thousands, but the actual target is not their entire intended target There's also the wider witnessing audience and that's you and I that we read about it in the paper That we are horrified as we see it on television and then of course millions even worldwide audiences are Affected because terrorists rely on the media to amplify their message and to spread their terror They're also aiming towards their constituents who may be real or imagined And they're aiming to bring in their sympathizers and bring them closer Into the group for funding and for actual support They're also aiming to outside funders. So sometimes you'll see a group aiming to an audience that Doesn't really make sense unless you start thinking of funding So when the Chechens went to the Nordos theater, we saw them put up huge banners in Arabic in Chechnya They speak Chechen not Arabic and in Russia. They speak Russian those banners were put up for their Middle Eastern funders And they may also be outbidding among their groups. We saw this among the Palestinian groups The group that Is looking for the most constituents the most fundraising support may go a step further and to try to impress The potential supporters were the group that you should back So they may go deeper into suicide terrorism. We saw this with the pflp I spoke to their leader in prison in Jericho That was Ahmed Sadat at the time during the second Intifada He's since been bulldozed out of there by the Israelis and brought into Israel jail Israeli jail, but He said that they very reluctantly joined the suicide bombing movement and basically for that reason And their sixth audience on the group level Is that they are trying to provoke the target government to respond to try to prove some of what they're claiming So maybe to have an over response So remember we have four levels. We have the group the ideology Social support and the individual On the ideological Level the group has to somehow convince its potential supporters its adherents and the people that are going to carry out attacks That it's justified to attack civilians In my case, um, my research was Basically totally limited to people that were following the militant shahadi ideology Or a martyrdom ideology in the palestinian territories. I did talk to the pflp, which was circular Although they would speak about being martyrs for their cause and being willing to die for it that in that case it wasn't religious and Before I started this research. I had worked with an abortion clinic terrorist Who was a religiously oriented terrorist, but not following these two although probably She would say she was willing to be martyred for her cause as well We've seen a shift in ideology and terrorist groups Going much more from nationalist groups to being more globally oriented and religious in their views and their ideological views Although keep in mind that global movements when we look at al-qaeda, for instance It always boils down to the local level, which may not be national at all It might be city-wide might be neighborhood-wide. They always have to Bring people in and hook them in a way that resonates with where they live and what their local grievances are Ideology confers meaning It's a set of beliefs that define reality It gives an acceptable response to life circumstances It to be successful Convays dignity to the person that's taking it on it gives them a sense of social agency belonging And hopefully from the group's perspective a positive identity Then the third level that's always there is some level of social support and that determines the potential pool of recruits Social support we found The best research is kahil shakaki who did Survey research in the west bank The social support He found for suicide terrorism and terrorism in general waxes and wanes By the level of threat that people feel under when they feel under more threat. They're more willing to endorse terrorism A social support Involves a looking glass phenomena. We all have reference groups when you came here today You thought about what you were going to wear How you were going to get here and you probably gave some thought to I have to fit in with a group I can't show up in my bikini. I'm not going to wear my bathrobe I'm going to wear something that is acceptable to my group Well, it's the same with terrorist and the more and more people sign on and give social support to the group The more acceptable it becomes to them as well to join And I always think of a picture that I found of a granny and Hamas in Gaza carrying a grenade launcher around her shoulder And you think you know if the grannies are endorsing it then probably everyone in the society is And that's what we did find when we went through the west bank in Gaza that they had What I refer to as a cult of martyrdom that it was pretty much society-wide And you find that to varying degrees in different places What feeds societal support as I said threat Also, we feed it what what we do If we're on the other side of terrorism So when we have pictures from Abu Ghraib when we have uh too high of a civilian death toll from drone attacks We may feed inadvertently social support for terrorism Then getting down to the nitty-gritty of the four levels of What makes a terrorist is the individual and looking at the motivations on the individual level And somehow the individual has to mesh with the group. He has to be hooked by the ideology He has to feel some level of social support that he's willing to go into the group Social support might be just the group that it's a gang of guys And he wants to belong or it may be that he's growing up in a place where there's societal wide Level of support. He knows he'll end up in a video. He'll be on a poster He'll be glorified And that's a good enough reason to join But what I found is I traveled first through conflict zones And then uh less so Into non-conflict zones that motivations really broke by those two categories And in the conflict zones, it's terrorism is really Primarily driven by trauma and revenge. There's an easily defined and demonized other There's a fight over land territory resources There's usually frustrated aspirations So if you were in Chechnya or in the west bank or Gaza, you would meet University students workers that can't get to work They have to cross lots of checkpoints that are frustrated. They can't get where they want to get And they might tell you about their sister that was killed, their friend that was killed Probably a lot of them have post-traumatic stress disorder And the martyrdom ideology Has a very big appeal to someone that's got post-traumatic stress disorder wants to revenge is very traumatized so uh And the martyrdom ideology I started to realize offered a type of psychological first aid for people that had traumatic bereavement survival guilt a sense of foreshortened future And who very much wanted to rejoin With loved ones who'd been killed And we know this is common if you talk to anybody grieving in our society now particularly If their loved one died in a traumatic way, they will often say to you I just want to die and rejoin them. I want to go to heaven now or if that's what they believe I don't want to live any longer And it's the same in their societies although a group is coming with this ideology selling them on the idea that We can help you with that So let me give you a few examples We went into prison Outside of Tel Aviv. I did this with you arm schweitzer and we met a young girl Aaron Ahmed and Aaron Had been studying in school. She was studying to be a banker. She wanted to leave The west bank and go to the middle east. She had someone in mind that she was going to marry She was quite happy with him because he Accepted her in her more Feminist capacity that she wanted to have a career that she Was less traditional than some women And he was also a militant And according to Aaron, there's two different stories on what happened to him He according to Aaron, he received a missile and his car burned up and From the Israeli point of view They would have put him on a target list because he was a militant They say he was making a bomb. He blew his own car up But from her point of view, he was killed by the Israelis and she was furious and she had traumatic bereavement She immediately changed from her more Western style of dress put on A conservative clothes put on a head scarf, which she hadn't worn before And she went to Hamas and she said give me a bomb. I want to revenge So it was very straightforward for her When we met her in prison and talked to her about it She said the group took advantage of me. They took advantage of me in a traumatic state At that time I was willing to give my life. I was willing to do it And she described that she had a bomb on She described that she went with her senders over into israel from the west bank and there was another boy that was also going to Be bombing someone their their plan was that he would Detonate his bomb kill himself. He was a suicider and then she would detonate her detonate hers after some time So the idea being that they would draw a crowd and even more people would be killed On the way over she started having having doubts when she got there and she was walking around She said she saw a baby and she said Allah gives life and Allah takes life. I don't have the right So she had her cell phone and luckily it didn't detonate her when she called and she Called back to her senders and she said pick me back up take me back The wife that was involved in this group was extremely angry screamed at her a lot But eventually they did come and pick her up and she ended up getting arrested later because they couldn't keep the story quiet And she felt that the group had taken advantage of her I should also mention in conflict zones we oftentimes see a lot of contagion if there's a lot of suicide bombing Then especially among the young ones you'll see a contagion effect and it's just like what we see in high schools here if one kid Commits suicide usually they send somebody like me and to go and talk to the kids and to say you know, he was troubled. This is why he did it, you know, if they understand why and Basically don't do it to have an intervention and to offer help to the kids that are thinking about it Because we know as psychologists that if we have one person that anyone in their circle their family Has committed suicide recently a friend has committed suicide recently They're at much higher risk and we find that with high school kids If you don't make an intervention that you might get a string of them killing themselves right in a row Well, it's no different in the Conflict zones that you'll see the same contagion effect, but it will be Going to be suicide bombers a whole string of them. So we saw in Hubbron A whole soccer team that went one after another And we talked to their families about it Also in conflict zones you'll have fugitives that want to control their own death and that Have been imprisoned or very much fear prison and prison is is a really tough thing I think sometimes we underestimate that how tough prison is and then if we add any kind of torture Even soft torture how difficult it is So when I spoke with Zachariah Zabedi who was the head of the alexa martyrs brigade And uh responsible for sending suicide bombers into israel He told me I I would rather go as a martyr myself I would rather be killed And try to kill as many as I can then ever go back to prison because prison he said just ends your life And fugitives and Chechnya told us Their family members told us the same thing that they would prefer to go as suicide bombers and did Because they knew that if they were caught they were definitely guilty and that they would be tortured and possibly disappear Let's see. I'd like to also tell you about a young boy in Chechnya We found out about him through A relative of my colleague and he was carrying the picture of Osama bin Laden in his passport So my colleague went and confronted him about this and said this is uh Like a ninth grader and said oh mar. Why are you carrying this picture in your passport in grozny? There's uh 17 checkpoints at this point to get across town And you know if the russians stop you you can be killed for having that And he said Osama stood up to the west Osama's a real man. These are my brothers. This is what I believe and Let them be afraid of Osama if they open my passport As she took his history and she's a psychologist. She found out that in the first bombings The father had moved their family and um someone had to go and get water and they were carpet bombing And the father went out and he got hit by martyr. So he was laying out in the ground and he eventually Because of this someone finally rescued him and dragged him back into the Stairwell where they were hiding out. I don't know how they got water because he didn't succeed And he lost his leg. So Omar was growing up with a disabled father someone who You know just was trying to get water for his family and couldn't survive the the russian onslaught and then later again when they were hiding the russian soldiers came and uh Dragged he and his father out from the group and the mother protested and said look my husband's invalid He can't do anything. I'm sure she was terrified. She didn't think to protest for her son So in his mind his father can't protect him. His mother doesn't even try to protect him She tries to protect her husband They get dragged out the russians make them put their hands up against a wall And pretend to shoot them they shoot over their heads and he thinks he's dead. He thinks he's uh Been killed and he eventually realizes that uh, they've been shot but up in the air And he turns to his father and they both realize they're still alive. He made his decision My father can't protect me and he needed to find people that could so he turned to the uh jihadi brothers And thank goodness my colleague found out about him She worked with her sister in the school system and they finally talked him out of it So he didn't go as a potential mom or someday Another girl that we talked to in israeli prison She had been waiting for a bomb for six weeks She was related to people in janeen and uh when they did operation defensive shield The israelis went into all the places where there were people like zekarized ebedi and tried to route them out And the idea was to take the terrorists and stop them from continuing to send I think it was almost daily suicide bombers into israel But in in circling the towns and refugee camps, of course innocent palestinians also got killed So we heard in bethlehem uh from uh I'm gonna lose her name one of the girl suicide bombers that she'd been sitting at home and watching out the window When this was going on in in her town And she saw a sniper's bullet hit the neighbor Inside his house completely innocent not doing anything killed She immediately volunteered for a suicide mission. Well, omaya was no different She got very very traumatized by everything that was going on in janeen and she volunteered for a mission She probably would have been the first female suicide bomber before wafa address But she was stalled out because during this time period they started A lot a lot more closing down on the terrorist groups and her group Uh told her she had to wait so she waited six weeks for her bomb My colleague yarmschweitzer couldn't believe it He was like there's no way that you could have known you were going on a mission for six weeks and kept your cool about it As a psychologist, I knew that that was possible and I can tell you how she went into a dissociative state and it was very interesting interviewing her and First I should tell you one of my colleagues bruce bonger shared with me when he was a graduate student He said I got the task of having to go through Videotapes and audio tapes that people make when they suicide. These are normal suicides. He was out in california and they were studying suicide and uh amazingly people like to tape themselves when they're committing suicide And he said you could always see the point where they suddenly went into a dissociative trance So before they stepped off the chair to hang themselves before they Shot themselves whatever they were doing that they were recording And suicide bombers are no different To go across your protective instinct to stay alive You have to somehow somehow shut that down and the way you shut it down Is basically to shut down parts of your brain so that you're dissociative And what we hear from suicide bombers you find this reported in the press and I was fascinated by it So I started asking a lot about it is that the ones that go to carry a bomb report being in a euphoric high And basically I think that they are getting self medicated from the brains endorphins and Amaya was giving us an interview and she started getting giddy giddy and giggling as she talked about Uh Waiting to carry her bomb. She said she was in her. Um, there's lots of seats for the people that are standing up There's lots of seats um Anyway, uh as she was waiting to carry this bomb. She said she would be sitting with her family Of course, she couldn't admit what she was doing and in her mind. She was saying goodbye to them And she became giddy and I turned to erin who was also sitting in the room because erin had agreed to Interpret for us. I didn't want to do the interview In hebrew because um, I thought it was just more respectful to do it in arabic And yoram had been speaking to these people in hebrew and I asked um, were you doing any drugs at the time or were you sexually involved with your sender and erin said I won't translate that question. That's a really insulting question And I apologized to her and I to erin and I said i'm really sorry But it's a really important question and you see how giddy she is. She's almost like she's on drugs right now And I want to get at this and you'll see where i'm going. Please ask her the question and tell her I don't mean any insult by it. So I asked and erin translated and the girl Wasn't insulted because we'd set it up, right? But she said no, of course not. I wasn't doing drugs and no no. I hadn't ever slept with anyone And uh, then I said well, you know, even now you're really giddy in this interview Can you describe that to us? Were you that way back in the past when you were waiting for your bomb? And she said yes every day and it was the happiest time of my life I was euphoric the entire time and so Understand that if someone has very bad PTSD and they're living in a conflict zone They're filled with a desire for revenge and a group comes to them offering them martyrdom It's very very powerful and it can even Mediate on a Psychobiological level in this way We also found when I um, I was telling peter a little bit about how I got into this and I won't have time to Tell all of you actually I see I'm going to run out of time We found in a thought experiment. You can find that on the web on my website. Um, if you look it up We asked normal students in belgium to imagine carrying a bomb and to go backwards that they got caught like one of these suicide bombers before they Carried the exploded their bomb and to go back in the thought experiment Even these kids more than half of them Went into a euphoric state imagining carrying a bomb. So it's a very very powerful force But anyway, let's move to non-conflict zones for a minute I continued on after studying the Chechens and the Palestinians and while I continued studying them I went to Morocco. I kind of got fanatical myself over this I have to admit and a little crazy, you know, like an addict and I went into Morocco. I had a colleague there a professor and he was very hospitable and allowed me to stay with He and his family and I went into the slums where the Casablanca bombers were from And I ended up meeting and interviewing their close friends that lived on the same street And I have to say even though most terrorism experts say it's not about poverty In the Casablanca slum it was all about poverty and then it was these four things. There was a group There was a recruiter that came from the group He came with a smarter to my ideology and he spoke to these kids that were in total despair They were college educated and could never get a job Some of them were college educated and could never get a job because they lived in the slum Had nothing going for them were on drugs couldn't get girlfriends because they're on drugs and unemployed And he said I can clean up your life and he brought them to mosque. He brought them to a serious Living an Islamic life, but he also brought them this virulent ideology Which is a completely distorted view of Islam and talk them into it. So he gave them a new life, but a short life basically gave them psychological first aid and They went and killed themselves one of them in a cemetery where he didn't even kill anybody but himself It was kind of strange and I have to say I was extremely moved when I Spoke to the friends because at the end of the interview Well, two things happened one one happened that One of the boys turned to me and said I was so angry when I found out they went and I said because you would have stopped them I mean, I just assumed and you should never make assumptions when you're doing research and he said no because I would have gone with them And I was so shocked because these are really nice kids I mean despairing horrible lives, but nice kids And I said really and he said you see our lives. What do we have to live for? And I thought oh Geez and the other thing that happened is they had been lovely lovely at one point. They asked me we I Took them out to a restaurant and fed them and we ate chicken together with their hands And they asked me do you have a Moroccan husband? Is that why you know to eat with your hands? I shouldn't even be gesturing with my left hand to say I ate with my hands and I said no, I'm not married to a Moroccan, but I you know traveled a lot and have a lot of friends And then they said why did you wear a Moroccan clothes? And I said to make it easier for you to speak with me and they said that's good. Otherwise, we would have had to harass you and When I got up to leave I went to the bathroom and I came back out and they kind of switched And they started looking at my purse and I thought They're deciding whether they're going to rob me or not and uh, they they told my interpreter that they wanted me to buy them a bunch of alcohol and I said I can't do it. Um, I want this interview to be clean And I don't want to pay you for the interview and uh, can't do it. It's not good for you And they looked me up and down like you know It's be so easy to just rip your purse off your shoulder and knock you down and run And they decided not to and it was really interesting watching this argument inside of themselves But um, and I was glad that they decided to be their higher selves Although they told me I had wanted to return that same night because we got cut off from the interview And they said don't come back here at night. We'll be all drugged up and we'll be different people So, uh, I also went through belgium, uh, france, uh, the uk and, um Netherlands to a certain extent and I was living in belgium at the time and I don't know if you realize this but many towns in belgium and In the netherlands the same are up to 20 percent, uh, muslim at this point Most of most of these people are, uh, turkish immigrants moroccan immigrants north african immigrants And in the uk it's more pakistani kashmiri, uh, southeast asian and most are fantastic wonderful immigrants But then there's a vulnerability among some To be recruited into this and i'd like to tell you about a few of them Oh, and I should just say generally what we're looking at as far as their motivations are discrimination and marginalization We have under and uh unemployment We have discrimination on housing I was very shocked when I moved to brussels and I was told Um by my students and by my kids that wanted to go out clubbing You know mom the the they would call them moroccan's and they called themselves moroccan's even though they had belgium passports You know the moroccan's can't go to the clubs And I said what do you mean and they said well the bouncer stands at the door And if a group of white kids comes get right in if a group of moroccan kids come They can't get in so I went to watch it myself and I was a popular professor So my students would buy me beers And it was really hard doing the research because I was trying to talk to these kids that were getting turned away But um, I saw it myself many times and I spoke with many many people in belgium of um, moroccan descent second generation and uh, they told me That uh, we will go for a job interview and we're told akmed Someone with that name. I I could never use no. I'm sorry fatima You'd have to take off your headscarf before I could hire you here My my clients, uh, wouldn't like someone a moroccan descent You could clean the bathrooms and they'd be college educated Or they and their friends would apply for a job And the white belgium would be told come on in for an interview The moroccan would be told the positions filled and it it really was happening They need a bit of a civil rights movement so in their case They're motivated by identity politics belonging the group of guys adventure um, sometimes by the promise of girls and I'm not talking about the The virgins at the end Talking about girls that's that maybe in their community say I want to marry a martyr I'll give myself to a martyr if you're going to be a martyr. I'll go with you The idea of manhood escape heroism A feeling of meaning to life And you'll even find in places where there's some Computers where kids going to check their email. My students would tell me I went into one of those and flashing on the screen was would you like to join the worldwide jihad? so and What I found is it's not trauma and revenge But the recruiters and especially over the internet the films the The pictures that they bring in a way they use the trauma from the conflict zones to create a secondary trauma So they bring pictures of palestine pictures of chachnia pictures of cashmere and they say brother Do you know what's going on over here? You don't feel that you have any place to belong in this society. We can give you a meaningful role You can um, you should identify. This is the umma You can be part of this and join our group and you can do something about it So i'm going to finish in just a second peter. Oh, okay. Well, then i'll go through i have three short stories One kid i interviewed um, he was in his 20s. I shouldn't call him a kid anymore But he said at age 17. I would have given my life for asama bin laden his name Well, what i'll call him is hamid He had been going to an internet cafe to check his email He lived in antwerp antwerp is a pretty dicey place with a lot of ethnic tensions The police are known to belong to uh I think it was called blombs block now. It's blombs belong. It's very uh anti immigration anti muslim group And uh, there had been riots things when he was growing up He went to an internet cafe to check his email And a recruiter sat next to him and said hey brother. Have you seen this uh new video? And uh hamid said no so they put it up on the screen And it was a picture uh film showing all kinds of hardships among the muslim community the al-qaeda narrative of The west is doing all these terrible things all over the world And you see these dead bodies and you know the thing that you can find on the internet now And uh at the end of some have been long and appeared and he said who will stand up Who will do something for these people? I'm doing something. Will you? Well hamid started to cry And he said looking back a few years back um That recruiter knew that he had putty in his hands and The recruiter of course said would you like to join and hamid had some sense of reasoning still even though he'd been very emotionally juggled around And he said no no it's not for me and then the guy started playing on him And this is how they use a global narrative and then they bring it down to the um The local level and he said you know we live very uneasily with our neighbors as muslims and as morocans And it's true. I mean I really could say when I moved to belgium and lived there for seven years there was a lot of hatred And um, it could be said to go both ways and uh, we shouldn't blame one or the other but there's definitely ethnic tension and um He said we live very uneasily with our white belgian neighbors And do you remember what happened in bosnia? Do you remember how? Yugoslavia uh imploded and suddenly our sisters were being raped. What if that happens here? Are you ready? Why don't you come to the gym and work out with us? So hamid said yes, he went to the gym Then the workouts progressed to why don't we go to the forest and train with guns? And uh, so hamid uh went along his path. He became uh, What's many in europe call a revert. He'd been brought up In islam, but he wasn't very serious about it He reverted to an extremely conservative form with this virulent ideology that he was being taught by the local guy in antwerp And um, he told me that one day they were out in the woods. Um, they must have been in the ardennes I I found this hard to believe almost because in belgium is such a small country. How could they be out doing uh, Gun drills, but he said he was out with a thob and arabic robe and uh, he had calmed on top of a Cabin and they were shooting at each other with bb guns and uh There were people inside the cabin that called the police They thought it was an abandoned cabin and the belgium police are um, pretty Pretty low-key So when they came out they searched and all these kids had uh, and their leader had gotten up in the trees So he was up in the trees with an arabic robe and the police didn't think to search up in the air So, uh, he wasn't caught. He eventually decided to go on jihad. He was going to go to chechnya And um, thankfully he asked his mother and his mother got historical and said you can't go it's meaningless Don't do it and his father got involved and his path out was slow But he eventually decided that he needed to learn arabic He needed to ask questions of his recruiter, which absolutely were not tolerated his recruiter and teacher And uh, he found that he got himself kicked out of the group Then he started studying arabic and he said I found out for myself what the karan says And that's a big issue in europe that when people are recruiting and teaching this ideology They'll say to the people that they're working with well, you're reading a karan in french You know, that's not really the karan. It's only correct in arabic Let me tell you what it says and it's very hard to speak back to that because they don't know arabic so he and another person that I also talked to both of them found their path out by um, Studying a bit of arabic and getting teachers that could say no, that's not correct Um, I have a few more stories, but I I really don't want to take too much time And uh, I'll just say will it happen here and the answer is that already has we've seen nidale, uh, hassan The psychiatrist who was of tolestinian descent and my view on him is All of us in this profession. We go into it because we have something hurting Maybe a little crazy and we hope we get it straightened out, but not everybody does he was a psychiatrist So probably something drew him to that field. He was seeing terrible traumas coming back from the combat zones uh, he was talking with al-waki, so he had the ideological support And uh, he was about to be deployed in something that he felt was wrong And he decided to go and uh, quote murder himself. We saw Adam gadan go off from california. He's now uh, propagating videos from overseas We saw the same with samir khan And uh, when I was asked years ago, are we going to see suicide bombers rising up in the us? I said, well, we've got quite a bit different situation than what we had in europe They have much more of a Less educated even illiterate population coming as immigrants where to come to america Our immigrant population that's muslim really does quite well and they integrate easily. They're educated There shouldn't be these same issues. There's no issue about trying to keep people in the garbage can collector class and So I said not unless we get people related to conflict zones and having a really hard time integrating And the only place that I could think where we would see that was among the samali diaspora And I was right. We saw the kids from minneapolis Going and in that case they They were having a difficult time. They weren't integrating well. They were finding that Being black they weren't accepted by the black community and they were having trouble in school Their parents were totally fixated on the conflict back home Um, they had european samali recruits come and tell them this is a manly man thing to do and come and join us It was made very much to be a heroic thing and the ones that went they went in uh streams or in groups The ones that went before communicated back to them over the internet and made it sound like a whole lot of fun And a really cool thing to do and also a lot of them had terrible traumas in their background They had come without their parents without their sisters. So we know they had huge losses huge traumatic bereavement issues And uh to go back and murder themselves in the homeland might have been appealing Um So i'm going to stop there and let you ask me questions. I've got a website It's my name My papers are there. Um I've got some business cards if you want to communicate with me and i'm sorry that I can't tell you more but In a half hour, that's the best I can do Thank you I was uh very very interesting doctor speckard. Um, let me ask you Given what you just said, which I think is all true about european muslims. Why is there being so little terrorism in europe? Oh, I think we've seen quite a bit. We've seen the awful lot of thwarted plots Um in belgium. There's so many that there was a group that tried to blow up embassy paris There was a group that tried to um blow up a nato facility In the uk we've seen many thwarted plots of trying to take down our airliners. We saw richard reid So I wouldn't say there's so little terrorism Well in the terms of success, I mean we've got a let me just amplify the question a bit there. I mean Um 10 percent of the french population is muslim yet 60 or 70 percent of their prison population is muslim So it's obviously an enormously disadvantage and there's obviously no french dream or belgium dream or british dream Or u dream that allows them to integrate And so the what you describe the kind of discrimination Lack of opportunities under employment, etc. And that should be a huge brew Creating I mean to me. It's an interesting issue. There are these failed plots But as you know, some of these failed plots that you know, some of them were sort of more on the drawing board than necessarily really real I mean we had the the the killing of van Gogh in in amsterdam We had the london attacks of 7 7 and we had the madrid attack To me, it's just one of these dogs that should be barking more loudly It's almost a dog that didn't given the what the what you've told us about The very real problems. It's hard to answer You know, I mean It's hard to answer perhaps a question that is sort of framed in the negative of why isn't there more terrorism in europe but What would you shouldn't there be more I guess there's another way of looking at it I don't know the answer to that. Um, robert liken would tell you that the french have done a fantastic job of really, um I don't know putting the hammer down and uh, uh, I have to say when I interviewed in France I went to our embassy and asked for some help and they said, oh, you will be immediately followed as soon as you leave the embassy now that you've declared what you're doing and uh, we were pretty sure we did have a tell on us we we uh Saw that and I saw that people were really afraid to talk there much much more so than in belgium and um Uh in the uk if they were extremists I don't know the answer. I mean, it's uh, it's a very teeny tiny minority that are going to get into terrorism I mean who wants to give their life even if you have no life Who wants to give your life and who wants to end up in prison? I guess in the form it's taken in france to some degree is uh, Basically writing in the sort of banlieu like sand and knee outside paris, right? So it's just taking the form of mob violence rather than sort of ideological violence Well, there's different schools of thought on that. I communicated with riven paas who studies the jihadi Internet and how they're talking to each other in the chat rooms and things and I think he's one of the best experts along with ebb and colman of looking at that kind of thing and um, I went down to uh, pantheon and uh, uh, cliche sabois And uh, walk the streets during the fires and talk to kids that were burning cars And uh, they said oh, we know who those recruiters are in our community the bearded ones And we don't want anything to do with them and they didn't admit immediately that they were burning cars It just came out eventually and uh, then I said you're burning cars, aren't you? And I said, yeah And uh, it was really fun and uh, they were angry and uh, you know, it's They're out in the suburbs bored with no money can't get into the city because it costs money to take the subway And uh, it's I think in france. It's kind of hard to jump over they do jump over but it's a pretty big barrier and um, They were angry they were angry about being unemployed and feeling that uh, well, they would say what is it? Ecolité fraternité liberité. It's not for us if you have dark skin. It's not for us And um, so yeah, they would burn cars and get their rage out that way And I think that the french are very good at catching people early on in their plots and they also Make it known to the parents that if your kid travels somewhere Questionable or has plans to please come and tell us immediately. We'll work with you. Which is a good thing Yeah, and I think the just to add to that. I think the french, you know because of the, um Um Kind of plots in paris in the mid 90s sort of kind of had an earlier start on the whole issue and also I mean for all the sort of French wailing about guantanamo. I my impression is the french charge can keep you in prison for three years without charging you with anything If it's a terrorism related potential charge, so they have a pretty firm Handle on it. Um, let me ask you since you're You laid out a sort of general case about uh, uh, and I thought it was very interesting the fact that obviously in conflict zones people's Reasons for doing things are different than in a non-conflict zone But they're associated because if they in a sense play on moral outrage that might be generated by Things that are going on in iraq or elsewhere To what extent does your did your interviews confirm or Or unconfirm, uh, that's a word kind of mark sageman's kind of basic kind of points Which I guess I haven't read the book for a long time, but it seemed to be He a bunch of guys who kind of self-radicalized. He sort of downplayed the recruiter Right. He said that these guys, you know, they'd come in often for reasons they were You know for the reason that needed to all cook her out They'd be in the same apartment and they sort of sort of self-radicalize each other They had all these experiences of discrimination It moved the whole group in a more radical direction and they joined as a group that you had that's his basic, I think Point uh, and obviously that's a very European point because it's not And he wouldn't claim anything otherwise Um Is that sort of this what you saw in your interviews in in europe or Yes, and no Yeah, what's the what's the no? I I agree with Bruce Hoffman that we have a leader leader led uh, jihad when we look at al-qaeda We still have uh, zawhiri quite active. Um, we have all the Ideology coming across the internet anybody that's Internet savvy can get on And get into these chat rooms that are being followed by people like Ruben pause and Evan Coleman and all our security services And so the ideology is definitely Out there and being promulgated by leaders the people that I spoke to in europe that were recruited For the most part were recruited by someone that was part of a group part of a leadership part of a hierarchy Um, some of them joined On mass so they went together as a group and that happened in london I talked to someone who was working with gang kids that he was taking out of the groups And he said he worked with 17 of them. They had all been taken on camping trips And uh on the camping trips. They were showed how to do small explosives how to change a pistol and uh Renovate it so that it was an active and working pistol And they were gang kids and their leader who was part of al-qaeda told them Listen right now. You're just doing gang crimes. Uh, you're you're not muslims You're going to hell and you're going to get killed And you're going to go to hell. But listen, you can join us. You can pretty much keep the same lifestyle Um, there were a few things that had to change and one of them was how they related to the girls that Converted and the girls were already wearing baggy clothes because in the gangs, uh, they were afraid of getting raped So they wouldn't draw attention to themselves. He said put on a headscarf sister and you can't touch these girls Also, if you're living in different postal codes where the gangs were at war with each other If you say salamu alaykum, you can go across, you know, you have to um, you have to give safe passage to each other So in that case, you know, it was a group thing And it very much had to do with the charisma of the leader The idea that he gave them a much more meaningful life and he told them We may call on you at some point and basically he wanted them to give some of the proceeds of their criminal activities to the group and and Equated them back to cashmere. He was cashmere And what was going on in afghanistan and cashmere? Uh, so it follows different things. I mean always there's a draw of the group the group, you know, unless you're a total lone wolf Um, you're going to bond to the other people in the group Yeah, I mean a classic case in this country of a People who joined as a group but were recruited by a particular person was in lakawana Where it was, you know, six yemeni americans. There was kamal dohish who was actually part of al-qaeda was killed in yemen later Uh, who basically came in and sort of gave them the same pep talk that you just described Which is you know, if you want to be serious muslims, you need to go to afghanistan train, etc um, you know, some of the things you also described reminded me of The nypd report And and and latterly mitch silber's book Which you mentioned, uh, you know going to the gym Training and the forests going on camping trips. I mean these and we could add to that People who go on like canoeing trips. I think some of the so what described Why why is that a sort of important intervening step? And is it a necessary step? In places like europe or do people kind of skip that step? You could skip it I mean the people that were part of the so-called hofstead group I don't think they did any paintballing or camping or canoeing But um, if you do those things, they're really bonding and the idea of you know naming an enemy and Practicing against that enemy is bonding Um With uh suliman who told me about the 17 kids that he pulled out Um, I was very surprised because we had already done our program in iraq And I had a lot of fights with the contractors there because they wanted to use shia imams And I don't know if you remember al qaeda in iraq. Thank you for laughing. Thank you so much I would be on the phone almost screaming at these contractors saying you can't hire a shia imam to deradicalize an al qaeda operative and uh, uh, I You know it was general stone in charge of the prison at the time Tell us a little bit about the prison and what you did in there and what he did in that because I think it's an interesting story Well, I want to give credit first to general gardener that general gardener who started the program And general stone came later And uh, I was asked along with rohan gunaratna and ustas muhammad. We all flew into iraq We talked to prisoners in camp cropper and we gave our advice as to what kind of a program they could put together rohan and ustas muhammad had both been working in singapore with that group and uh, ustas muhammad had been an imam for it and um, they offered the uh, as I told you the classic islamic challenge idea and I told general gardener at the time Uh, all of these people are really traumatized. You have a conflict zone You have people that are very upset about being arrested And I also wouldn't give any guidance until I spoke to the prisoners because I thought you can tell me As the military what you think but unless I speak to the prisoners. I can't tell you what I think as far as deradicalizing them and uh, when we talked to them We found many that had just been picked up in sweeps and the military did say it's probably 80 percent that are not ideologically um Committed so we said of course you need two different programs You need to figure out how to deal with people that aren't ideologically committed But but might be willing to place bombs for money and that kind of thing um, or just pure revenge and the 20 percent that have become ideologically committed then you need to think about them and I argued for also doing some kind of psychological challenge to try to understand how they'd been hooked because The ideology always finds someplace to reside in your soul That you're upset about something and what I find really positive About people that are in the militant shahadi movement You might think this is kind of crazy that I find a real positive So they're very passionate people and they're usually Follow their consciences. I mean not all of them. Some of them are just criminal thugs But others are quite passionate. So if you speak to them and Talk talk them out of that. It's really truly Islamically justified And you speak to that passion and their psychology and redirect them You may find them going in a completely different direction with all that good passion to change the world and to right the wrongs of this world Many of them had been beaten up during their arrests. I mean, you know, think about Our soldiers facing them. They might be wearing a bomb. They might be all wired up and You know their arrests were quite violent and they were traumatized by it They were traumatized by being separated as I told you being imprisoned is traumatic Many people told me I missed my wedding, you know young boys the girl married somebody else I was the last male in my family. I left all my women folk Unprotected I'm freaked out about it. I can't eat my food here because I don't know if my mother has food All kinds of things but um general stone came later and uh, We put the program together. Um, I don't think that it was carried out as I designed it and uh, I was very sorry to see that Happened that way. We had three former Both, um, we had three former al-qaeda operatives. Um that joined us They had been propagandists and uh, they had the most incredible street street cred and they were so passionate amazing people one of them's now been killed by al-qaeda and um They were willing to risk their lives and their families to be with us in the prisons in buqa And to say to the other prisoners give it up brother. It's it's it's not the time. It's not right. It's not islamic And uh, shake ali who I was working with uh wrote to me. I'd go back in and forth back and forth He said you got to get back here. I talked somebody out of it. He's having post traumatic nightmares I don't know what to do which convinced me you can be an amazing charismatic shake And talk them out of the islamic part of it. But then what do you do with all the trauma? I mean if you've got blood on your hands and you've killed people Then there's you know, uh, you've got to come out of that. You have to find your way back And uh, what do you do with yourself then? Even if it wasn't implemented completely to what the specifications you would have preferred I mean, how would you rate out of 10? uh, the success or lack thereof in So because I mean that the prison system had become a sort of al-qaeda incubator on steroids, right? So And obviously it it it decreased and it was I mean we've had general stone come and speak about it to the new america foundation and he gives a you know a pretty good account of Doing a lot of things that sound similar to what you're suggesting and and and reducing the prison population And uh as a result sort of and isolating the people who are running the insurgency in the prison Who are regarded as basically being? You know but irreconcilable in a sense. So how would you rate the the effort overall? I love general stone. He's an amazing man. Um, but I um don't I don't know sometimes I was upset to hear him diss the guy in front of him And uh during the time of general garner, uh, we got this huge amount of prisoners 20 000 So at first they didn't know what to do with them and general garner was moving them from place to place trying to figure out How can we stop, uh, the seeds that were Spreading extremism. I mean they would be teaching how to make a suicide bomb or how to make an explosive Inside the prisons because they were grouped according to un rules. They had to be grouped. They shouldn't be in solitary unless there was Some acting out that ended them in solitary Uh general stone did start to find a way to separate them I don't know if he was completely successful because they were extremely clever in hiding Who was the group leader? So sometimes they had all agreed that if we're interrogated We'll say he's the group leader when really the group leaders over here And then that guy would be sent somewhere else and sent into isolation or into the that they tried to put them Into um buildings where all the extremists were together. So they were only talking to themselves But really what happened is we had the awakening movement Um people got sick of al-qaeda in iraq. Uh, they started to realize They're creating this huge sectarian divide that we don't agree with. Um people had been living uh, uh By sectarian should we say not sectarian? Uh before like shake shake ali told me my mom's shia and and he had been in al-qaeda so A lot of people got sick of it They started fighting against it and general stone started doing these huge releases They did put them through the rehabilitation program before they released them But most of the people that he released were the people that he viewed as Not he personally, but his staff viewed as less threatening And I don't believe that they really changed hearts and minds through the program that was instituted possibly Our vision was to work with the hardcore extremists and change them His view in the end was just deep six them never release them let the let the others go Which we had told general garner in the beginning the people you picked up in sweeps Got to get him out of here By the way, this release program was deeply unpopular in the rest of the u.s. Military for obvious reasons um You mentioned interesting thing about marriage About how some people joined the jihadist movements to kind of for romantic reasons And I it was a fascinating piece in prospect magazine because that sounds very counterintuitive Where particularly in british kashmiri communities where you're thought you where you're expected to marry your first cousin or a cousin That a way out of that is to Join these kind of militant you know become a militant and meet women in the militant movement who aren't necessarily Related to you. So did you see any of that or is that yes? And I I put a whole chapter on sex and uh, I don't know if I called it sex and love But I don't remember you can find it in the book and I started asking a lot of questions like that because people like you were asking me and You know, that's always Not something that's easy to get to and first interviews. I mean, you know I didn't have the opportunity to go back over and over again with these people But in the uk I was very interested to find a story that One of the people told me I can't remember who he is now that From birmingham that was involved in the Subway bombs It starts with s but I don't remember his name But anyway, he said And this was my guide He had been telling me for a long time and people that we were interviewing were telling telling us we have double lives we Were allowed to go off to college we leave our families and we go live in a dormitory during the time we go to college We create love affairs and we sleep with the people that we're in love with Then we come home from college and our parents insist that we get married to somebody from back there So they said it's a constant stream of bringing people that are new immigrants who they're not in love with to be married and The country is trying to Integrate the population But so they've got somebody that's starting to integrate and then that person pairs up with someone from the village who's an extremist and They get married and they're not happily married because it's arranged marriage and She or he is in love with whoever they were with in college So they live this double life where they somehow try to keep that going And my guide said to me I just can't believe this guy that he had such a double life of the one of them that went to bomb himself Because he looked like he had integrated. He looked like he was fine And you know, then he goes off and bombs himself in the subway and I turned to him and I said, what are you talking about? That's all we've been hearing about for the last three days so Yes, of course Love affairs have tons to do with it and we found in holland Um, I actually learned this when I was in televieve. I was with jorm schweitzer and To dutch police officers Detectives came to talk to jorm and he said sit in it on the meeting because you're interested in this too and They asked we've got these girls in holland that have signed last wills and testaments and we're worried Could they go off and be suicide bombers jorm? You've studied female terrorists and and you to give us your opinion So we asked lots of questions and I wanted to know how were they recruited They were recruited from somebody from holland who've now been rounded up. Some of them Arrested released the mill that goes on and it was a very charismatic guy that had recruited them They'd been brought into groups with a female leader. It was a islamic study group Uh got very radicalized into extremism agreeing that um, they would be willing to go as Quote martyrs and they signed last will and testaments Um, up to there. I wasn't convinced that they would go But then she said and this woman has arranged for them informal marriages So they were marrying other extremists secretly and I said to their family Does their family know about these marriages? No, of course not their secret Are they consummated? Oh, yes, many of them at least half And um, I said you've got bombers for sure I mean imagine, uh, this is a conservative culture where If Moroccans in belgium are telling me we date Moroccan girls and we sleep with them and um, they they get a stitch to prove their virginity A vaginal stitch which is broken and they go to a doctor and they get restitched When they have to prove it later But they said if we're dating a Moroccan girl, um, we date her way across town or in a different village Because if her brother knows about it, I'll get beat up And so imagine these girls had consummated informal marriages with other extremists They're pretty committed and uh, they also had the blackmail potential So, um, there's an example and some of these girls would say I only want to be with a martyr So imagine some boy. I think, um, uh, the murderer of the avant-garde was Having a bit of trouble with girls. He had proposed himself for marriage and uh, been turned down And uh, then, you know, may have decided that he needed to make himself look a bit more, uh, heroic In his viewpoint Great, we'll open it up to questions if you have a question Can you identify yourself and wait for the microphone and raise your hand We'll start with Mike Rowlands over here I'm retired from the FBI and uh, happy to tell you having started here, but when I got through it I was not the one who knocked on your husband's door, but glad to see that they were worried about your safety A couple questions. I could ask you a thousand questions. I found this absolutely fascinating. So thanks for coming On the question of why we haven't seen it here in peter started to get down that road in in europe And yet with all that's going on in the world no matter where you come out on the wars In the campaigns and the troubles in the middle east and the palestinian israeli conflict It would seem that there's plenty to blame america for and then come here and take it out And we've struggled with that for years the the why not here And I guess that's my first question then i'll come back to my second But it it just seems a not all that difficult And b plenty of motivation and even the similes as you talked about still left here I'm sure I don't know that there the elshaba beef at least then was with us to go back home But just your thoughts on that if if there is a logic to it Thank you mike. It's a great question and thank you for your service and the fbi I think that the us is pretty darn good and people feel hope here and a lot of this has to do with anger and despair and If you have your own traumas if you have your own despair You can hook it into others And then you can find the excuse and the justification to act and sometimes, you know Well, we saw this guy out in california the one that the former la pd officer For me he was following a martyrdom ideology had nothing to do with islam, but he had a grievance he was really angry and He had tried to address his grievance rightly or wrongly and you know, maybe he's a crazy. I don't know But he felt that he had tried everything and now he was going to take a gun and he was going to shoot people He was going to get in the media and his manifesto would be spoken about which it was and he did all the things that terrorists do and he terrorized the whole community and I think this is the story of how we will see terrorism here that if people really become despairing And feel that they can't work out their grievance in any other way And in this case, he was a lone wolf Or a true lone wolf. I think there's very few lone wolves. Usually there's groups like we've seen inspire magazine from al qaeda This last month again come out telling people rise up and strike on your own Here's how you do it But here's how you do it is the group part of it And though here's why you should do it is the ideology part of it So they're not really lone wolves, but they're really difficult for people like you because How do you find somebody that has hooked his own or her own despair to this group and to this narrative? And I think it's just human nature that a lot of us Won't act on our own behalf violently But if you become convinced that it's a lot of people like even this la pd officer He felt I think rationally insulted someone had used the n word And he was very upset about it sounded like he got violent in response But in his manifesto, he spoke about rodney king and other people according to him I don't know if it's true that were beaten And so he hooked it into a larger group that he was supposedly acting in behalf of You know all black men that are discriminated against so he took his own despair his own anger Hooked it into a larger cause And then said I will murder myself for them. I will use violence for them And I think as long as we stay a society where people feel hope Where they see the possibility to Deal with their grievances through the legal system I mean one of the things in belgium that was very upsetting to me when I went to a conference like this, um, the minister against discrimination Was present and I went up to him and I said, you know, I've watched this with my own eyes I've had people tell me they can't rent apartments if they're moroccan It only in the in the kind of ghettoized part of town These kids can't go to nightclubs and we're all blaming them in the counterterrorism community for not integrating But they're not allowed to integrate and he answered me. Well, they're the ones that cause all the problems in the nightclubs And I wanted to say seriously are you the minister of anti-discrimination? But he he was completely serious and they don't have the same system as we do I asked people, why don't you sue the nightclub? Why don't you film this? And It's a long process to go through. It's very bureaucratic and they don't have the same winnings at the end Like our guys at denny's that didn't get served coffee and you know got their million dollar reward at the end It's worth it. And uh, and you know denny's learned their lesson, right? And uh, and nobody else is gonna, you know, I hope Be discriminatory in serving people of color after that lawsuit So that's one of the answers you you raised an interesting point which connects to mike's question, which is Major Nadal Hassan, you know in many ways there's a classic lone wolf But in other ways because of his communications with anwar alaki who basically blessed the operation Uh, what does that make him and in a way? um In the more networked environment we live in I mean, will classical lone wolves be Less and less frequent because everybody at some point is going to connect with people with like-minded people on the internet Or at least go to a website that might reinforce their beliefs So just and and just and a sort of and bravier can Norway I'm not that familiar with his case, but To what extent was he a classic lone wolf or was he more like major Nadal Hassan? That he was sort of getting validation from the internet or not um One of the people I I can't remember his name, and I'm sorry He's just written a book on lone wolves, but he analyzed a lot of these cases And he said thank god most of them speak on the internet before they go So that's good for people in your capacity Because if you're watching the internet and you have you know flagging words or however you do these things Hopefully you find them It's like the heart of the faculty. Yeah. Yeah, we just search all of their emails Sorry But anyway You hopefully find them ahead of time But he said that they tend to brag and look for some validation outside of themselves For me the true lone wolves are this Dorner I guess was his name. Uh, oh no, I that's somebody else. Um, the one in la Kazinsky The unabomber he's a true lone wolf, but for the most part they are hooked into this wider movement And um, the brekkie of that guy he he was talking to people that were in a neo-nazi kind of uh Ideology he was reading their readings and communicating with them But he did act on his own and I think more and more as we see it harder for uh groups To operate as groups We'll see them encouraging people to take their ideology and To take their know-how that they've put out on the internet and Ruben Paz calls this the uh University of jihad and They'll use it so This gentleman here. It's great for the mind. Yeah, thanks Hi, my name is Dave price retired educator and journalist. Thank you very much for that fascinating look not only to terrorism But of course who makes up terror the individual terrorists and it's there um, if for a moment we could dismiss the nra claim that the Only thing would have the only uh thing that could take out a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun If you believe that you know terrorism is not the answer for the terrorist or anything Could you address on two levels? What countries can do not necessarily affected but those you know around? I mean we all know that or as individuals if you want to see a lessening of it, you know How would that work? Not something you can do where you can go and work with them But I'm just saying in that in that general area what should countries in the world be doing to reduce it? And then individuals themselves that are concerned from that level That's a good question Dave. Thank you and um You know I sometimes when I'd go speaking on this I'd feel like you know When you get that candidate that goes up on the beauty pageants and says, you know Bring peace and love to the world Well, of course, you know the answer to violence is always love and healing So individually, you know spreading love through the world as much as you can on a countrywide level We need to deal with failed states Because you know, we find that terror groups flourish When we have conflicts try to figure out how to intervene in a useful way Um, I'm really impressed with our special forces Um, uh the way that they do really precise, um Attacks and take out terrorists. I'm less impressed with our drone attacks It seems that we're getting too high of civilian casualties And I'm seeing that circulating on youtube little kids burned up and drone attacks and when I hear people say that Anybody who's living with the terrorist is guilty by association I think really if you're in an arranged marriage and you're married to a terrorist How do you walk away if you're in a conservative society? If you're the child of a terrorist, how do you walk away? And if we feel that we can drone their entire compound It might be worth it. I mean, it's all trade-offs, but um The blowback is going to be that the pictures of the dead bodies are going to circulate the internet And uh their communities are going to be quite angered and For me, I do believe the al-qaeda is uh led But I also believe that the uh leadership is quite easily replaceable that it's a a flat organization That follows a very well-known ideology And um that the leadership can rise up and replace itself quite easily So I would um promote more special forces attacks instead of drones And as much as we can giving money to building strong states democratic states, of course and also understanding that in In north africa in the middle east In predominantly islamic countries, it's going to be their own version of democracy. You're never going to see Freedom of speech that you can mock the prophet It's just not going to happen. And that's okay. I mean that they can build the kind of society that works for them And uh, we should encourage that Gentlemen here My name is jhangir. I'm a federal police officer from pakistan presently a hubert humphrey fellow at the washington college of law Uh, my question is you talked about uh the revenge Motivation being a major area I'm really worried about because of the drone attacks. What is happening in the prashtoon belt of pakistan as well as afghanistan There's a new generation than the young kids. They are playing in the hands of the terrorists So i'm more worried about the next generation of terrorists, which are coming up So does your book also speak something about how to demotivate them? Thank you Thank you, jhanid. Um, it is a real concern And is a real concern. I mean what I hear from the intel people is that The al-qaeda operatives have been chased out of afghanistan and have crossed the border and if we leave afghanistan, they'll come right back And um, what do we do about that? It's a very thorny question. And I don't know the answers Some of them are kinetic, you know, we kill them and go after them as best we can We capture their computers when we can we try to find out what their networks are Uh, we work together with our, um, two governments and by the way, welcome to washington I hope you're enjoying it and I hope you're finding us to be a good country and good people and um We have to work together and you know, when we find out that sama bin laden's living so close to the military complex, that's a little concerning Uh So what do we do? I mean these are really complex questions that I can't give you answers to and uh Everything that we do has uh, uh You know, it's cause and effect cause and effect back and forth But as much as we can we have to work to root out the terrorists Discredit their ideology Show that uh, muslims are also killed by these groups and that's not correct And uh, work with the kids. I mean provide them hope and a promise of the future so that what the terrorists promise for them isn't appealing Gentlemen over here. Yes, my name is mustapha. I'm director director of shia rights watch My question is that we target in the people who you know, Exploding themselves and going through that duration of the extremists But are we are targeting the leaders who train in those kids and young Generation to be extremists or are we are just following that? group of the young Uneducated people are we are educating those people too that islam is not that you know religion of the terrorist and there is a only sect of this The islam is that training the people to be extremists Thank you Thank you mustapha for your question It's a good one. And uh, I think that the current president, um, obama would tell you that he's got List of the leaders his kill list And that he's going from the top down trying to kill the terrorists that are teaching this ideology promulgating it equipping and funding missions But um, it's a good question about education and that's something that the us sometimes has failed at I know that that um, my husband's a diplomat And he was talking with the usbex and they said, you know, you lost something here when the former soviet union fell apart You should have come and built schools You should have come and been more involved in the universities and education is extremely important In iraq that would be something that we could really be working with and when people are educated They have better futures They know more about the world They have opportunities that they wouldn't have otherwise and when we keep keep people uneducated They can fall prey much more easily to these ideologies. I've always been a believer in I think we should do something like when I was a kid we used to if we ate at mcdonald's and we were in the car I'm ashamed to admit this but our dad told us Ball up your bag and throw it out the window And then we had what's called a litterbug campaign And we all learned that and probably our parents learned that they could get a big fine if you did that And we stopped being litterbugs and in my mind it stuck in my mind Don't be a litterbug. Don't ever throw anything on the ground and We could make campaigns against the the militant shahadi ideology I I think that if we could do it in schools as a preventive just to teach kids This is what the ideology says so many people are afraid of that They're afraid that if you start speaking about it kids will do it. It's just like sex education If you talk about sex education, they'll do it. I don't Believe in that. I believe that if you tell kids the truth and then you say here's the problems with this Kids are smart. They'll understand and we have seen that in the uk. They've done a lot of education on websites In schools and community centers to try to discredit The ideology but keep in mind that the ideology works if it resonates For something in their lives. So if they're living in a life where there's a lot of injustice And uh, it makes sense to them Then it'll find a place in their heart and their soul Hi, my name is Maya Hardiman I'm an intern at the consortium for the study of terrorism and responses to terrorism So one thing that I've been fascinated by is like how we have different responses to different types of extremism So I was really curious about what made you focus on islamic extremism if you thought that it was somehow different Really fundamentally different than other forms of extremism or if you were just narrowing the scope of your investigation Thank you, Maya for your question. Um, I just fell into it I I didn't intend to do this. I went to help with the nordost hostages When I was living in belgium, I had a very good friend who was in mosca who was a ptsd expert We thought we were helping with the hostages the first interview we did She told us about speaking to the woman that had a bomb belt on sitting right next to her And I turned to nadia, uh, tarabrina my research colleague After the interview and said, oh my god nadia, we have two studies here We will look at the hostages and try to help them But no one has ever interviewed a terrorist in an activated state I mean, you know, no one would be crazy enough to do that, but These yeah, maybe maybe I got so crazy and uh, but um They spent three days together and they had long conversations so, um We started on that then I got a chetching colleague We started doing what we called psychological autopsies going backwards over the ones that killed themselves Then I had this crazy student that dragged me to palestine And uh went through the west bank in gaza, then I got a colleague that invited me to morocco Uh, I was asked by um the government if I would go to asbekistan and try to talk to the families of the four girls that had Suicided there The dod invited me to iraq. I went to lebanon because I had a friend there talked to hasballah Oh, I lived in brussel. So when paris was on fire, I decided to uh go down there and then I just thought oh my god You're living in belgium, you know the land of uh, uh, you know some Yes, there was uh, yeah the land of freeds. Thank you and uh And chocolate and beer, but uh, there was a lot going on right in my backyard and I and uh Same thing with going up to the uk. It was easy to take the train So I you know just didn't have the opportunity to talk to any neo nazis but I would have been happy to and I've always been fascinated with abortion clinic bombers after I um worked with one of them I was on a legal case with her And uh, they're fascinating. I you know, I just come got completely fascinated with how they think and What gets them, uh, literally ticking Well, we could have carried this on for much longer dr. Specker. It was really fascinating We don't have a lot of guests who come here and start to say that they were forced to overnight in the homes Or asked to overnight in the homes of terrorists So thank you for this really interesting presentation and the book is on sale outside Thank you And I'll be happy to sign them for you if you like