Stratfor and Renée Zellweger

In this Stratfor article Ben West discusses the September 15th arrest of Adel Daoud, a wanna-be jihadist, in Chicago.

He had planned to detonate an IED outside of a chicago bar, but it turned out that the FBI had been tracking him and that they had provided him with a dummy IED and arrested him as soon as he tried to trigger it.

It is an interesting article. It covers how and why he came to be on the FBI's radar, and the steps they took to ensure that he would have, at best, a weak entrapment case.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, since the arrest took place in Chicago the movie Chicago naturally sprang to mind. After careful consideration, and mindful of the fact I should pick a blonde before Strafor heads back to Asia, Africa, the middle East or Latin America, I selected Renée Zellweger for the singular honor.

Ms Zellweger has had a solid and successful career. I've seen her in a few films and she has an appealing screen presence. She can be considered an A-List actress by today's standards. She's been in film for 20 years already and she's gotten over the hump of age 30 that torpedoes so many actresses, so I expect she'll continue to have success in the film industry.


Aspiring Jihadist Arrested in Chicago
By Ben West, September 20, 2012

On the evening of Sept. 15, Adel Daoud parked a Jeep Cherokee loaded with a large explosive device outside a bar in downtown Chicago. As he walked down the street away from the vehicle, he activated a trigger to detonate the bomb. The bomb, however, was inert, and FBI agents positioned nearby immediately took Daoud, an 18-year-old from the Chicago suburbs, into custody.

Daoud had been the subject of a four-month FBI investigation and sting operation, during which undercover agents had been communicating with Daoud and recording his statements. Sting operations have become the tactic of choice for the FBI and other U.S. law enforcement organizations when investigating would-be jihadists. As U.S. law enforcement agencies perfect their sting operations to identify aspiring jihadists and prevent attacks, jihadists, too, can be expected to innovate and evolve alternate means of communication and vetting of those with whom they collaborate.

Details of Daoud's Case

Daoud was a typical aspirational jihadist. He read Inspire magazine (an online jihadist publication), watched jihadist training videos, cited arguments from the late Anwar al-Awlaki, participated in jihadist forums denouncing U.S. policy and justified attacks against U.S. citizens. He was not shy in voicing his intent to kill Americans in retaliation for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Daoud tried to recruit at least six people over the span of seven months to help plot an attack against the United States before he crossed paths with an undercover agent on the Internet around May 2012. Based on records later obtained by investigators, Daoud did not appear to have any hard skills to conduct a bombing attack. He downloaded several instructional documents and videos on how to make explosives and build bombs, but there is no indication that Daoud attempted to make any weapons himself. Instead, he talked about going to Saudi Arabia or fighting in Yemen, although he expressed a desire to conduct attacks in the United States before going abroad.

By himself, Daoud was still a long way from posing a direct threat to the United States, but he was bent on conducting an attack. Along the way, he made a number of mistakes. For one, it is apparent from Daoud's conversations with the undercover agent, documented in the Sept. 15 criminal complaint, that Daoud did not heed all of the advice that he read in Inspire magazine. Over the years, Inspire has emphasized that big, elaborate attacks are risky, expensive and hard to put together. One of the magazine's main contributors, Nasir al-Wahayshi, has argued that small, simpler attacks such as the Fort Hood shooting in 2009 are much easier to execute, are more effective than bombings and do not open up aspiring jihadists to discovery by the authorities during the planning stage.

Daoud unequivocally rejected the idea of a shooting attack, even mocking the July 20 shooting that killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. Daoud insisted on carrying out a spectacular attack, killing "a lot of enemies" and making headlines worldwide. One of the characteristics of dramatic attacks of the sort Daoud envisioned, however, is that they are difficult to execute alone -- especially if the individual doesn't know how to make explosives or a bomb. Early in Daoud's planning, he saw it necessary to reach out for help, which helped to tip off law enforcement agents.

Rather than immediately arresting Daoud and making a weak case to a federal judge based on an 18-year-old's online rants, investigators continued to monitor Daoud, seeking more evidence to make a stronger case and get a more severe sentence. The FBI set up a sting operation, during which authorities recorded Daoud plotting an attack with an undercover law enforcement agent. The FBI also watched Daoud conduct surveillance on the bar he intended to attack. In a textbook sting operation targeting an aspiring jihadist, an undercover agent offers the suspect an explosive device (or other deadly weapon). As soon as the suspect attempts to use the inert explosive device, authorities have all the evidence they need to charge the suspect with attempt to use a weapon of mass destruction. The FBI has conducted dozens of these sting operations, where it finds an individual who self-identifies as an aspiring jihadist and then uses informants or undercover agents to collect more evidence against the suspect. Many of those put on trial have received 20- to 30-year sentences.

While the government's pursuit of an incompetent, would-be jihadist may seem extreme, individuals like Daoud (known in some law enforcement circles as "Kramer jihadists," after the bumbling character from Seinfeld) have posed a threat before when they have linked up with competent jihadist operatives. For example, the FBI conducted surveillance on the group that would conduct the 1993 World Trade Center attack but dropped the investigation when the informant turned out to be problematic and when it was determined that the group did not possess the skills to pose a threat. Later, the group met Omar Abdel-Rahman (also known as the Blind Sheikh), who arranged for competent jihadist operatives -- Abdul Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef) and his partner, Ahmed Ajaj -- to come in and lead the group of amateur jihadists. Under the leadership of Basit, the group transformed into the terrorist cell that successfully attacked the World Trade Center.

Other jihadist operatives, such as Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, were similarly incompetent but became dangerous when competent bombmakers and operatives exploited their willingness to conduct jihad. Given these past failures, U.S. counterterrorism officials have no appetite for letting aspiring jihadists slip through the cracks just because they appear incompetent on the surface.

Pre-Empting Entrapment

With the investigation under way, the FBI initiated its efforts to dispel any inklings of coercion. Defense attorneys, civil rights groups and some in the media have alleged that FBI sting operations targeting aspiring jihadists are entrapment -- where law enforcement agents coerce an individual who would not otherwise have posed a threat into an illegal act. The FBI's handling of Daoud's case shows that it is taking steps to combat these charges.

Several times during recorded conversations, the FBI undercover agent gave Daoud opportunities to back away from his planned attack. The agent cited Ramadan as a reason to delay the attack and further delayed by fabricating excuses, such as needing to wait for approval from his sheikh. On at least two occasions, the undercover agent directly asked Daoud if he was sure he wanted to carry out his attack. The agent emphasized that Daoud had to have jihad in his heart in order to carry out a justified attack. He stressed that Daoud couldn't be pressured into the attack, that he had to be completely self-motivated to execute it. Any outside help would be just that -- help, not coercion.

As stated above, this step was likely included deliberately. Entrapment has been raised as a possible defense in the upcoming trial of Mohamed Mohamud, the 21-year-old Somali-born American accused of attempting to bomb a Christmas ceremony in Portland, Ore., in November 2010. Even though the entrapment defense hasn't proved to be successful, to avoid a recurrence of this defense in Daoud's case, the undercover agent cleverly used jihadist principles to get Daoud to emphatically show that he wanted to commit an attack himself and that nobody was forcing him to do it. Recordings of these conversations will make for a more solid case when prosecutors put Daoud on trial in the coming weeks or months.

The Effectiveness of the Sting

U.S. law enforcement agencies have been extremely active with these types of jihadist sting operations, especially in the past three years. While most of the suspects that the stings involve do not appear to pose a serious threat at the outset, aspiring jihadists can be dangerous if they encounter the right people with the right tradecraft.

In addition to being an effective law enforcement tactic, sting operations also threaten the integrity of jihadists' communication channels. Such operations will increasingly make aspiring jihadists skeptical of the person to whom they are speaking. In Daoud's case, he told the undercover agent that one of his contacts thought he was talking to a spy. Daoud's sheikh, who was not aware of the planned attack, also repeatedly discouraged him from talking about jihad and violence. Others around him knew the risk of discussing plans of attack, but Daoud persisted due to his inexperience.

U.S. law enforcement's struggle with aspiring jihadists will be a drawn-out affair, punctuated by action and counteraction. The FBI and other U.S. agencies are refining their skills in sting operations, which have proved to be an effective tool for pre-empting terrorist attacks. The success of these stings will plant doubts in aspiring jihadists' minds about who they can trust, further complicating their efforts to conduct dramatic attacks. Now the onus is on the jihadists to adjust. They can be expected to implement alternate methods of communication and to step up efforts to verify one another's identities to avoid detection and arrest.

Aspiring Jihadist Arrested in Chicago is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Stratfor and Judy Holliday

In this Stratfor article Kamran Bokhari discusses the opportunities the deteriorating situation in Syria present to jihadists. The jihadfists have long hoped to seize control of a country around which they can coalesce their dreamed caliphate. However, they've had little luck so far, and in fact their popularity and influence continues to wane.

Should the power vacuum in Syria grow it might present the best chance of Al Qaeda ever gaining control of a country, particularly as it can easily bring in Sunni fighters from Iraq and Lebanon. However, there are a lot of hands stirring the pot in Syria, and so Al Qaeda's chances are probably much less than they hope.

It should be noted that in the article Bokhari is apparently making a distinction between jihadists like Al Qaeda and islamists such as the Moslem Brotherhood. Unfortunately, exactly what that distinction is is not clear from reading just this article. None the less, the article is a good read. Its beginning is excerpted below, and at the end of the excerpt is a link to the full article.

Since the article was speaking of power vacuums at one point, my mind naturally turned to empty headed people, which led to dumb blondes, which led to Judy Holliday's portrayal as the quintessential dumb blonde in the movies Born Yesterday. So, for this article, Judy Holliday earns the much sought after Hot Stratfor Babe award. 

In the film she plays the dimwitted girlfriend of a loutish business tycoon who's gone to Washington to bribe politicians and what-not. He gets fed up with what a dope she is so he hires a tutor to tech her more sophisticated manners. Naturally, she turns out not to be a dumb as she seemed and, after falling in love with the tutor, she outsmarts the tycoon and runs off with the tutor.

Ms Holliday started her career on Broadway and made a successful move to starring in films because of her role in the Broadway version of Born Yesterday. Judy Holliday also had a brush with the real Washington when she was subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee investigating communists influences among the performing arts. She managed to escape a full blacklisting, but she had dodgy enough connections that she did get blacklisted from television and radio.

Sadly, she had a short career, dying at the young age of 48 due to breast cancer.


Jihadist Opportunities in Syria
By Kamran Bokhari, February 14, 2012

In an eight-minute video clip titled "Onward, Lions of Syria" disseminated on the Internet Feb. 12, al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri expressed al Qaeda's support for the popular unrest in Syria. In it, al-Zawahiri urged Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to aid the Syrian rebels battling Damascus. The statement comes just days after a McClatchy report quoted unnamed American intelligence officials as saying that the Iraqi node of the global jihadist network carried out two attacks against Syrian intelligence facilities in Damascus, while Iraqi Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Assadi said in a recent interview with AFP that Iraqi jihadists were moving fighters and weapons into neighboring Syria.

Al Qaeda's long-term goal has been to oust Arab governments to facilitate the return of a transnational caliphate. Its tactics have involved mainly terrorism intended to cause U.S. intervention in the region. Al Qaeda has hoped such interventions would in turn incite popular uprisings that would bring down the Arab regimes, opening the way for the jihadists to eventually take power. But the jihadist network's efforts have failed and they have remained a marginal player in the Arab world. By addressing Syria, al Qaeda hopes to tap into the past year of Arab unrest, a movement in which it played little to no part.

The region's regimes have been on the defensive due to the rise of political Islamism, growing public disillusionment and the sectarian Sunni-Shiite split, though foreign military intervention has been required to actually topple them, as we saw in Libya. Growing uncertainty in the region and the gradual weakening of these regimes gives jihadists an opportunity to reassert their relevance. Al-Zawahiri's statement, however, represents a continuation of the central leadership's inability to do more than issue taped statements from its Pakistani hideouts, much less engage in strategic planning.

Jihadists and the Middle East Unrest

Al Qaeda's extreme transnational agenda always has had limited appeal to the Arab masses. Popular unrest in Arab countries and the empowerment of political Islamists via elections in Egypt and Tunisia have underscored the jihadists' irrelevance to societies in the Islamic world. The jihadists have failed to oust a sitting government anywhere in the Islamic world, even in Afghanistan, where the Taliban's rise to power in the mid-1990s occurred in a power vacuum. Recognizing their limitations, jihadists have focused on conducting attacks intended to create crises within target countries and in those countries' external relations -- as is the case in Pakistan and Yemen. The jihadist hope has been to create enough disorder that they would eventually be able to seize power.

This approach has proved difficult because Arab governments (despite their weaknesses) have been resilient and societal fragmentation has not worked to the advantage of jihadists. A second option has been to try to take advantage of power vacuums that were created by other forces. Iraq presented one such opportunity when U.S. forces ousted the Baathist regime in 2003, allowing for the emergence of al Qaeda's then-most active node. In Iraq, the country's Shiite majority posed a daunting obstacle to the jihadists even before the jihadists alienated their Iraqi Sunni allies to the point that they began siding with the Americans, which led to a degradation of the jihadist network in Iraq. By contrast, post-Gadhafi Libya, with its proliferation of militias -- some of which have both Islamist and jihadist tendencies -- could become a more welcoming place for jihadists. But even if Libya were to descend into Islamist militancy, geography would most likely prevent it from spreading too far beyond Libya's borders.

However, given Syria's strategic location at the crossroads of so many key geopolitical fault lines, the meltdown of the Syrian state could easily result in a regional conflict. Most stakeholders oppose foreign military intervention in Syria for this very reason. Many states are eyeing the strategic goal of weakening Iran geopolitically through the ouster of the Alawite regime in Syria, but even that prospect may not be enough to offset the potential costs.

Jihadists' Prospects in Syria

With or without foreign intervention, jihadists in the region have ample room for maneuver in Syria. The most significant regional jihadist presence lies across the Syrian border in Iraq. These forces benefited from Damascus' decision to back Sunni insurgents from 2003 to 2007. The consolidation of Shiite power in Iraq greatly weakened these forces. Now that Syria is unraveling and armed resistance to the regime is shaping up, the jihadist flow is reversing direction, with jihadists now entering Syria from Iraq.

Read the rest of Jihadist Opportunities in Syria at Stratfor.

Stratfor and Jolene Blalock

This Stratfor article discusses the recent home grown jihadist plot, that was interrupted when the FBI arrested the conspirators, to attack a U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station located in Seattle. The station was a soft military target, and the plan was to attack it with automatic weapons and grenades, killing as many recruits and staff as possible before being overwhelmed by responders.

The article discusses a possible shift from civilian to military targets. While hardened military targets are difficult to attack, there is none the less a debate within jihadist circles to to shift away from attacking much more exposed civilian targets like subways, mall and hotels to attacks against the military. 

This change in strategy, coupled with the move away from IEDs to small arm attacks, would mean that these attacks would likely be against recruiting stations and troops in transit. It is too early to tell if there really is a shift in strategy, but there are indications that it is being hotly debated.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, since soldiers are the targets and it may be a future trend, I decided to look to future female soldiers as the pool to choose the Hot Stratfor Babe from. After my usual in-depth search I selected Jolene Blalock, who played the insect battling pilot, Captain Lola Beck in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.  

I've never seen the film. While I thought the first Starship Troopers movie was OK, a lot of people hated it with a burning passion. Regardless, Marauder is the third film in the series and so I'm guessing, based on the general geometric decline in quality sequels suffer from, that it isn't a very good movie. 

After the article I've included a clip from Starship Troopers 3: Marauder where they discuss Bug Religion. I must say, as a fan of B Movies, the ridiculous dialog about Bug Gods appealed to me. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for this movie showing up on TV.


THE SEATTLE PLOT: JIHADISTS SHIFTING AWAY FROM CIVILIAN TARGETS?
By Scott Stewart, June 30, 2011

On June 22 in a Seattle warehouse, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif pulled an unloaded M16 rifle to his shoulder, aimed it, and pulled the trigger repeatedly as he imagined himself gunning down young U.S. military recruits. His longtime friend Walli Mujahidh did likewise with an identical rifle, assuming a kneeling position as he engaged his notional targets. The two men had come to the warehouse with another man to inspect the firearms the latter had purchased with money Abdul-Latif had provided him. The rifles and a small number of hand grenades were to be used in an upcoming mission: an attack on a U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in an industrial area south of downtown Seattle.

After confirming that the rifles were capable of automatic fire and discussing the capacity of the magazines they had purchased, the men placed the rifles back into a storage bag intending to transport them to a temporary cache location. As they prepared to leave the warehouse, they were suddenly swarmed by a large number of FBI agents and other law enforcement officers and quickly arrested. Their plan to conduct a terrorist attack inside the United States had been discovered when the man they had invited to join their plot (the man who had allegedly purchased the weapons for them) reported the plot to the Seattle Police Department, which in turn reported it to the FBI. According to the federal criminal complaint filed in the case, the third unidentified man had an extensive criminal record and had known Abdul-Latif for several years, but he had not been willing to undertake such a terrorist attack.

While the behavior of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in this plot demonstrates that they were amateur "wannabe" jihadists rather than seasoned terrorist operatives, their plot could have ended very differently if they had found a kindred spirit in the man they approached for help instead of someone who turned them into the authorities. This case also illustrates some important trends in jihadist terrorism that we have been watching for the past few years as well as a possible shift in mindset within the jihadist movement.

Trends

First, Abu-Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, both American converts to Islam, are prime examples of what we refer to as grassroots jihadists. They are individuals who were inspired by the al Qaeda movement but who had no known connection to the al Qaeda core or one of its franchise groups. In late 2009, in response to the success of the U.S. government and its allies in preventing jihadist attacks in the West, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) began a campaign to encourage jihadists living in the West to conduct simple attacks using readily available items, rather than travel abroad for military and terrorism training with jihadist groups. After successes such as the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting, this theme of encouraging grassroots attacks was adopted by the core al Qaeda group.

While the grassroots approach does present a challenge to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in that attackers can seemingly appear out of nowhere with no prior warning, the paradox presented by grassroots operatives is that they are also far less skilled than trained terrorist operatives. In other words, while they are hard to detect, they frequently lack the skill to conduct large, complex attacks and frequently make mistakes that expose them to detection in smaller plots.

And that is what we saw in the Seattle plot. Abdul-Latif had originally wanted to hit U.S. Joint Base Lewis-McChord (formerly known as Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base), which is located some 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Seattle, but later decided against that plan since he considered the military base to be too hardened a target. While Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were amateurs, they seem to have reached a reasonable assessment of their own abilities and which targets were beyond their abilities to strike. [continued after jump]