Terrorists aren’t all alike: expert

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/06/2015 (4060 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you were surprised initially someone such as Aaron Driver, who grew up in a Canadian military family and now lives in our midst, ended up becoming an outspoken supporter of the Islamic State, permit me to introduce an authority on the subject.

Michael German is an expert in terrorist-group behaviour, a former counter-terrorism instructor at the FBI National Academy, former legal counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union and now a law school fellow. He’s also the author of Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent.

Impressed? I was.

The website GlobalSecurity.org offers equally as impressive detail on Michael German’s career as an FBI special agent.

“In the early 1990s, Mike successfully infiltrated white supremacist groups in Los Angeles that were engaged in a bombing campaign against racial minorities and stockpiling weapons in preparation for a race war. In the late 1990s, after the Oklahoma City bombing, he again went undercover against right-wing militia groups that were conspiring to harm federal agents. Both cases disrupted multiple terrorist cells, leading to criminal convictions that prevented terrorist acts. Mike’s undercover work gave him unique insights into the way terrorist groups organize, recruit and operate.”

And so it was that earlier this week I contacted German in his office at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

I wanted to know: who are the Aaron Drivers of this world?

What’s the profile of these kids?

“They’re not all kids,” German said.

He believes government studies on the subject are often skewed, and he offered an example.

“If you wanted to try to understand the profile of an FBI employee and you included the director of the FBI and the FBI employee who works on the cars in the garage, obviously these two are very different types. As is the brand-new recruit, as is the file clerk.

The idea that there would be one profile that fits everyone in a law enforcement group, he suggested, is ludicrous.

“But with terrorism that’s what we do? We throw Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta (the 9/11 ringleader and hijacker) and Anwar al-Awlaki (the American-born al-Qaida recruiter), and the knucklehead with the axe in New York City all into a big pile and, ‘let’s try to distill what makes someone a terrorist.’ “

They’re all different, German contends.

“Osama bin Laden isn’t the type of person to fly a plane into a building. And the guy with the axe probably couldn’t spell airplane much less get into one and fly it.”

Then there were the studies and the one school of thought back when German was doing undercover work that contended terrorists were mentally ill.

“And what they discovered through empirical studies was there was no mental-illness condition that’s prevalent among terrorists. But rather than abandon that and say, ‘OK, this has to be understood in the context of the wider conflicts,’ they instead came up with this idea of radicalization. Which is just another way of saying they’re crazy.”

And then, to further confuse the profiling process, German noted this: “There have been black people in white supremacist organizations.”

So what does that say about profiling terrorists. “There are no profiles.”

Basically, he believes, it’s beyond explanation. “But what we have to be careful about is making sure we’re talking about the violent extreme, rather than the ideology writ large. Because there are far more people who have those ideologies than commit violence.”

Which brought me to Aaron Driver, the 23-year-old online supporter of IS arrested earlier this month without criminal charges under Canada’s anti-terrorism law and released with stringent bail conditions imposed because of his views.

Unfortunately, German suggested, Canada appears to be following America’s misguided footsteps.

“Here in the United States we’ve seen this abuse of material support laws where it’s not really targeting people who are supporting terrorism but rather people who are supporting political causes where there is a terrorism element to that conflict.”

German was reluctant to offer more insight about the Driver case because, being a former law enforcement officer himself, he knows the RCMP and CSIS know more about the case than the information he gets through the media.

But there is something we do know about Driver that I thought German might find interesting, given the former FBI agent’s view of profiling terrorists and their supporters: Aaron Driver grew up in a military family.

Because so did Michael German.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca