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"Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat" - NYPD Report
They grew beards, gave up women and booze, surfed the Web for radical Islamic sites and turned their back on American pop culture. All red flags, according to a new NYPD analysis that details how otherwise "unremarkable" young Muslim men morph from middle-class nobodies with no criminal records into homegrown terrorists, posing a threat as dangerous as that from Al Qaeda.The NYPD's report - "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat" - is a 90-page road map to jihad based on the actions of about 100 extremists and 11 terror plots. The analysis was created by the NYPD's Intelligence Division to help law enforcement authorities identify terrorists and prevent attacks. The warning signs include becoming more religious, growing a beard, taking part in activities like paint-ball war games and expressing significant dissatisfaction with the U.S. As the individuals follow the destructive path, they start hanging out with like-minded extremists in back rooms of bookstores, isolated corners of prayer rooms, Islamic community centers and Muslim student associations, rather than traditional mosques, the report says. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the primary motivation behind the assessment was to determine: "Were there any early-warning signs?" "Hopefully, the better we're informed about this process, the more likely we'll be to detect and disrupt it," Kelly said. NYPD Assistant Commissioner for Intelligence Lawrence Sanchez described the report as "a guide to know what to look for, what to watch for and how to interpret what you see. It is a start, a way to a look at a series of benign activities, to try to decide what is really benign and what is virulent." The experts found that direct command from Al Qaeda is the exception, not the rule. The NYPD traced how legal immigrants - mostly Muslim men, ages 15 to 35, with high school or even college degrees - grew disillusioned with life in America or other adopted countries and took up radical Islam that put them on the path to jihad. NYPD analysts charted how the London bombers in July 2005 devolved from second-generation Brits who loved soccer, cricket and gambling into jihadists willing to travel to Pakistan for military and explosives training. They cut ties with their families and exchanged less radical mosques for hard-core coffee klatsches led by sympathizers with an often dubious grasp of the Koran, the report found. "For detectives, they can now look at a series of signals and see if there is a pattern," said Mitchell Silber, the NYPD's senior intelligence analyst and a co-author of the report. "They notice a group of young men are no longer attending a certain mosque. They might interpret that as a good thing. But a signature, or a red flag, is that jihadists leave a mosque because it is not radical enough, and go and meet in someone's apartment." Posted by: Seafarious 2008-04-07 |
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