the cia finally agrees with me

(even if it's only a former one of em) - These “new terrorists ... really cannot be targeted by bombs,” he warned. “This requires a different type of war - an idea-based solution ... we really haven’t engaged it yet."


Former CIA officer rejects conventional view of terrorism

WASHINGTON: A CIA officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan says the theory that terrorists are poor, angry and fanatically religious is a myth.

According to Marc Sageman, now a Pennsylvania professor and author of a new book on terrorism, of the 400 members of terrorist networks from North Africa, the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia that he studies, 75 percent came from upper or middle-class backgrounds and most also from “caring, intact” families. Sixty percent were college educated and 75 percent could be considered professional or semi-professional. Seventy percent were married and most had children. Only half came from a religious background, and a large group raised in North Africa or France grew up in entirely secular communities, which “refutes the notion of culture, often cited as a factor encouraging terrorism.

He told a meeting here last month, says a report in the Washington Times Monday, the idea that terrorists were “inherently evil” was false. “None of these guys, really, are evil -though their acts definitely were.” Neither are they mentally ill, he said. Of those studied, he said, only one percent had hints of psychological disorders - the same as the world base rate. “Most of (them) were the elite of the country,” he added.

Many, his study showed, were sent abroad to study, became lonely and isolated from their communities and cultures, and sought friends among people like themselves. They often found them in groups based around mosques, even if they had little previous interest in religion.

Seventy percent joined a jihadi group while away from their country of origin, Mr Sageman said, and a further 20 percent were second-generation immigrants. Sixty-eight percent had friends in the jihad and an additional 20 percent had close relatives who were already members. He described the fledgling terrorist at this stage as someone who feels excluded from society and resents this. The mosque provides reasoning to this emotional process: “Society is corrupt, cruel, infected by Western values.”

He said this is where the notion of the Salafi comes in. He called the Salafi movement inherently a peaceful social movement, with about 30 million followers worldwide. He pointed out that more than half of the terrorists in his sample worshipped at only 10 mosques worldwide. Salafis, he explained, generally advocate the formation of a model Islamic society “based on fairness and justice” by non-violent means. But there is a violent strand, he added. This violent group develops “in-group love and out-group hate. It sees those standing in the way of the true Islamic community as “infidels who, according to distorted interpretations of the Quran, can justifiably be killed. Targets include Arab leaders viewed as oppressive or corrupt, such as the Saudi royal family, and, particularly in the case of networks such as Al Qaeda, the “far enemy,” or those Western countries seen to be aiding such leaders, chiefly the United States.

The Washington Times report quoted Mr Sageman as saying that the social movement of the Salafi jihad developed over three stages - the first being in Afghanistan during the Soviet war. He rejected the widely-held view that the CIA “created” Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but conceded that “we encouraged indirectly the rise of an Islamist movement ... (and) transformed ... local insurgents against their own governments ... and made (the movement) global over time.” Many foreign fighters were unable to return home after the war in Afghanistan, he added, for political or criminal reasons. In 1991, they were expelled from Pakistan to the Sudan, where they became radicalised. After five years, the most militant returned to Afghanistan, he said, where Bin Laden was setting up his training camps. Within two months, Bin Laden had issued his first fatwa against the West.

According to Mr Sageman, since the attacks of 9/11, terrorist networks have mutated. Although Bin Laden did for some years have fairly strict control over his organisation, there are now “smaller, decentralised clusters of friends ... disparate organisations coming together with little in the way of instructions from the top, apart from broad ideologies”. These are, he said, “self-organising, bottom-up social movements ... even more dangerous than a top-down organisation because they can’t be decapitated. He rejected the common perception of how terrorists were recruited, saying, “They can generate without the need to recruit.” Instead, he said, the movement is “very much dependent on volunteering with “only 15 to 20 percent accepted to Al Qaeda”. He said it was “almost trivial” to arrest terrorists acting right now, against preventing the next generation. Although we must, he stressed, “eliminate the immediate and present threat to the US and the West, much of our focus needs to be on the war of ideas. Our military options have run out,” he said. “We have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot.” “Much of the anger is because of the run-up to Iraq, the occupation of Iraq. The way we’ve handled the Israel-Palestine issue has not played well in the Muslim world. We need to appear much fairer and just in our dealings with both sides than we have been in the last few years.

Mr Sageman said “terrorism is on the way up”, and although in 2001, two-thirds of the its leadership was killed, but this year, the leadership had reconstituted itself and is “willing to take far more risks than the old leadership was able to. These “new terrorists ... really cannot be targeted by bombs,” he warned. “This requires a different type of war - an idea-based solution ... we really haven’t engaged it yet."