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RADICALIZATION IN THE U.S. AND THE RISE OF 

TERRORISM 

JOINT HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY 

AND THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT 

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016 

Serial No. 114–163 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov 

http://www.house.gov/reform 


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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM 

JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah, Chairman 

JOHN L. MICA, Florida 

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio 

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee 

JIM JORDAN, Ohio 

TIM WALBERG, Michigan 

JUSTIN AMASH, Michigan 

PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona 

SCOTT DESJARLAIS, Tennessee 

TREY GOWDY, South Carolina 

BLAKE FARENTHOLD, Texas 

CYNTHIA M. LUMMIS, Wyoming 

THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky 

MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina 

RON DESANTIS, Florida 

MICK MULVANEY, South Carolina 

KEN BUCK, Colorado 

MARK WALKER, North Carolina 

ROD BLUM, Iowa 

JODY B. HICE, Georgia 

STEVE RUSSELL, Oklahoma 

EARL L. ‘‘BUDDY’’ CARTER, Georgia 

GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin 

WILL HURD, Texas 

GARY J. PALMER, Alabama 

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland, Ranking 

Minority Member 

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York 

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of 

Columbia 

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri 

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia 

TAMMY DUCKWORTH, Illinois 

ROBIN L. KELLY, Illinois 

BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan 

TED LIEU, California 

BONNIE WATSON COLEMAN, New Jersey 

STACEY E. PLASKETT, Virgin Islands 

MARK DESAULNIER, California 

BRENDAN F. BOYLE, Pennsylvania 

PETER WELCH, Vermont 

MICHELLE LUJAN GRISHAM, New Mexico 

JENNIFER HEMINGWAY, Staff Director 

ANDREW DOCKHAM, General Counsel 

DIMPLE SHAH, National Security Subcommittee Staff Director 

SHARON CASEY, Deputy Chief Clerk 

DAVID RAPALLO, Minority Staff Director 


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SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY

RON DESANTIS, Florida, Chairman 

JOHN L. MICA, Florida 

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee 

JODY B. HICE, Georgia 

STEVE RUSSELL, Oklahoma, Vice Chair 

WILL HURD, Texas 

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts, 

Ranking Member 

ROBIN KELLY, Illinois 

BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan 

TED LIEU, California 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS

MARK MEADOWS, North Carolina, Chairman 

JIM JORDAN, Ohio 

TIM WALBERG, Michigan, Vice Chair 

TREY GOWDY, South Carolina 

THOMAS MASSIE, Kentucky 

MICK MULVANEY, South Carolina 

KEN BUCK, Colorado 

EARL L. ‘‘BUDDY’’ CARTER, Georgia 

GLENN GROTHMAN, Wisconsin 

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia, Ranking 

Minority Member 

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York 

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of 

Columbia 

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri 

STACEY E. PLASKETT, Virgin Islands 

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts 


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C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Hearing held on September 14, 2016 ..................................................................... 1 

WITNESSES 

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Ph.D, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of 

Democracies 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 6 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 9 

Mr. Matt A. Mayer, Visiting Fellow, Homeland Security Studies, American 

Enterprise Institute 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 21 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 23 

Mr. David Inserra, Policy Analyst, Foreign and National Security Policy, 

The Heritage Foundation 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 27 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 29 

Mr. Richard Cohen, President, Southern Poverty law Center 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 37 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 39 

APPENDIX 

March 2014 Journal Forensic Sciences ‘‘Bombing Alone’’ submitted by Mr. 

Hice ....................................................................................................................... 64 

Articles submitted by Mr. DeSantis: 

Counterpunch ‘‘King of the Hate Business’’ May 15, 2009 .................................. 74 

Second Class Justice ‘‘Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center’’ 

Sept 9, 2012 .......................................................................................................... 77 

CNN ‘‘Prosecutors Say’’ July 2, 2013 ..................................................................... 83 

Foreign Policy ‘‘The Hate List’’ March 12, 2013 ................................................... 86 

National Review ‘‘The SPLC and Slant’’ March 15, 2013 .................................... 91 

Weekly Standard ‘‘King of Fearmongers’’ April 4, 2013 ....................................... 93 

Weekly Standard ‘‘Another Killer Cites the Southern Poverty Law Center’’ 

Feb 11, 2015 ......................................................................................................... 110 


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RADICALIZATION IN THE U.S. AND THE RISE 

OF TERRORISM 

Wednesday, September 14, 2016 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, JOINT WITH THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS, COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, D.C. 

The subcommittees met, pursuant to call, at 2:22 p.m., in Room 

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ron DeSantis [chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security] presiding. 

Present from the Subcommittee on National Security: Representatives DeSantis, Mica, Duncan, Hice, Hurd, and Lynch. 

Present from the Subcommittee on Government Operations: Representatives Meadows, Carter, Grothman, Connolly, Maloney, and 

Plaskett. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The Subcommittee on National Security and the 

Subcommittee on Government Operations will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess at any 

time. 

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed 49 people and injured another 53 in an attack on a nightclub in Orlando. The shooter made 

three calls to 911 during the attack. According to FBI Director 

James Comey, Mateen dedicated his attack to the Islamic State 

and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. During the calls, Mateen 

also expressed admiration for the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston 

Marathon bombers, as well as a Florida suicide bomber for the alNusrah Front, a group that engages in terrorism in Syria. 

While some, such as Attorney General Loretta Lynch, were unsure about Mateen’s motivations, the evidence points in only one 

direction: He killed in support of a terrorist ideology. 

Prior to the shooting, Mateen was investigated by the FBI. That 

investigation, which began in May of 2013, was more than just an 

inquiry. The FBI interviewed him twice, dispatched an informant 

to get close to him, conducted surveillance of his movements, and 

scrutinized his communications. 

Ten months later the investigation was closed. Agents concluded 

that Mateen was not a threat and had broken no laws. He was put 

on a watch list during his investigation, but once the investigation 

was closed, he was removed from the list. 

Two months after that investigation concluded, Mateen again 

came onto the FBI’s radar when Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, a 

Florida man who attended the same mosque as Mateen, blew himself up as a suicide bomber for the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusrah 


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Front in Syria. And he had gone to Syria previously, trained, came 

back to Florida undetected, went back to commit that attack. 

The second investigation apparently ended when the FBI could 

find no connection of consequence between Mateen and the suicide 

bomber. 

Although the FBI’s own investigation of its handling of the 

Mateen case is ongoing, there have been no suggestions that the 

Bureau handled the Mateen case any differently than the thousands of other terrorist leads that it receives annually. 

Now, both Al Qaeda’s global network, as well as the Islamic 

State, among several other terrorist networks around the world, 

promote a global jihadist ideology. As the Congressional Research 

Service has found, these terrorists use, quote, ‘‘Islam as an ideological and/or religious justification for their belief in the establishment of a global caliphate, a jurisdiction governed by a Muslim 

civil and religious leader known as the caliph, via violent means,’’ 

end quote. 

This committee began to look at the issue of radicalization by 

ISIS and other terrorist groups on October 28, 2015, when we held 

a hearing entitled ‘‘Radicalization: Social Media and the Rise of 

Terrorism.’’ 

The Orlando attack underscores the importance of the committee’s investigation into the ways terrorists in the United States become radicalized. This investigation is relevant to protecting the 

public from future attacks. 

Now, the June 12 attack in Orlando, the July 14 attack in Nice, 

France, and other recent terrorist attacks in the United States and 

abroad, committed by radicalized Islamic extremists target 

unsuspecting populations in vulnerable public places, represents 

the prevailing template for terrorist attacks. In just the last 7 

months, attacks in Orlando, Nice, Brussels, San Bernardino, and 

Paris revealed that ISIS has become successful at using our country’s own population against itself. 

Indeed, recent reports indicate that since 2011, over 30,000 people from over 100 different countries have traveled to the conflict 

zone in Syria and Iraq to join the fighting there. This group includes over 4,500 Westerners and over 250 Americans, all of whom 

have joined or attempted to join extremist groups in an effort to 

wage jihad. 

Recent terrorist attacks have also shown that so-called lone wolf 

terrorism has become a growing concern for government and law 

enforcement agencies in the United States. Individual terrorists 

have proven capable of committing a wide range of violent attacks, 

even though those individuals had no formal connection to terrorist 

groups. These have included mass shootings, bombings, assassinations. 

The unprecedented speed with which such individuals are being 

radicalized by violent Islamic extremists is difficult for law enforcement to track and is straining the ability of government to monitor 

and intercept suspects. Part of this may have to do with the very 

technological advances that have otherwise improved our way of 

life. 

Research has shown that since the terrorist attacks of September 

11, the preferred method for recruiting radicals had changed. BeVerDate Nov 24 2008 11:20 Jul 17, 2017 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00008 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\26122.TXT APRIL

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fore 9/11, the Internet contributed to only 3 percent of all 

radicalizations, but as of 2014, it contributed to roughly 20 percent. 

The evolution of radical movements may also play a role in the 

speed by which potential terrorists become radicalized. Today, only 

42 percent of radicals identify with a specific terrorist organization, 

compared to 63 percent between the 1960s and 1990s. 

The long-term trend towards so-called lone wolf terrorism makes 

it challenging to stop terrorist attacks before they occur. Authorities have had far more success penetrating plots concocted by several different people than by individuals who simply choose to act 

on their own. U.S. policies regarding intelligence, military operations, and immigration should reflect this new reality. 

I thank our witnesses for their testimony today as it is important 

that we continue to examine the issue related to radicalization by 

Islamic extremists and what can be done to combat this growing 

problem. 

And I now recognize the ranking member of the Subcommittee 

on National Security, Mr. Lynch, for his opening statement. 

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to 

thank yourself and Chairman Meadows and Ranking Member 

Connolly for holding this hearing to examine the threat of extremism and radicalization, especially of the homegrown ilk. And I 

would also like to thank today’s expert witnesses for helping the 

committee with its work. 

As reported by the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve last month, the U.S.-led coalition to combat ISIS has 

killed at least 45,000 ISIS fighters since September of 2014 and liberated about 25,000 square kilometers in Iraq and Syria. This 

amounts to more than half of what ISIS previously controlled in 

Iraq and roughly 20 percent of formerly held territory in Syria. 

According to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the terrorist organization is also on the verge of losing its regional stronghold in 

Libya as its fighters retreat from their tactical center in the city 

of Sirte. 

It is clear that the battlefield losses have degraded ISIS to some 

degree and their ability to maintain offensive operations on the 

ground in Iraq and Syria and Libya and recruit other U.S. and foreign fighters to the region. However, the facts on the ground have 

also led the group to shift its militant strategy towards directing 

and inspiring terrorist attacks in the West. 

FBI Director James Comey recent predicted that while the global 

coalition will eventually crush ISIS, and I quote him here, 

‘‘Through the fingers of that crush are going to come hundreds of 

really dangerous people,’’ close quote, intent on bringing the fight 

to Western Europe and the United States. He has also noted that 

the FBI is tracking nearly 800 ISIS-related cases across our country. That is 80 percent of all the FBI cases nationwide. 

This strategic shift has already manifested itself in an escalation 

of ISIS-directed or ISIS-inspired attacks in Western countries and 

worldwide. These include the coordinated suicide bombings and 

shootings in Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, and Ankara, as well the 

cargo truck attack in Nice, France, the cafe attack in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and in the United States, the terrorist attacks in San 

Bernardino and Orlando. 


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The June 20, 2016, attack in Orlando is also the most recent example of the rising threat of homegrown violent extremism in the 

U.S. that has accompanied ISIS’ continued calls for lone wolf attacks. As reflected in the 911 transcript released by the FBI, the 

Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, repeatedly pledged his allegiance 

to ISIS while he perpetrated the attack, and one day later ISIS 

issued a statement deeming Mateen one of the soldiers of the caliphate. 

Given the grave threat posed by homegrown violent extremism, 

national security demands that we work in a bipartisan manner to 

adopt practical reforms based on the lessons learned from Orlando, 

San Bernardino, and other attacks. 

Since 9/11, the FBI has primarily focused its counterterrorism efforts on disrupting terrorist networks. However, the facts surrounding Orlando indicate that we must also ensure that Federal 

law enforcement and Homeland Security agencies are adapting to 

the prevalence of lone wolf attacks that are inspired to be conducted by foreign terrorist organizations. 

I would note that the FBI previously investigated Mr. Mateen on 

radicalization grounds, as the chairman noted, on two separate occasions and even placed him on a terrorist watch list. He did not, 

however, remain on the agency’s radar given the absence of any, 

quote, ‘‘ties of consequence,’’ close quote. 

Now, common sense also dictates that we address the accessibility of firearms to individuals who are known or suspected terrorists. While Federal law specifies several grounds to disqualify a potential buyer from firearms eligibility, being on a terrorist watch 

list is not currently one of those. 

Moreover, we must continue to develop a long-term and comprehensive strategy to counter the pervasiveness of extremism and 

their messaging, abroad and at home. And as recommended by Ms. 

Farah Pandith, appointed by Secretary Clinton in 2009 to serve as 

the first State Department Special Representative to Muslim Communities, future actions designed to combat radicalization and 

homegrown violent extremism should include diplomatic and economic consequences for foreign nations that support the exportation of extremist ideologies. They must also include coordinated 

and proactive efforts to push back against extremist propaganda 

online. 

I want to thank you again, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to examining issues related to the homegrown violent extremism in our 

country and other forms of radicalization with our witnesses. And 

I yield back the balance of our time. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman yields back. 

I now recognize Mr. Meadows, chairman of the Subcommittee on 

Government Operations, for his opening statement. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I thank you and 

the Ranking Member, Mr. Lynch, for your leadership in making 

sure that this hearing happened. 

Good afternoon. Welcome to all of the witnesses. 

I would like to first begin by offering not only my thoughts, but 

my prayers for the victims and families that we lost in this summer’s string of terror attacks throughout the world, specifically this 

June. As we all know now, in Orlando the event cut short nearly 


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50 innocent lives, which was the worst attack on American soil 

since 9/11. And I will continue to pray and encourage others to continue to pray for those who grieve, and pray for those who were injured for a complete recovery. 

We must remain vigilant, however, and remember that an act of 

terrorism by radical Islamic extremism and extremists like what 

happened in Orlando could have happened anywhere in the United 

States, including my home State of North Carolina. The Americans 

that have been radicalized as part of an Islamic extremist movement do not fit necessarily any sort of a demographic model. It is 

seemingly random in nature. 

And the attacks that are made up from this homegrown violent 

extremist group are especially challenging for our law enforcement 

officers. In fact, the attacks in Orlando were carried out by a lone 

wolf terrorist who had already been investigated by the FBI. And 

so it shows the complexity of what we are dealing with. 

Today’s hearing will examine ways in which we can give our law 

enforcement agencies and communities the tools that they need to 

prevent this lone wolf radicalization before it starts. 

I might add that at times we continue to talk about lone wolf, 

but, indeed, they are not necessarily lone wolves, because they are 

connected to someone, somewhere who assists them in carrying 

this out. Indeed, anyone with a smartphone has the potential to become radicalized. Jihadists have been able to exploit the Internet 

as a medium for recruitment and the dissemination of propaganda 

and communication, and our witnesses hopefully will provide insight into how the Internet can provide an opportunity for our law 

enforcement and intelligence community to be able to identify these 

potential lone wolf actors and intercept terror plots and to counter 

the extremist message that is flooded, literally flooded, through social media by radical Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS. 

This hearing will also be able to examine the strategies that both 

law enforcement and the administration can undertake to address 

the growing threat of radicalized Americans returning to the U.S. 

as foreign fighters. This threat from the foreign fighters cannot be 

overstated. And as we look at that, the devastating attacks this 

past November in Paris were carried out by a French national who, 

indeed, had been trained with ISIS in Syria and then returned to 

France. And a few months later, in March of this year, foreign 

fighters from the same ISIS cell as the Paris attackers carried out 

a series of bombings in Brussels in what would be the deadliest act 

of terrorist in Belgium’s history. 

So I look forward to hearing from each one of our witnesses 

today on how the United States can best address this radicalization 

of homegrown violent extremists and the unpredictability of lone 

wolf attacks and the rising threat of foreign fighters. 

And finally, pray for our law enforcement officers who have a 

target on their back, indeed, each and every day. And I would like 

to thank you, and I thank the chairman for his leadership on this 

as you come and testify on this critical matter. 

I yield back. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman yields back. 

I will hold the record open for 5 legislative days for any members 

who would like to submit a written statement. 


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We will now recognize our panel of witnesses. I am pleased to 

welcome Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Mr. Matt Mayer, visiting fellow of 

homeland security studies at the American Enterprise Institute; 

Mr. David Inserra, policy analyst of foreign and national security 

policy at the Heritage Foundation; and Mr. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Welcome to you all. 

Pursuant to committee rules, all witnesses will be sworn in before they testify. If you can please rise and raise your right hand. 

Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to give 

will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so 

help you God. Thank you. Please be seated. 

All witnesses answered in the affirmative. 

In order to allow time for discussion, please limit your oral testimony to 5 minutes. Your entire written statement will be made 

part of the record. 

Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, you are up. 

WITNESS STATEMENTS 

STATEMENT OF DAVEED GARTENSTEIN–ROSS 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank 

you all for holding this important hearing on this topic. 

Terrorism today is not what it was even 5 years ago. It is a much 

deeper problem and a much more complex problem than it used to 

be. Chairman DeSantis spoke of technology as being one of the key 

factors. I agree with this. We are living in a world that is more 

interconnected, especially through social media. We are living in a 

world with much moreencryption and where much more is dark to 

law enforcement than it used to be, and where networks can become demonstrably thicker, even in Western countries, than they 

were before. 

When we look at the scale of the problem, it is clear that terrorism is growing across multiple ideologies. ISIS is, of course, omnipresent in our statements, as it should be. I think that jihadist 

terrorism is the biggest threat we face today. But when we look beyond it to sovereign citizens, White nationalism, Black nationalist 

groups, it is very clear that we are seeing a rise in substate violence where some of the same external factors are helping to drive 

violence across all these ideologies. 

Looking at ISIS alone, we have had already, just since the caliphate was announced in 2014, over 100 arrests of members; we 

have law enforcement cases at the Federal level in all 50 States; 

more than 250 Americans as of the end of last year who had either 

tried to go to Syria to join this extremist group or who succeeded 

in doing so; and a number of Americans, perhaps around 20, who 

have been killed over in the Syria-Iraq theater. This is a much bigger explosion in terrorism across this particular ideology than we 

have seen previously. 

Now, when we look at the factors I spoke to, social media makes 

us live in a much more interconnected world, and what is different 

about social media, or as its sometimes referred to, the Social Web, 

as distinct from Web 1.0 and 2.0, is that it puts people in proximity 


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with each other. It is not CNN or ESPN that is the message. The 

message is other users. It fosters what one terrorism expert referred to as a sense of remote intimacy in which you feel as though 

you really get to know and are intimate with somebody who can 

be half a world away living in Raqqa. 

ISIS in particular has been very good at scoping out people who 

would potentially be amenable to their message and who might be 

drawn into the movement, preying upon vulnerabilities, needs, and 

other factors that are manifested in online users. 

Secondly, ISIS has been very good at using what I call virtual 

planners, people who aren’t in any sort of physical proximity with 

terrorists but from abroad can help them to choose targets, choose 

timing, and even provide suggestions about technical details like 

bomb design. 

In the United States, we saw a virtual planner at play. This was 

in the Garland, Texas, attack that occurred last year in which 

Junaid Hussain was in touch with one of the attackers, Elton 

Simpson, and knew ahead of time that this attack was going to 

take place. 

We also can see, based on social media, that grievance can be 

stripped of context and omnipresence. We have seen this in a number of different examples. One example that comes up is some of 

the tough job of law enforcement. You have had both killings that 

are unjustifiable and that quite justifiably produced protests. You 

have other cases where it is not clear except to those who were on 

the scene what actually happened. But things can still spiral before 

the State can react and before an investigation can be done. 

Beyond the U.S. also, Internet penetration is growing in a number of critical regions. It is 29 percent in Africa today, 53 percent 

in the Middle East, under 25 percent in South Asia. Just as we 

have seen the Internet have a big role in radicalization in places 

where it has high penetration, as more of the world comes online, 

we will see the same dynamic occur in multiple theaters. 

Now, in terms ofencryption the impact is very clear. On page 10 

of my testimony I have a diagram of the Paris-Brussels network. 

This network represents a watershed. It is the first time that you 

had a jihadist network in Europe carry out a major attack, that 

being the Paris attack, then survive the full weight of law enforcement and intelligence resources coming down on them and carry 

out another major attack in Brussels. 

If you look at the depth of this network it is the kind of thing 

experts would have told you, correctly, was impossible in a Western 

state just 5 years ago. The big thing that has changed is 

encryption. No longer can governments reliably depend upon their 

electronic surveillance superiority in trying to disrupt these networks. 

Now, as to what the United States Government can do, I have 

a few suggestions. One thing is provide transparency. If you look 

at one situation that could have spiraled earlier this year, that 

being the standoff at the National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, the 

FBI, when it came to ending the standoff, was able to put the entire thing on video and get it up on to YouTube quickly in order 

to dispel the kind of conspiracy theories and grievances that they 

understood could arise from that incident. 


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Secondly, I believe that we need to move beyond what I call the 

myth of the lone wolf. In Europe there were a number of attacks 

prior to the Paris attack that were connected to that network that 

were described as lone wolf incorrectly, things like the Brussels 

Jewish Museum shooting, the Amsterdam-Paris train attack in 

which Americans were able to thwart that attack. In all of these 

cases, you had connections to the later Paris attackers. We missed 

the opportunity to understand that the network was there. 

In the United States we should not have a default assumption 

that attacks are lone wolf. I would say that, based on my review 

of the Orlando case, it isn’t yet clear to me that this is actually a 

lone wolf case. We should be open, especially in this age of 

encryption, to the notion that there might be a network and our investigation isn’t done right away. 

I look forward to further discussing things that we can do and 

how we can approach this very thorny problem set when we get to 

the questions. Thank you all. 

[Prepared statement of Mr. Gartenstein-Ross follows:] 


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CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY: FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES 

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

Subcommittee on National Security, Subcommittee on Government Operations 

Radicalization in the 

U.S. and the Rise of 

Terrorism 

DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS 

Senior Fellow 

Foundation for Defense ofDemocracies 

Chief Executive Officer 

Valens Global 

Washington, DC 

September 14, 2016 

www.defenddernocracy.org 
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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross September 14,2016 

Chairman DeSantis, Chairman Meadows, Ranking Member Lynch, and Ranking Member 

Connolly, and distinguished members of both subcommittees, on behalf of the Fonndation for 

Defense of Democracies, it's an honor to appear before you to discuss today's topic. 

This country is in the midst of the largest spike in homegro~<Vnjihadist terrorist activity that it has 

ever seen, both in the overall number of cases and also the number of fatalities caused by 

terrorists claiming to act in service of the jihadist cause. While I assess jihadism to remain the 

top domestic terrorist threat, adherents to several other U .S.-based movements have also engaged 

more frequently in terrorist violence in recent years, including members of the anti-government 

Sovereign Citizens movement, and both white nationalists and black nationalists. 

This testimony will first show that the problem of terrorism is growing in scale. It then argues 

that both analysts and the media have an unjustifiable default assumption that relatively smallscale attacks have likely been carried out by "lone wolves." This prevalence of this assumption 

was crystal clear in the wake ofOmar Mateen's bloody June 2016 attack in Orlando. 

The Growing Threat of Terrorism 

By the end of last year, it was demonstrable that the United States was in the midst of an 

unprecedented surge in jihadist militant activity. This pattern could also be discerned in other 

Western countries. 

By now, federal prosecutors have charged over I 00 people in the U.S. in connection with Islamic 

State (ISIS) activity. 1 But when looking beyond criminal charges, the magnitude of the problem 

becomes more clear. In one of the most rigorous studies examining ISIS's presence and activities 

in America, Lorenzo Vidino and Seamus Hughes of George Washington University's Program 

on Extremism wrote: 

In June 2015 the FBI states that "upwards of 200 Americans have traveled or 

attempted to travel to Syria to participate in the conflict." A few weeks later, the 

Office of the Director of National Intelligence estimated that more than 250 

individuals from the U.S. had traveled or attempted to travel to the conflict area, a 

few dozen had joined the ranks ofiSIS, and some 20 had died. 

Moreover, the surge in the number of American foreign fighters is small 

compared to those who sympathize with and embrace ISIS's ideology. American 

authorities have consistently said that the popularity of ISIS's propaganda, driven 

largely by its savvy social media tactics, wholly overshadows that of a! Qaeda. 

Tellingly, in May 2015 FBI Director James Corney spoke of "hundreds, maybe 

thousands" of ISIS sympathizers and potential recruits across the country, 

disclosing that the Bureau had related investigations running in all 50 states. A 

1 See Adam Goldman, Jia Lynn Yang and John Muyskens, "The Islamic State's Suspected Inroads into America," 

Washington Post, updates August 8, 2016, httos://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/isis-suspects/. 

Foundation for Defense of Democracies www.defenddemocracy.org 
11 


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Daveed Gartenstein-Ross September 14, 2016 

few months later, in October 2015, Corney revealed that the FBI had a staggering 

900 active investigations against homegrown violent extremists. 2 

These trends have remained consistent since. The amount of domestic jihadist activity is far 

greater than it has been in any previous period, including the spike in homegrown terrorist cases 

in 2009-10. The number of attacks is also gro"ing across various Western countries, as this 

graphic recently produced by terrorism researcher Sam Mullins makes clear: 

It has become an item of received wisdom that the jihadist threat we face in the United States is 

not the same as that which confronts the Europeans. This is true for a variety of reasonsincluding the American Muslim community's level of integration and affluence-but these are 

not normal times in terms of the domestic threat of jihadism. Several factors are pushing the 

level of risk steeply upward. First, the explosion of jihadist social media usage, and the 

proficiency with which these groups use the online space, has created far more mobilization than 

we have seen in any previous period.3 Second, the bloody Syria conflict-in whichjihadists have 

managed to become a significant power on the battlefield-has had a tremendously galvanizing 

impact. Third, the growing pressure put on Muslims' place in American society, including the 

2 Lorenzo Vidino and Seamus Hughes, ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa (Washington, DC: Program on 

Extremism, George Washington University, 2015), p. 4. 3 For more on jihadist use of social media, see, e.g., Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nathaniel Barr, "The Social 

Science of Online Radicalization," War on the Rocks, October 29, 2015; J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, The 

ISIS Twitter Census: Defining and Describing the Population of ISIS Supporters on Twitter (Washington, DC: The 

Brookings Institution, 2015) (describing ISIS's use of Twitter at the group's height on that platform); J.M. Berger 

and Heather Perez, The Islamic State's Diminishing Returns on Twitter: How Suspensions Are Limiting the Social 

Networks of English-Speaking !SIS Supporters (Washington, DC: George Washington University Program on 

Extremism, 2016) (describing ISIS's growing challenges on Twitter after the platform focused on account 

takedowns). 

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focus put on the issue in this year's presidential campaign, may further the sense of grievance 

within this community. 

And jihadism is far from the only domestic terrorist challenge that we face. Anti-government 

violence has been growing as well. Here are some examples from the past several years: 

• 2010: Man flies plane into IRS building in Texas; police officers killed by Sovereign 

Citizens in Arkansas. 

• 2011: Alaska Peacemakers Militia members arrested and charged with plotting to kill or 

kidnap state troopers and a Fairbanks judge; Georgia militia members arrested in an 

alleged plot to bomb federal buildings, attack Atlanta and other cities with ricin, and 

murder law enforcement officials. 

• 2012: Sovereign Citizens ambush and murder police in Louisiana. 

• 2013: Sovereign Citizens arrested in Las Vegas allegedly had plans to execute random 

police officers. 

• 2014: Robert Talbot, Jr. arrested for alleged scheme to launch "American Insurgent 

Movement"; antigovernment extremists murder two police officers in Las Vegas. 

• 2015: Antigovernment Sovereign Citizen arrested prior to alleged coup plot in West 

Virginia. 

• 2016: Armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 

There has also been disturbing racially-motivated violence in recent years that can be 

characterized as terrorism. Recent examples of white nationalist/racist violence include: 

• 2011: David Pedersen and Holly Grigsby engaged in a multi-state killing spree, killing 

four in three states. 

• 2012: Wade Michael Page murdered six people during an attack on a Sikh temple in Oak 

Creek, Wisconsin. 

• 2014: Frazier Glenn Miller opened fire at Jewish institutions in Overland Park, Kansas, 

killing three. 

• 2015: Dylann Storm Roof, hoping to incite a race war, killed nine African-American 

churchgoers at a bible study; a group of white separatists shot five African-Americans at 

a Black Lives Matter protest. 

• 2016: Three people were stabbed during clashes at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Anaheim. 

There have also been black nationalist-related acts of terrorism, often related to the shootings of 

African Americans by police officers that have also helped to spur the Black Lives Matter 

movement. Gavin Long and Micah Johnson are recent examples of this phenomenon. 

As we see sub-state violence growing across several countries, including our own, one factor I 

would point to as particularly significant is social media, which I mentioned previously. Social 

media can make fringe causes embraced by disparate individuals more popular, and can hasten 

mobilization. This is true of both non-violent protests and also sub-state violence. 

The Orlando Attack and the Over-Categorization of Lone Wolf Terrorism 

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Omar Mateen, who struck the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, wanted the world to 

associate his attack with ISIS. Mateen felt so strongly about this that he took time out of his 

rampage to call 911 and swear allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. For its own part, 

ISIS was happy to associate itself with his attack. The group's Amaq News Agency has 

described Mateen as a "fighter from the Islamic State." 

But should the Pulse attack be considered an "ISIS attack"? Almost immediately, commentators 

and experts referred to it as an act of lone wolf terrorism, the implication being that both Mateen 

and ISIS overstated his connection to the jihadist organization. The rush to label Orlando an act 

of lone wolf terrorism is part of a broader trend, one that has proven costly in the recent past. 4 

We can see the tendency to quickly label attacks as lone wolf in other recent incidents. On July 

14, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhle1, a Tunisian national residing in France, killed over 80 and 

wounded hundreds when he ploughed a 19-ton cargo truck through crowds celebrating Bastille 

Day in the southern French city of Nice. Mere days after the Nice massacre, a 17 -year-old 

Afghan migrant seeking asylum in Germany attacked passengers on a train in Wurzbnrg with an 

axe and a knife, wounding four before police killed him. A suicide bombing on July 24 injured 

15 in the German city of Ansbach, and on July 26, two attackers claiming allegiance to ISIS 

stormed a chnrch in a suburb of the French city of Rouen, slit an 84-year-old priest" s throat, and 

took hostages. 

These incidents are part of the aforementioned trend of increasing violence carried out by lone 

individuals. Analysts, journalists, and scholars were quick to label each perpetrator of these 

recent attacks as lone wolves: individuals who lacked substantial connections to ISIS or other 

jihadist groups, and who carried out their operations without the assistance of others. The 

designation has generally been applied within 24 hours of these attacks, before significant 

intelligence about an incident's planning and execution has emerged-and long before 

authorities have concluded their investigation. Observers have repeatedly erred by definitively 

categorizing attacks as lone-wolf operations when they would later tum out to be connected to 

broader cells or networks. 

The tendency to view lone attackers as unconnected to the broader ISIS organization prevented 

observers from fully comprehending the magnitude of the network that was behind the complex 

coordinated attacks in Paris and Brussels. In April 2015, Sid Ahmed Ghlam, an Algerian national 

studying in France, called for medical help after accidentally shooting himself in the leg while 

handling a firearm. Authorities' investigation revealed that Ghlam, who was in possession of 

several guns, was planning to attack churches in the Paris area, and may have been involved in 

the murder of a woman found dead in a Paris subnrb. In August 2015, three Americans restrained 

Ayoub El-Khazzani, a 25-year old Moroccan national, before he could open fire on passengers 

traveling by train from Amsterdam to Paris. 

At the time, the two attacks were seen as disconnected, with Khazzani generally labeled a lone 

wolf. And the bumbling incompetence of both incidents-Ghlam shot himself, while Khazzani's 

weapon jammed before he could get off a shot-made the attacks seem like the work of 

amatenrs. Meanwhile, ISIS fueled perceptions that it was primarily interested in inspiring lone4 For more on this point, see Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nathaniel Barr, "The Myth of Lone Wolf Terrorism," 

Foreign Affairs, July 26,2016, from which parts of this section are adapted. 

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wolf attacks rather than guiding them, with a pro-ISIS media outlet producing a propaganda 

video shortly after Khazzani's botched attack calling on "lone lions" to kill the group's enemies. 

But after the devastating November 2015 attacks in Paris, it became clear that initial judgments 

had been wrong. A March 2016 New York Times article by Rukmini Callimachi detailed how 

Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ground commander of the Paris attacks, had directed Ghlam, 

Khazzani, and several others to carry out attacks in Europe, even as he was preparing the Paris 

operation.5 Although he of course wanted these small-scale plots to succeed, they also helped 

deflect attention from ISIS's more sophisticated operational planning, serving as a "smoke 

screen" that allowed the group to "calmly prepare" its future operations, in the words of one 

French official. Because counterterrorism analysts and officials viewed Ghlam, Khazzani, and 

other attackers as unrelated to one another, they did not identify the operational infrastructure 

involved in coordinating ISIS's various attacks in Europe. 

The failure to identify common ties between supposed lone wolves and ISIS is part of a broader 

and long-standing pattern of underestimating the scope of jihadist networks in the West. An 

official inquiry into the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks in London, for example, described the cell 

that carried it out as autonomous and self-actuating rather than tied to al-Qaeda. 6 The idea that 

the London bombings were unrelated to al-Qaeda was definitively refuted by a commemorative 

video the group released in July 2006, which showed a martyrdom tape recorded by cell leader 

Mohammad Sidique Khan. AI Qaeda's then-deputy emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, revealed that 

Khan and fellow plotter Shehzad Tanweer had visited al-Qaeda's training camps in Pakistan 

"seeking martyrdom," an account that has been corroborated by Western intelligence agencies. 

Bob Ayers, a security expert at London's Chatham House, commented when the new video was 

released, "It makes the police look pretty bad. It means the investigation was either wrong, or 

they identified links but were reluctant to reveal them."7 

Since then, officials and analysts have often continued to ignore attackers' ties with broader 

networks. Part of the reason for the consistent failure may lie in a desire to avoid culpability; 

observers may perceive attacks carried out by networks as something officials should have 

prevented, but potential lone attackers are notoriously difficult to spot. Another reason may be a 

desire to downplay networks due to policy preferences, such as wanting to avoid taking kinetic 

action against the networks driving these attacks. But it is a mistake to conflate facts with policy 

preferences, and the truth is that terrorists' ties to broader networks are frequently overlooked. 

The idea that lone-attacker plots carried out in 2016 were the work of individuals is already 

being discredited. When ISIS claimed responsibility for the July 2016 Wiirzburg train attack, the 

group released a video featuring the perpetrator that demonstrated ISIS had advance knowledge 

of his strike. Less than a week after the Nice attack, French authorities revealed that Lahouaiej 

Bouhlel may not have acted alone, as several individuals were detained. One suspect had posed 

5 Rukmini Callimachi, "How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror under Europe's Gaze," New York Times, March 29, 

2016. 

6 House of Commons, Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 (May 11, 2006), 

available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/sharedlbsplhi/pdfs/11 05 06 narrative.odf. 7 Sean Alfano, "Video: 2 London Bombers Were Qaeda," CBS News, July 7, 2006, 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vidco-2-london-bombers-were-qaeda/. 

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for pictures in the truck that Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through a celebrating crowd. The 

perpetrator had sent a text message to an alleged coconspirator minutes before the attack 

requesting "more weapons." 

The nature of radicalization and operational planning in the digital age has complicated efforts to 

interpret and analyze attacks perpetrated by single individuals. Jihadists plotting murders in the 

West used to congregate in person, meeting in small groups in underground mosques, houses, or 

other discrete locations. Radicalization occurred through in-person contact. Counterterrorism 

officials looked for physical hubs of recruitment, tapping phones and scanning surveillance 

videos for evidence that cells were meeting. 

But with the social media boom and the f.'l'Owth in encrypted communications, radicalization and 

operational planning can easily take place entirely online. ISIS has capitalized on evolving 

communications technologies, building cohesive online communities that facilitate 

radicalization. The group has also established a team of "virtually planners" who use the Internet 

to identify recruits, and to coordinate and direct attacks, often without meeting the perpetrators in 

person. Junaid Hussain, a British ISIS operative who was killed in August 2015, played the role 

of virtual planner for the May 2015 strike against the Draw Muhammad contest in Garland, 

Texas. Hussain had communicated online with attacker Elton Simpson beforehand, and was the 

first to celebrate it on social media. It may take months-or longer-to detect the role of virtual 

planners in attacks. 

The changing nature of operational planning underscores the need for a new paradigm for 

understanding the relationship between single attackers and networks. It no longer makes sense 

to apply pre-digital-age thinking to jihadist attacks perpetrated in the age of Twitter, Telegram, 

and end-to-end encryption. 

Instead, it is useful to think of four categories of attacks, with descending connections to a 

network. The first category consists of operations in which the attacker was trained and 

dispatched by an organization. Reda Harne, who traveled to Syria and received weapons training 

from Abaaoud before being sent back to Europe, fits this mold. The second category is attackers 

in touch via social media with virtual planners such as Hussain, who help set targets, determine 

the timing of the attack, and provide technical assistance. The third category is operatives who 

are in contact with a militant group via online communications but do not receive specific 

instructions about carrying out an attack. Finally, the fourth category comprises the true lone 

wolves, individuals who strike without ever communicating withjihadist networks. 

It is clear that few of the jihadists labeled lone wolves truly fit that definition. Recently, it seems 

that Europeans have been quicker to absorb that lesson. For example, after the recent gas 

canisters plot was foiled in France, it took little time for prosecutors to determine that the 

attackers had been directed by ISIS. 8 It's not clear that we have absorbed that lesson in the U.S., 

but there are also networks at play in this country. 

8 Camille Verdier, Steve Visser and Margot Haddad, "French Prosecutor: Women Who Planned Attack Were 

Directed by ISIS," CNN, September 9, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/world/france-arrests-gas-cvlindersnotre-dame/. 

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ISIS's External Operations and the State of Networked Terrorism 

Currently networked terrorism is a far more powerful threat to Western countries than it has been 

in years, due to both a rise in mobilization to violence as well as a remarkable improvement in 

terrorist tradecraft due to numerous factors, including the explosion in end-to-end encryption. 

This section first looks at the network that recently carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks as 

an example of how networks function in 2016.9 

The recent attacks in Paris and Brussels represent a watershed moment not just for ISIS, but for 

the entire jihadist movement. The attacks mark the first time that a single jihadist network 

succeeded in carrying out two separate mass casualty attacks in Europe. In the past, when 

jihadist networks struck in Europe, they were pursued with the full weight of European security 

and intelligence services, and relevant perpetrators were neutralized before they could mount a 

second attack. 

ISIS's successes are the result of a complex strategy executed by officials in the Amn ai-Khm:ji, 

a shadowy wing of ISIS's bureaucracy responsible for selecting and training external operatives 

and for planning terrorist attacks in areas outside of ISIS's core territory, including those in 

Europe. Though ISIS's attacks and plots in Europe have received a great deal of media attention, 

the Amn al-Kharji has largely stayed out of the spotlight. This aversion to publicity is deliberate, 

and demonstrates the Amn al-Kharji's importance to ISIS. While ISIS's military branches in 

Syria and Iraq readily advertise their exploits, the Amn al-Kharji is shrouded in secrecy, 

sometimes employing disinformation to mislead intelligence agencies. Nonetheless, enough 

information now has emerged in open-source reporting to paint a picture-however 

incomplete---of the Amn al-Kharji. 

The most detailed information on the Amn al-Kharji comes from an interview given by an ISIS 

defector, known only as "Abu Khaled." 10 According to Abu Khaled, the Amn al-Kharji is one of 

four agencies that fall under IS IS's amniyat, or security apparatus. The other three agencies are 

the Amn ai-Dawla, which is responsible for internal security within ISIS's territory; the Amn alDakhili, which is akin to an interior ministry; and the Amn al-Askari, or the military intelligence 

wing. Abu Khaled, a former member of the Amn al-Dawla, explained that the Amn al-Kharji 

was responsible for conducting espionage and terrorist attacks in enemy territory, and that the 

agency had developed intricate tactics enabling its operatives' infiltration. Indeed, long before 

the Amn al-Kharji put its attack plans for Brussels and Paris into motion, the branch spearheaded 

operations behind enemy lines in Syria and Iraq. By the time ISIS began investing serious 

resources in European operations, the Amn al-Kharji had already refined its tradecraft for attacks 

outside ISIS-controlled territory. 

Abu Khaled's testimony sheds light on key players within the Amn al-Kharji's opaque structure. 

According to Abu Khaled, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, ISIS's late spokesman who served as one 

of the organization's top officials until his death, appointed the commanders of each of the 

9 For more on this point, see Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nathaniel Barr, "Recent Attacks Illuminate the Islamic 

State's Europe Attack Network," Jamestown Foundation, April 27, 20!6, from which parts of this section are 

adapted. 

10 Michael Weiss, "Confessions of an ISIS Spy," Daily Beast, November !5, 2015. 

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amniyat's four branches. Other reports identified the Syria-born Adnani as the operational 

commander of the Amn al-Kharji. However, given Adnani's role in managing multiple agencies 

within ISIS, it is highly likely that his position in the Amn al-Kharji had been largely 

bureaucratic. That is, Adnani likely signed off on external operations, but was not involved in 

operational planning. 

Rather, responsibility for directing 

ISIS's external operations falls to 

an elusive figure known by his 

kunya (nom de guerre), Abu 

Sulayman al-Faransi. Despite his 

prominent role in ISIS, little 

personal information about alFaransi is available. It is believed 

that-as his kunya suggestsFaransi is a French national. 

According to French sources, he 

now resides in northern Syria with 

his wife-also a French nationaland two children. Reports allege 

that al-Faransi was promoted to 

external operations chief following 

the Paris attacks, suggesting that 

the Frenchman was rewarded for 

overseeing one of ISIS's most 

high-profile attacks. Al-Faransi's 

name also surfaced in 

investigations into the Brussels 

attacks. Belgian authorities 

investigating the contents of a 

computer owned by Ibrahim El 

Bakraoui, one of the two suicide 

bombers who struck the Zaventem 

airport, concluded that Bakraoui 

had been in contact with al-Faransi, and that other cell members may have been, as welL 

Bakraoui had submitted attack plans to the Frenchman. 

Below al-Faransi in the Amn al-Kharji are the theater commanders, responsible for planning 

operations in various regions that ISIS wants to target. Theater commanders are perhaps the most 

pivotal actors in ISIS's external operations structure, as they serve as a bridge between strategic 

planners and tactical operators. It appears that ISIS appoints theater commanders who originate 

from the regions over which they are given authority. For instance, ISIS's external operations in 

Southeast Asia are likely led by Bahrun Nairn, an Indonesian militant now based in Syria who 

was responsible for coordinating the January 2016 attacks in Jakarta. ISIS has also likely 

appointed theater commanders for external operations in both Turkey and North Africa. 

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The theater commander for Europe is believed to be Salim Benghalem, another French national 

whose involvement in jihadism predates ISIS's emergence. Benghalem became radicalized in a 

French prison when serving an earlier sentence for attempted murder. He soon fell in with a 

network commonly known as the Buttes-Chaumont group, a Paris-based jihadist network 

involved in recruiting individuals to fight U.S. forces in Iraq in the mid-2000s. This group also 

included Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 

January 2015. In 2011, Benghalem and Cherif Kouachi traveled to Yemen, where they received 

training from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. 

Soon after traveling to Syria to join ISIS in early 2013, Benghalem was tapped to serve as a 

prison guard for French hostages whom ISIS had kidnapped. Several former prison guards from 

this group have emerged as key actors in ISIS's European external operations efforts. For 

instance, Mehdi Nemmouche, a fellow French national who guarded French hostages alongside 

Benghalem, returned to Europe and carried out an attack on the Brussels Jewish Museum in May 

2014 that killed four. Naajim Laachraoui, a Belgian national who served as one of the suicide 

bombers at the Zaventem airport, had also been a guard. Benghalem now outranks all of his 

former prison guard colleagues. 

As the theater commander for ISIS's European operations, Benghalem oversees several 

commanders responsible for training operatives, and planning and coordinating operations at the 

ground level. These tactical commanders play a hands-on role in ISIS's Europe operations, and 

sometimes participate in attacks. Given their more public role, these commanders often attract 

greater media scrutiny than their more discrete superiors. Such was the case for Abdelhamid 

Abaaoud, who was killed by French authorities several days after the Paris attacks. In January 

2015, Abaaoud deployed to Athens, where he directed a cell based in the Belgian city of 

V erviers that was disrupted when Belgian authorities intercepted telephone calls between 

Abaaoud and the plotters. 

Between the Verviers plot and the Paris attacks, Abaaoud spent his time training operatives and 

planning unsophisticated, low-cost operations in Europe. In the summer of 2015, Abaaoud 

trained Paris native Reda Harne and at least one other operative to carry out mass casualty 

attacks on soft targets in France and Spain. This plan was disrupted when authorities arrested 

Harne's counterpart in Spain. Abaaoud was also in contact with Ayoub El Khazzani, who was 

tackled by passengers when he tried to open fire during an August 2015 train ride from 

Amsterdam to Paris. Khazzani never traveled to Syria, suggesting that, in addition to training 

operatives already in ISIS-controlled territory, Abbaoud sought to inspire radicalized individuals 

based in Europe to carry out attacks on their own. 

These small-scale plots distracted authorities, who, as I warned in the first part of this testimony, 

never looked beyond the lone-wolfparadigm to find the terrorist networks of which the plotters 

were a part. All the while, Abaaoud was planning the Paris attacks, his jihadist magnum opus. In 

a move uncharacteristic of a commander of his stature, Abaaoud traveled to Paris to oversee and 

coordinate the operation personally. Though there is little information on Abaaoud' s activities in 

Europe in the months and weeks before the Paris attacks, multiple news outlets reported that he 

traveled to the United Kingdom in the summer of 2015, possibly to case potential targets or to 

coordinate with other militants. Abaaoud then personally coordinated and participated in the 

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Paris operations, dropping off one of the suicide bombers, opening fire on civilians in several 

different locations, and later driving to an area near the Bataclan and contacting militants inside 

the concert hall. Unlike the Verviers plot, Abaaoud was committed to personally seeing the Paris 

attacks through to completion. 

Abaaoud planned additional attacks after the Paris massacre, but French authorities caught and 

killed him in a raid on an apartment in a Paris suburb. Though Abaaoud's death eliminated one 

of ISIS's most skilled external operatives, it is believed that ISIS quickly replaced him with 

Fabien Clain, a French convert whose voice was featured in the audio message in which ISIS 

claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. 

A look at the networks involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks provides further evidence of the 

sophistication of ISIS's external operations, and some indication of how jihadist networks will 

look in the United States (though U.S. networks are not be as sprawling, and are often somewhat 

less interlinked). ISIS utilized a networked approach in executing the two attacks. That is, the 

group built a vast network in Europe to prepare for the Paris attacks, with some militants serving 

in an operational capacity while others played a support and logistics role. That ISIS was able to 

sustain such a vast support infrastructure in Europe is striking, considering the challenges of 

evading European intelligence agencies. Even more remarkable is that ISIS was able to keep its 

support network largely intact following the Paris attacks, and then subsequently mobilize this 

network to strike again in Brussels just months later amid a heightened security atmosphere. This 

feat reflects both the magnitude ofiSIS's European network and the quality of its tradecraft. 

Zerkani Network 

Mohamfi!Be!koid 

Klm1 ... J"'<:Idt 

""'""'"'*li<>t\»1' 

Salah .eslam 

.:"' Abdelho 

Khali.rkani' 

Aboooud 

.,--:::""''""''' 

M'.,.""'" 

The graphic above reveals the scope of the networks involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks. 

Abaaoud sits at the center of the network, attesting to his role as the overall coordinator of the 

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Paris attacks. Another key actor is Khalid Zerkani, an integral jihadist player in the Brussels 

neighborhood of Molenbeek, a hotbed of militancy that has served as a safe haven for ISIS 

operatives. Though Zerkani-who has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role as a 

jihadist recruiter-was not involved in either the Paris or Brussels attacks, the foreign fighter 

recruitment networks he established from 2012 to 2014 have been at the center of ISIS's ongoing 

operations in Europe. Several key individuals involved in the Paris and Brussels attacks, 

including Abaaoud, Naajim Laachraoui and Salah Abdeslam, are directly linked to Zerkani, as 

was Reda Kriket, who had amassed an "unprecedented" weapons arsenal and was in the final 

stages of operational planning when French authorities arrested him shortly after the Brussels 

attacks. 

ISIS operatives in Europe linked with Zerkani have also relied on other members of the Zerkani 

network as they sought to evade European authorities and plan future attacks. After the Paris 

attacks, Salah Abdeslam contacted Abid Aberkan, the nephew of Fatima Aberkan, who has been 

described as the "mother" of the Zerkani network. Abdeslam hid at the house of Aberkan's 

mother, where he was eventually discovered and arrested. 

The graphic also reveals the extensive overlap between the Paris and Brussels attack networks. 

Key individuals involved in providing logistical support for the Paris attacks rapidly transitioned 

to an operational role in Brussels. For instance, Naajim Laachraoui helped construct explosives 

for the Paris attacks before donning his own suicide vest in Brussels. Mohamed Belkaid, who 

was believed to have been in contact with several of the Paris attackers via phone, housed Salah 

Abdeslam while Abdeslam was on the run from Belgian authorities. Belkaid was likely involved 

in planning attacks with Abdeslam when Belkaid was killed by Belgian forces in a raid several 

days before the Brussels attacks. Mohamed Abrini is yet another individual who played a support 

role in Paris before mobilizing in Brussels; he rented an apartment that was used by several Paris 

attackers and later tried to plant a bomb at the Zaventem airport, though he failed to detonate his 

explosives. This pattern suggests that ISIS's strategy in Europe involves building dual-purpose 

cells that can be converted from a support to attack role in order to maximize the utility of its 

network. 

The U.S. has also had domestic terrorist networks in recent years, though they are not as robust 

as the European networks. For example, indictments and other publicly-available sources of 

information reveal a remarkably dense ISIS network clustered around the Minneapolis-St. Paul 

area. Almost every actor in this network is linked with one another. 

As we talk about lone wolf terrorism, let's not lose sight of the role that networks will continue 

to play, especially in this age of improved tradecraft. 

Thank you again for inviting me to testify today. I look forward to answering your questions. 

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21 

Mr. DESANTIS. Thank you. 

Mr. Mayer, you are up for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF MATT A. MAYER 

Mr. MAYER. Chairman DeSantis, Chairman Meadows, Ranking 

Member Lynch, Ranking Member Connolly, thank you for having 

me here today to talk about this very important issue. 

With more than 315 million Americans in the U.S. and our firm 

commitment to liberty, securing those people is among the most 

difficult activities of our domestic national security apparatus. The 

list of vulnerabilities across America are nearly endless, from malls 

to restaurants to businesses and to events. A determined terrorist 

merely has to acquire a means to so harm. 

As we have seen over the past fear years, that means can come 

in the form of a pressure cooker bomb in Boston, a semi-automatic 

pistol in Texas, a hatchet on the sidewalk in Queens, and a handgun in Orlando. The injuries and deaths from these attacks are 

tragic and senseless. 

Because our domestic national security apparatus cannot stop 

every attack does not mean it should not stop some of the attacks. 

We will miss the terrorists who leave no trace of their plans before 

acting. We cannot miss the terrorists who provide clues about their 

intent and state of mind before acting. The fact that the FBI had 

investigated Omar Mateen several times indicates something went 

wrong. 

We may not get every investigation right, but we can make sure 

our policies give our domestic national security apparatus the 

greatest chance to detect and stop the terrorists before they act. 

As noted in June, the FBI, with roughly 13,000 agents, doesn’t 

have the resources to adequately cover more than 1,000 active 

probes and the tens of thousands of tips it receives every year. The 

FBI, however, is not alone. Standing next to those 13,000 agents 

are more than 1.1 million badged local law enforcement officers 

ready to lend a hand at a moment’s notice. 

If we want to increase our chances against lone wolf and small 

cell terrorists, we must more fully leverage the men and women in 

local law enforcement. First, the FBI and other Federal law enforcement entities must do a better job of sharing information and 

intelligence with local law enforcement. To succeed at detecting 

and stopping terrorist attacks, our Federal and local law enforcement entities must be bolted together firmly to ensure all resources 

available are marshaled, leveraged, and synchronized. 

I respectfully suggest that the ideal locations to bring Federal 

and local players together are the joint terrorism task forces located in most major U.S. cities. Other information and intelligencesharing initiatives operating separately from the JTTFs only increase the odds that key terrorism data do not get shared or inadvertently do not make it into a JTTF investigation. 

Next, Federal terrorism funds must be directed to support 

human intelligence operations by local law enforcement in key locations. With the substantial increase in terrorists’ use of encrypted 

technology, the ability of our domestic national security apparatus 

to use signals intelligence to detect terrorists is diminishing. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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To overcome this challenge, local law enforcement should increase the use of HUMINT, monitoring, surveillance, and undercover work to identify terrorist plots and cells. This work should be 

done in accordance with procedures erected to protect civil liberties 

and in partnership with the FBI. 

In conjunction with the use of HUMINT, local law enforcement 

must counterbalance that hard power by deploying more soft power 

as well. Last month I outlined the development of regional outreach groups in at least 24 jurisdictions across America. ROGs will 

bring together law enforcement entities and Muslim community 

groups and mosque leaders to strengthen connections and build 

trust. It is vital that ROGs are led by local law enforcement entities and not Federal entities. 

Finally, given the enormous resources, personnel, experience, 

and relationships existing in States and localities, it is time those 

entities had permanent seats at the National Security Council. By 

giving governors, mayors, and local law enforcement permanent 

seats, we can ensure that our domestic national security policy 

maximizes the resources they have to contribute and properly represents the equities, concerns, and inputs. 

For too many years, Federal entities have served as gatekeepers 

of State and local injects into national policymaking. Under our tripartite system of government, States and local governments deserve their own representative voices in Washington, D.C. 

Instead of reacting to what happened in the past, Congress 

should preemptively enact reforms that address what we imagine 

will be elements of future attacks. By strengthening the relationship between components of our domestic national security apparatus, we can inject fidelity into the system. By broadening the use 

of human intelligence by local law enforcement, we can insert 

nimbleness andcertainty into the system. By deepening connections 

and trust among local law enforcement and the Muslim diaspora, 

we can inoculate our communities from the virus spread by radical 

Islamic groups. By leveraging the expertise residing in communities across America in the development of our national domestic 

security policy, we can boost the odds that we adopt policies that 

actually work. 

Whether we like it or not, the use of terrorism by those who hate 

us or seek to use conflict with us to rally adherence to their warped 

cause will be a constant bedfellow for us in the decades to come. 

We may or may not be able to change hearts and minds in the Middle East, but we certainly can put in place policies here that protect Americans from the worst emanations of our enemies. When 

it comes to protecting our cities and the people therein, local law 

enforcement must play a more prominent role. 

On Saturday, I leave for Europe to get briefings from the major 

security groups in London, Paris, Brussels, The Hague, and Stuttgart. I would be happy to come back to brief members and staff on 

those findings once we have them. 

Thank you for the opportunity to testify and answer any questions you may have. 

[Prepared statement of Mr. Mayer follows:] 


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A ,..,.l AMERICAN 

~ 

,..,. ENTERPRISE 

INSTITUTE 

Statement before the Joint Committee of the 

Subcommittee on National Security and Subcommittee on Government Operations 

On Radicalization in the US and the Rise ofT errorism 

Our Ability to Detect and to Stop 

Lone Wolf and Small Cell 

Terrorists Will Depend on 

Enhancing the Role of Local Law 

Enforcement 

Matt A. Mayer 

Visiting Fellow 

September 14, 2016 

My name is Matt A. Mayer. I am a visiting fellow for national security issues at the American 

Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The views I express in this testimony are my own 

and should not be construed as representing any official position of the American Enterprise 

Institute. 
24 


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Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the joint committee today. In lieu of restating the 

research I've done over the past decade and in my book Homeland Security and Federalism: 

Protecting America from Outside the Beltway, I would respectfully direct you to my page on the 

American Enterprise Institute website (https:/ /www.aei.org/scholar/matt-a-mayer/), where you 

can read the various reports I've written on this hearing's topic. 

I'd rather spend my brief time with you framing the challenges that remain with radicalization in 

the US and the rise of terrorism, especially as it relates to homegrown violent extremists inspired, 

enabled, or directed by terrorist groups. 

With more than 315 million people in the US and our firm commitment to liberty, securing those 

people is among the most difficult activities our domestic national security apparatus engages in. 

The list of vulnerabilities across America is nearly endless. From malls to restaurants to businesses 

to events, a determined terrorist merely has to acquire a means to sow harm. 

As we have seen over the past few years, that means can come in the form of pressure cooker 

bombs at the Boston Marathon, a semiautomatic pistol at a Texas military base, a hatchet on a 

sidewalk in Queens, or a rifle and handgun in an Orlando nightclub. The injuries and deaths from 

any terrorist attack are tragic and senseless. 

As security experts have noted since the September ll, 2001, terrorist attack, America will 

remain a top target of terrorist groups and their adherents. Likewise, our domestic national 

security apparatus will not be able to detect and stop every attack. Perfect security, if possible, 

can occur only in a totalitarian regime in which freedom is nonexistent. Americans fully 

understand the price of freedom is living in a risk-inherent society. 

Because our domestic national security apparatus cannot stop every attack, however, does not 

mean it should not stop attacks by terrorists of whom it has knowledge. We will miss the terrorists 

who leave no trace of their plans before acting. We cannot miss the terrorists who provide clues 

about their intent or states of mind before acting. The fact that the FBI had investigated and 

interviewed Omar Mateen several times indicates something went wrong. 

No matter how hard federal, state, and local law enforcement tries, it is often policy failures that 

result in terrorists evading detection and launching attacks. Consider this: had federal policy 

been in place that would have alerted the FBI of Mateen's purchase of weapons, the FBI could 

have questioned the storeowner, resumed surveillance of Mateen, and possibly secured a 

warrant to search his home and computer. Based on news reports, the result of such a search 

would have led to Mateen's arrest, and his attack would have been thwarted. 

Both sides can debate the constitutional questions surrounding weapons bans and list purchase 

prohibitions, but a policy in which a simple alert is generated when someone who has been 

under investigation buys a gun could have prevented the Orlando terrorist attack without 

infringing a core constitutional right. Do we really need to debate whether such a common-sense 

approach is a constitutionally safe way to balance our security and liberty? 

We may not get every investigation right, but we can make sure our policies give our domestic 

national security apparatus the greatest chance to detect and stop terrorists before they act. 

As noted in june, the FBI, with roughly 13,000 agents, doesn't have the resources to adequately 

cover more than l ,000 active probes and the tens of thousands oft ips it receives every year. The 

)0036 ' 
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FBI is not alone, however. Standing next to those 13,000 agents are more than l.l million 

badged local law enforcement officers ready to lend a hand at a moment's notice. 

If we want to increase our chances against lone wolf and small cell terrorists, we must more fully 

leverage the men and women in local law enforcement. I have written extensively over the past 

decade on several key reforms that would strengthen our domestic national security apparatus. 

First, the FBI and other federal law enforcement entities must do a better job of sharing 

information and intelligence with local law enforcement. It appears that in both the Boston 

Marathon bombing and the Orlando nightclub mass shooting, the FBI failed to alert local law 

enforcement about investigations it had conducted of the terrorists. More broadly, information 

and intelligence sharing by federal law enforcement entities still is largely dependent on the 

individuals heading the respective offices. 

To succeed at detecting and stopping terrorist attacks, our federal and local law enforcement 

entities must be bolted together firmly to ensure all resources available are marshalled, 

leveraged, and synchronized. I respectfully suggest the ideal locations to bring federal and local 

players together are the joint Terrorism Task Forces QTIFs) located in most major US cities. Other 

information and intelligence-sharing initiatives operating separately from the jTIFs only increase 

the odds that key terrorism data do not get shared or inadvertently do not make it into a jTIF 

investigation. 

Next, federal terrorism funds must be directed to support human intelligence (HUMINT) 

operations by local law enforcement in key locations. With the substantial increase in terrorists' 

use of encrypted technology, the ability of our domestic national security apparatus to use signals 

intelligence to detect terrorists is diminishing. As I proposed in early january, Congress should 

launch a commission to investigate and provide recommendations on how to evolve our 

domestic national security apparatus while also protecting our civil liberties. Our domestic 

national security apparatus faces a difficult challenge as terrorists and other criminals evolve their 

operations with technological changes. 

To overcome this challenge, local law enforcement should increase the use of HUMINTmonitoring, surveillance, and undercover work-to identify terrorist plots and cells. This work 

should be done in accordance with procedures erected to protect civil liberties and in 

partnership with the FBI. The programs at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the 

New York Police Department provide strong models on which to base this program. 

In conjunction with the use of HUMINT, local law enforcement must counterbalance that hard 

power by deploying more soft power as well. Last month, I outlined the development of 

Regional Outreach Groups (ROGs) in at least 24 jurisdictions across America. ROGs will bring 

together law enforcement entities and Muslim community groups and mosque leaders to 

strengthen connections and build trust. It is vital that ROGs are led by local law enforcement 

entities and not federal entities. As with the HUMINT program, federal terrorism funds should 

support this vital work modeled on the LAPD' s outreach program. 

Finally, given the enormous resources-personnel, experience, and relationships-existing in 

states and localities, it is time those entities had permanent seats at the National Security Council. 

By giving governors, mayors, and local law enforcement permanent seats, we can ensure that 

our domestic national security policy maximizes the resources they have to contribute and 

properly represents their equities, concerns, and inputs. For too many years, federal entities have 

served as gatekeepers of state and local injects into national policymaking. Under our tripartite 
26 


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system of sovereignty, state and local governments deserve their own representatives and voices 

in Washington, DC. 

After a tragic national event, the urge by policymakers is to enact new legislation that deals with 

an element of the event. Terrorists inherently seek to exploit gaps and vulnerabilities. 

Policymakers and experts could spend their lives and the nation's treasury trying to close every 

gap and vulnerability. Such an approach is destined to fail and only curtail our freedom. 

Instead of reacting to what happened in the past, Congress should preemptively enact reforms 

that address what we imagine will be elements of future attacks. By strengthening the 

relationship between the components of our domestic national security apparatus, we can inject 

fidelity into the system. By broadening the use of HUMINT by local law enforcement, we can 

insert nimbleness and uncertainty into the system. By deepening connections and trust among 

local law enforcement and the Muslim diaspora, we can inoculate our communities from the virus 

spread by radical Islamic groups. By leveraging the expertise residing in communities across 

America in the development of our domestic national security policy, we can boost the odds that 

we adopt policies that will actually work. 

Whether we like it or not, the use of terrorism by those who hate us or seek to use conflict with us 

to rally adherents to their warped cause will be our constant bedfellow for decades to come. In 

June, a survey showed that 93 percent of young Iraqis regard the United States as their enemy. 

We may or may not be able to change hearts and minds in the Middle East, but we certainly can 

put in place policies here that protect Americans from the worst emanations of our enemies. 

When it comes to protecting our cities and the people therein, local law enforcement must play a 

more prominent role. Thank you for the opportunity to testify and answer any questions you may 

have. 

The American Enterprise institute for Publrc Polrcy Research (AEI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 50l(c)(3) educational 

organization and does not take institutional pos1tions on any issues. The views expressed in this testimony are 

those of the author 

Ave NV/, 
27 

Mr. DESANTIS. Thank you. 

Mr. Inserra, you are up for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF DAVID INSERRA 

Mr. INSERRA. Thank you. My name is David Inserra, and the 

views I express in this testimony are my own and should not be 

construed as representing any official position of The Heritage 

Foundation. 

Even before the attacks on Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, and Nice, there was plenty to suggest that the face of the 

global Islamist terrorist movement had come to look very different 

from what confronted the world over a decade ago. The list of what 

has changed is quite long, from ISIS getting its own state, to the 

much discussed role of social media and the Internet. 

Now we must answer new questions, like how to handle terrorist 

travel in an age of refugees and foreign fighters, and so we must 

assess the current state of the Islamist threat facing the U.S. As 

part of my research I track Islamist terror plots and attacks 

against the U.S. homeland. Since 9/11, there have been 89 plots 

and attacks. That is a large enough data set for a credible trend 

analysis to tell us more about the character of the threat. 

There are three trends that I would like to tell the committee 

about and then offer some thoughts on the way forward. 

First, the frequency of the plots has dramatically increased. 

There have been 25 successful or interrupted terrorist plots in the 

U.S. since the start of 2015, as opposed to only a handful in both 

2013 and 2014. As a result, the threat is getting deadlier. While 

we have had 11 successful Islamist terrorist plots since 9/11, 5 of 

those successful plots have occurred since the start of 2015, resulting in the greatest loss of life from Islamist terrorism on U.S. soil 

since 9/11 with 68 innocent victims. 

Second, overwhelmingly these plots are emanating from the 

homefront. All 25 terrorist plots involve a homegrown element, and 

since 9/11, 78 out of 89 terrorist plots have involved a homegrown 

terrorist. And importantly, ISIS has become the dominant 

influencer by far. At least 21 out of the 25 plots contained affiliation with, support for, or inspiration from ISIS. 

And the third trend I want to talk about is that the plots are becoming more dispersed across the U.S. and targeting a greater variety of targets. Looking at recent plots, 6 targeted military installations, 4 targeted law enforcement, 1 targeted a government building, 10 targeted public gatherings like malls, a beach, or bars, and 

4 targeted religious buildings or schools. 

In prior years, the military was the number one target, but lately 

these public mass gatherings of so-called soft targets have become 

the primary targets, and we have also seen an increase in attacks 

on law enforcement. 

Similarly, in prior years, the plots were generally clustered in 

the New York to Washington, D.C., corridor, but in the last year 

and a half, the target cities have widely ranged from Houston to 

San Bernardino, and from Chicago to the Florida Keys. 

These trends are clear: more threats, more from inside the 

United States, more related to ISIS, more dispersed, and, unfortunately, more successful and more deadly. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Given these trends, I would like to offer some thoughts on how 

we can stop these terrorists. At least 15 out of the 25 most recent 

plots were interdicted using sting-type law enforcement operations 

and confidential informants to unearth terrorist conspiracies. In 19 

out of the 25, law enforcement investigations of some kind were instrumental in detecting and stopping these attacks, while 5 were 

successful and only 1 was stopped by security officers on the scene. 

This trend leads to the conclusion that the U.S. has become and 

remains a relatively harder target for transnational terrorist operations than it was before 9/11. Yet we face a more active threat, 

an assessment that is confirmed by statements and reports by the 

FBI and the U.S. intelligence community. 

Our greatest asset in preventing terrorism has been and must 

continue to be Federal, State, and local law enforcement, as well 

as our intelligence communities, armed with the tools, information, 

and resources they need. Since 9/11, the U.S. has taken important 

steps in this direction, but we must continue to improve and refine 

these tools. 

This does not mean that our government can ignore our rights 

under the Constitution; every program and law must meet constitutional scrutiny. But this does mean that within the bounds of 

the Constitution, strong and proactive investigatory tools should be 

given to our security forces with careful oversight from all branches 

of government. In so doing, we can maximize both our security and 

our liberty, rather than trading one for the other. 

I look forward to discussing this with you more in our questions. 

Thank you. 

[Prepared statement of Mr. Inserra follows:] 


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TlieHefitage Foundation 

CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY 

"Staying Ahead of the lslamist Terrorist Threat: 

Assessing Future Domestic Counterterrorism Measures" 

Testimony before 

Subcommittee on National Security 

Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

United States House of Representatives 

September 14, 2016 

David Inserra 

Policy Analyst, Homeland Security and Cyber Policy, 

Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, 

The Heritage Foundation 

My name is David Inserra, and I am the Policy 

Analyst for Homeland Security and Cyber Policy at 

the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for 

National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage 

Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are 

my own and should not be construed as representing 

any official position of The Heritage Foundation. 

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the 

committee today to address this vital subject 15 years 

after that fateful day in September 2001. 

The best way to prevent more days like 9/11, San 

Bernardino, and Orlando, is to spend the days after 

the attack learning our lessons and preparing for 

what comes next-doing what we can to continue to 

keep this nation safe, free, and prosperous. In that 

respect, today's hearing is well-timed and important. 

In my testimony, I would like to address: 1) the 

evolving nature of the domestic Islamist terrorist 

threat; 2) guidelines for evaluating future 

counterterrorism measures; and 3) the efficacy of 

some measures that have been proposed related to 

countering terrorist activities, including: the mode of 

attack, the means of terrorist travel, and methods of 

terrorist radicalization. 

Homeland security has been a particular Heritage 

research priority since 9/1!. We produced the first 

major assessment of domestic security after 9111 and 

co-authored. along with the Center for Strategic and 

International Studies (CSIS), a major study that was 

used to guide the reorganization of the Department 

of Homeland Security.' Over the pas! decade and a 

half, we have assembled a robust, talented, and 

dedicated research team. I have had the honor and 

privilege of working with that team and for almost 

five years now. 

Heritage analysts have studied and written 

authoritatively on virtually every aspect of homeland 

security and homeland defense. The results of all our 

research are publicly available on the Heritage 

website at www.heritage.org. We have collaborated 

over the years with the homeland security research 

community, including RAND, CSIS, the Aspen 

Institute. the Center for National Policy, the Hudson 

Institute, the George Washington University 

Homeland Security Policy Institute, and the Strategic 

214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE • Washington, DC 20002 • (202) S46-4400 • heritage.org 
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CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY 

Studies Institute and Center for Strategic Leadership 

at the Army War College. Heritage analysts also 

serve on a variety of government advisory efforts, 

including study committees for the National 

Academies, the Department of Homeland Security's 

Homeland Security Advisory Council, and the 

Advisory Panel on Department of Defense 

Capabilities for Support of Civil Authorities. Our 

research programs are nonpartisan, dedicated to 

developing policy proposals that will best serve the 

nation. 

Our views reflect not just our own research but 

consultation with counterterrorism professionals 

across the United States and around the world. In the 

last year, Heritage analysts have conferred with 

experts and officials from Somalia to India and from 

Australia to Germany. 

I am particularly proud of The Heritage Foundation's 

long and substantive record of research on 

counterterrorism operation and combating lslamist 

influences. Among our most important reports were 

an assessment of the Administration's 

counterterrorism strategy in 2011; a global 

operational assessment of foreign fighters in 20 16; 

and a study on combating Islam ism worldwide in 

2016.2 This effort reflects the foundation's 

commitment to advancing public policies that 

enhance our security by thwarting terrorist travel; 

disrupting terrorist activities; encouraging economic 

growth by promoting the legitimate exchange of 

goods, peoples, services, and ideas among free 

nations; and fostering a free and open civil societyall at the same time. 

What's the State ofthe Threat? 

In the past year. Heritage has suggested Congress 

consider establishing another 9/1 1 Commission. A 

particular reason for that recommendation is that 

America no longer faces the terrorists of 9/11. Even 

before the attacks on Paris, San Bernardino, 

Brussels, Orlando, and Nice there was plenty to 

suggest the face of the gioballslamist insurgency 

had come to look very different from what 

confronted the world over a decade ago. The list of 

what has changed is quite long, from ISIS getting its 

own state to the presence of al-Qaeda on the Internet. 

And now we must answer new questions-like how 

to handle terrorist travel in an age of refugees and 

foreign fighters. 3 

A challenge in assessing the face of modern 

terrorism is that it has many faces. ISIS is a case in 

point. Although ISIS has a global presence, it 

manifests itself in many different forms in different 

places. 

In Iraq and Syria, as you well know, ISIS 

rules as virtually a state actor. 

In parts of Western Europe, ISIS plugs into 

a standing, well-established extremist 

network which in part predates 9/11 and 

extends across several countries. In 

Belgium, for example, extremist roots go 

back to the 1 990s when extremists helped 

organize material support for Groupe 

lslamique Arme, Algerian terrorists aiming 

to establish an Islamic state in Algeria. In 

recent years this has been supplemented by 

foreign fighters and extremists returning 

from the Middle East traveling to the region 

and plugging in to existing terrorist 

infrastructure. 

Other parts of the world lock very different. 

In Trinidad, in the Caribbean, the ISIS cause 

has been adopted by local lslamist criminal 

cartels. 

In India, small disparate groups and 

individuals claim to be acting in sympathy 

with the ISIS agenda. 

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, splinter groups 

of the Taliban have used a declared 

affiliation to ISIS as means to demonstrate 

their independence. 

In Indonesia and Malaysia, ISIS has tried to 

infiltrate, influence, transform. or supplant 

established lslamist groups with varying 

degrees of success. 

In Australia, ISIS has tried to use foreign 

fighters from the country to reach back to 

extremist elements in Australia encourage 

and organize terrorist acts. 

In Hong Kong, small self-radicalized groups 

of individuals have taken up the ISIS cause. 

In April 2015. for example, ISIS recruited 

Indonesian domestic helpers in Hong Kong 

2 
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CONGRESSIONAl TESTIMONY 

to help funnel foreign fighters into 

Syria/Iraq. 

In parts of North Africa, established terrorist 

organizations have entered into tonnal 

partnership and coordination with ISIS. In 

places, such as Yemen and Libya, ISIS has 

attempted to build up its own presence. 

The U.S. has a unique terrorist profile all of its own. 

In part, my assessment of the threat to the U.S. is 

drawn from a database and timeline maintained by 

The Heritage Foundation that tracks known lslamistrelated terrorist plots aimed at the United States since 

9111 according to publicly available records4 The 

list does not include activities that are merely linked 

to terrorism (such as traveling abroad to join a 

terrorist organization); each plot requires some threat 

directed at the U.S. homeland. Additionally, the 

primary motivation of the terror plot or attack must 

be a radical Islamist ideology, which supports the 

use of violence as a means to achieve long-run 

lslamist objectives such as imposing Islamic law, 

i.e., sharia. 

Currently, foundation analysts have identified 89 

plots between October 2001 and today. That is a 

large enough data set for credible trend analysis on 

the character of the threat. One of the clearest trends 

is that the threat profile in the U.S. has shifted 

significantly in the last half-decade. 

First, the frequency of plots has dramatically 

increased. There have been 25 successful or 

interrupted terrorist plots in the U.S. since the start of 

2015. 

Second, plots overwhelmingly are emanating from 

the home front. Twenty-four out of25 involved 

American nationals. All involved a homegrown 

element. 

Third, ISIS has become the most dominant 

influencer-by far. At least 21 out of 25 contained 

affiliation/support for/inspiration from iSiS. 

Fourth, the threat is getting deadlier. Five out of the 

11 successfullslamist-related terrorist attacks have 

been in the last fourteen months, resulting in the 

greatest loss of life from lslamist terrorism on U.S. 

soil since 9/11. 

The trends are clear-more threats, more from inside 

America, more related to ISIS, more deadly. This 

appears to be consistent with the trends we are 

seeing with material support activities as well. 

Beyond these trends there remains, however, an 

admixture of plots--different attack modes, targets, 

levels of sophistication, geography, histories of 

radicalization, and types of individuals. For example, 

looking at recent plots: six targeted military 

installations; four targeted law enforcement; one 

targeted a government building; ten targeted public 

gatherings like malls, a beach, or bars; and four 

targeted religious buildings or schools. 

Where in previous years plots were clustered in the 

New York-Washington, DC corridor, they are now 

more dispersed nationally. Overwhelmingly, 

terrorists plot attacks nearby their residence. There 

are not identifiable patterns of terrorist hot spots. 

Rather than evolving terror networks, 

operationalizing terrorist activities is occurring by 

individuals or in small groups with a variety of links 

to extremist individuals and groups, most but not 

always in their communities. 

The distinction between "lone wolf' and other small 

groups organizing attacks I find unhelpful as an 

organizing principle for counterterrorism operations. 

There are few truly lone-wolf-type actors, akin to 

Theodore John Kaczynski (the Unabomber), a 

domestic terrorist who lived and operated virtually 

"off-the-grid" for two decades. Most terrorist attacks, 

including the most recent act in Orlando, involved 

contact with other individuals. Where there is contact 

and activity, there is a potential to appropriately use 

legitimate law enforcement and intelligence means to 

uncover terrorist conspiracies. 

In summary, the modem American lslamist terrorist 

comes from a diverse and somewhat small group. 

The total number of plotters totaled about 200 

individuals. Recent cases of material support for 

terrorist activity total probably about several hundred 

more (though admittedly it has been difficult to 

develop a definitive accurate number). 

The role of the Internet and social networking is 

difficult to fully assess. Without question, these 

individuals use the digital platforms like many others 

interested in extremist content. Terrorists use the 

Internet just like the rest of us. We don't see them 

inventing new uses; what they are doing in many 

cases is adapting practices pioneered in commerce, 

3 
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CONGRESSIONAl TESTIMONY 

politics, and entertainment. Terrorists use the 

Internet for a range of activities from fund raising, to 

propaganda, recruiting, intelligence gathering. 

surveillance, and operational planning. Like 

teenagers and criminals when they want to have a 

conversation that no one can hear, they move to 

encrypted technologies or the "dark" web, employing 

online sites, services, and databases that are not 

indexed by conventional web search engines and 

generally require special, though publically 

available, software to use. 

But whether the Internet plays a significant or 

determinant role in radicalization and 

operationalizing terrorist intent is debatable and 

certainly varies from case to case. 

The ambivalent role of social networks in fostering 

domestic terrorism reflects the trends seen in other 

countries. One key variable appears to be the extent 

of human networks on the ground where extremist 

social networks are prevalent. Where there is a 

human web to encourage, inspire and guide through 

the radicalization process, the impact of the Internet 

seems to very more powerful and influential. Where 

there is less of a supporting group of individuals the 

material appears to stimulate more interest than 

action. 5 

What Works in Preventing Terrorist Acts? 

The Heritage Foundation database and timeline are 

also helpful in understanding what contributes to 

effectively interdicting potential terrorist attacks on 

the U.S. homeland. For example, in recent attacks we 

concluded that at least 15 out of 25 were interdicted 

by using "sting" type law enforcement operations to 

uncover terrorist conspiracies. In 19 out of25, law 

enforcement investigations, including stings, were 

instrumental in detecting and stopping attacks. 

This trend leads to the conclusion that the U.S. has 

become and remains a relatively harder target for 

transnational terrorist operations than it was before 

9111. Even with the dramatic rise of the global 

!slamist terrorist expansion and the proliferation of 

foreign fighter pipelines over the last half-decade, 

foundation analysts have not identified any 

organized !SIS-related elements traveling to the 

United States and organizing terrorist plots here. 

Trends suggest that traditional law enforcement and 

intelligence counterterrorism methods, particularly 

where local, state, federal, and international partners 

work well together and share information are the 

most reliable and consistent means to stop terrorist 

plots. 

An assessment of the Heritage data is consistent with 

the findings of a congressionally directed assessment 

last year of the FBI's performance on 

counterterrorism which had generally positive, albeit 

not wholly uncritical findings.' On the other hand, 

where best practices and integrated effort are not 

achieved, as in the case of the findings of a House 

Homeland Security report last year on foreig~ 

fighters and terronst travel, gaps are created. 

Where Do We Go from Here? 

Trend analysis suggests a manner to examine the 

terrorist plots we face-and determine what 

additional measures might be taken or modified to 

better prepare U.S. law enforcement to preempt 

terrorist attacks. The question to be asked is: What 

does an attack like that which occurred in Orlando 

tell us about our understanding of the threat or the 

nature of countermeasures that we didn't know 

before the attack? That is the right metric for 

determining if additional counterterrorism activities 

would be efficacious in addressing the dangers we 

are seeing. 

No counterterrorism is risk free from the perspective 

of looking for the right combination of law 

enforcement and intelligence techniques where the 

effort is to continually seek to maximize the goals of 

increasing security, protecting individual freedom, 

and sustaining an open and prosperous society. 

Developing these measures requires deliberate, sober 

judgments-resisting the impulse to just do 

something. 

From a countermeasure perspective, unquestionably 

the most effective terrorist countenneasures are those 

that stop the terrorists before they attack. When 

laymen debate counterterrorism they often fixate on 

the mode of attack (e.g., car bomb or a dirty bomb) 

and the target (e.g., a shopping mall or the Super 

Bowl). This rivets attention on a small percentage of 

terrorist activity-the part that looks different. The 

probability for interdicting terrorist activity is far 

greater by focusing on the high percentage of 

terrorist activity that looks the same, including 

terrorist travel, recruiting, planning, fund raising, 

logistics, operational planning, intelligence 

gathering, training, rehearsal, equipping, and 

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reconnaissance. All these preparatory steps to a 

terrorist attack (even by a lone wolf) are common to 

most of the terrorist plots seen in the U.S., although 

how these actual steps are taken will vary. The most 

effective counterterrorism and intelligence programs 

focus on identifying the persons associated with 

these activities. 

With that perspective in mind, let us tum to three 

frequently raised proposed areas for additional 

countermeasures: the mode of attack, the means of 

terrorist travel, and the methods of terrorist 

radicalization. 

Mode of Attack. Preventing terrorist access to 

weapons is often suggested as a means of reducing 

risk. Since the inception of the national homeland 

security enterprise, the guiding principle has been to 

adopt a risk-management approach----evaluating 

criticality, vulnerability, and threat to make a 

determination of what measures are most efficacious, 

efficient, and cost-effective. 

Risk management is much more than just looking at 

vulnerably. In a free and open society of almost 320 

million in a country the size of a continent, 

Americans face almost infinite vulnerabilities. That 

docs not mean Americans face unlimited risk. Other 

factors also have to be considered. The odds of being 

killed in a terrorist attack have been calculated at 

about one in 22 million. That doesn't mean terrorism 

is not a threat. It is. Terrorists attack our humanitynot just humans. Terrorism is an attack on our 

society and must be taken seriously. 

On the other hand, we don't make Americans more 

safe and secure by undermining their freedoms and 

liberty. Risk -management helps us plot the best 

course. 

The use of weapons in terrorist attacks is a case in 

point. Guns, of course, are used in armed attacks 

(also called mass shootings). This is not a new tactic. 

Increasingly, since the horrific terrorist attack in 

Mumbai, India, in 2008 we have seen terror groups 

emulate versions of this tactic-most recently in the 

Paris terrorist attack in 2015, and in the U.S. in San 

Bernardino and Orlando. U.S. law enforcement 

should be preparin,f to take measures to respond to 

this kind of threat. But guns, just like planes, 

fertilizers, pressure cookers, oxygen bottles, nails, 

and many other instruments of everyday life are used 

by many Americans for all kinds of reasons. The best 

approach, as with all possible modes of terrorism is 

take a risk-managed approach. 

The key measures currently used regarding firearms 

involve screening using various federal databases.' 

As the committee well knows, the Terrorism 

Screening Database (TSDB) is the official name for 

"Terrorist Watchlist" and is maintained by the FBI's 

Terrorist Screening Center (TSC). The TSDB is the 

U.S.'s central repository offoreign and domestic 

known and suspected terrorists. It receives names of 

international terrorists from the Terrorist Identities 

Datamart Environment (TIDE), which is maintained 

by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in 

connection with the U.S. intelligence community and 

security agencies that have information on terrorists. 

It also receives data on domestic terrorists from the 

FBI. 

To get on the TSDB, U.S. officials nominate an 

individual whom they have "reasonable suspicion" 

of being engaged in or aiding terrorist activities. 

There must also be a sufficient level of identifying 

information to include an individual on the list. 

The TSDB only includes information used to 

identify terrorists. The TSDB itself does not include 

classilied information on terrorists regarding what 

they have done and how we have been tracking 

them. This classified information is maintained in the 

TIDE for foreign terrorists and the FBI for domestic 

terrorists. 

From the TSDB, more specific lists are created for 

different purposes. For example the No Fly and 

Selectee lists are used to prevent individuals from 

travelling or for subjecting them to greater scrutiny. 

To be included on the No Fly or Selectee List 

additional evidence of their threat to aviation security 

and clear identifYing information is needed above 

and beyond the reasonable suspicion standard. 

Another list extracted from the TSDB is the Known 

and Appropriately Suspected, or KST, file. To be 

included on the KST file, clear identifying 

information is needed. The KST is queried by the 

National Instant Criminal Background Check System 

(NICS) that is used to check firearms purchases. 

Inclusion on the KST does not itself prevent a gun 

purchase, but flags the purchase for further review. 

The purchase is allowed so long as the individual is 

not a felon, mentally ill, a fugitive from justice, an 

illegal immigrant, or prohibited from making gun 

purchases for another statutory reason. 

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CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY 

If the system can be strengthened, it might well be 

better to focus on the person, rather than guns. 

Agencies might review the process of how they 

assess information, make determinations. and share 

data (such as investigative officials if an individual 

on the KST file applies to purchase a firearm). Such 

efforts might not deliver the satisfaction of 

congressional Members being able to declare " I 

voted to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists," but 

it might add real value to the current system more 

effectively than trying to craft a ban not prone to 

abuse or legal challenges. 

In addition, mass shootings in busy areas will always 

be a threat given America's free society. A 

responsible measure would be to expand active 

shooter threat training across the countty. Since state 

and local law enforcement officers will be the first to 

respond, training for active shooter events should be 

expanded through existing programs such as the 

Active Shooter Threat Training program and 

corresponding instructor training program. 

Beyond that measure, ensuring the FBI more readily 

and regularly shares information with state and local 

law enforcement, treating state and local partners as 

critical actors in the fight against terrorism, remains 

vitally important. State, local, and private-sector 

partners must send and receive timely information 

from the FBI. Despite the lessons of9/ll and other 

terrorist plots, the culture of the FBI continues to 

resist sharing information with state and local law 

enforcement. 

Means of Terrorist Travel. General bans on 

international travel are also frequently suggested in 

the wake of terrorist attacks, whether or not an 

element of international travel was involved. While 

it makes perfect sense to develop policies, 

procedures, and tools to prevent terrorists from 

exploiting legal authorities for international travel, 

general bans on specific populations as a tool to 

prevent terrorist travel have not proven effective. 

Studies of terrorist travel since 9111 demonstrate that 

terrorists have sought to exploit every means of 

international travel, legal and illegal. 10 In addition, 

since known and suspected terrorists travel in such 

small numbers it is difficult, if not impossible, to 

identity a specific group to exclude from 

international travel that makes sense as a tool of 

effective counterterrorism. 

Again, the best measures would focus on the 

individuals rather than classes of people. This is one 

of the potential advantages, for instance, of the Visa 

Waiver Program (VWP), which provides more 

relevant information on business and tourist travels 

than the visa process over larger numbers of travel, 

far more efticiently. VWP, if implemented correctly, 

can be a very effective tool for identifying 

prospective security risks, including known and 

suspected terrorists. The Visa Waiver Program 

provides a cost-effective and efficient means to 

capture more useful data on travelers in real time. 

The Administration should be a much stronger and 

effective steward of the program, ensuring that the 

information sharing provisions are rigorously 

enforced." 

Rather than look at new restrictions, the 

Administration and Congress might look to how it 

could practically move more countries under the 

VWP regime. In addition, Congress and the 

Administration must redouble their efforts to ensure 

the program is properly run and punish countries that 

are not complying. 

From a larger perspective, integrating combatting 

terrorist travel within the larger context of the 

national counterterrorism effort is vital. The U.S. 

must maintain essential counterterrorism tools. 

Support for important investigative tools is essential 

to maintaining the security of the U.S. and 

combating terrorist threats. Legitimate government 

surveillance programs are also a vital component of 

U.S. national security and should be allowed to 

continue. The need for effective counterterrorism 

operations, however, does not relieve the 

government of its obligation to follow the law and 

respect individual privacy and liberty. 

Methods of Terrorist Radicalization, One of the 

responses to the Orlando shooting has been a call to 

ramp up Countering Violent Extremism programs 

(CVE). While such programs are correct to focus on 

preventing terrorism, they face significant 

challenges. U.S. The size of the radicalized 

population in the United States attempting terrorist 

attacks is small. Individuals radicalize for different, 

often complex reasons. Law enforcement is generally 

better offtargeting suspected individuals with 

traditional counterterrorism and law enforcement 

methods. 

That said, the U.S. should not reject counterradicalization programs out of hand. Programs 

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CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY 

would have to be narrowly targeted, clearly defined, 

with clear goals and metrics of effectiveness and 

responsible oversight. Such efforts only warrant the 

attention of counterterrorism officials if the threat is 

a clear national security priority. Generic CVE 

programs make no sense. Islamist terrorism is the 

only form of terrorist threat today that rises to the 

level of a national security threat. Any program, if 

truly needed, should be limited to lslamist-related 

terrorist activity and focused on diminishing the 

threat of terrorist activity as defined by statute (as 

opposed to any other form of public activity or 

expression). Such programs should be focused to 

deal with particular threats as opposed to a general 

information campaign with appropriate review and 

sunset provisions to ensure the programs are used 

only as long as they effectively support law 

enforcement activity and are needed. 12 

More important efforts are community outreach 

programs as they remain a vital tool in helping 

communities deal with radicalizing individuals .. The 

U.S. should facilitate strong community outreach 

that empowers community policing and intelligenceled policing practices. Such capabilities are key to 

building trust in local communities, especially in 

high-risk areas. 

Next Steps 

In light of the ongoing terrorist threat, the most 

important for this committee and Congress to 

remember is that just doing something won't make 

America safer. Doing the right thing will. That 

means improving and expanding information sharing 

arrangements with partners around the world as well 

as between local law enforcement and the federal 

government. Whenever Congress is considering 

counterterrorism policies , it must makes sure that 

the steps it takes improve our ability to detect, 

investigate, and stop terrorism before it strikes. And 

that is the best way to stay one step ahead of the 

enemy. 

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today on this 

important issue. I look forward to your questions. 

******************* 

The Heritage Foundation is a public policy, research, and educational organization recognized as exempt under 

section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It is privately supported and receives no funds from any 

government at any level, nor does it perform any government or other contract work. 

The Heritage Foundation is the most broadly supported think tank in the United States. During 2014, it had 

hundreds of thousands of individual, foundation, and corporate supporters representing every state in the U.S. Its 

2014 income came from the following sources: 

Individuals 75% 

Foundations 12% 

Corporations 3% 

Program revenue and other income 1 0% 

The top five corporate givers provided The Heritage Foundation with 2% of its 2014 income. The Heritage 

Foundation's books are audited annually by the national accounting firn1 ofRSM US, LLP. 

Members of The Heritage Foundation staff testify as individuals discussing their own independent research. The 

views expressed are their own and do not reflect an institutional position for The Heritage Foundation or its board 

of trustees. 

1 L. Paul Bremer Ill and Edwin Meese Ill, "Defending the American Homeland: A Report of the Heritage 

Foundation Homeland Security Task Force" (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 2002); james jay 

Carafano, Ph.D. and David Heyman, "DHS 2.0: Rethinking the Department of Homeland Security" (Washington, 

D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 2004). 

2 The Heritage Foundation Counterterrorism Task Force, "A Counterterrorism Strategy for the "Next Wave," 

Heritage Foundation Special Report No. 98, August 24, 2011, at 

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http:/ fwww.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/08/a-counterterrorism-strategy-for-the-next-wave; Lisa 

Curtis, Charlotte Florance, Walter Lohman and James Phillips, Pursuing a Freedom Agenda Amidst Rising Global 

lslamism, Heritage Foundation Special Report No. 159, November 17, 2014, at 

http: I fwww.heritage.org/research/reports/20 14 I 11 /pursuing -a-freedom-agenda-amidst -rising-globalislarnism; 

Lisa Curtis, Luke Coffey, David Inserra, Daniel Kochis, Walter Lohman, joshua Meservey, james Phillips and Robin 

Simcox, "Combatting the ISIS Foreign Fighter Pipeline: A Global Approach," Heritage Foundation Special Report 

No. 180, january 6, 2016 at http:/ jwww.heritage.org/researchjreports/2016/01/combatting-the-isis-foreignfighter-pipeline-a-global-approach. 

'james jay Carafano, "Why a New 9/11 Commission Is Needed," The National Interest, December 15, 2015 at 

http:/ /nationalinterest.org/featurejwhy-new-9-11-commission-needed-14 731. 

4 Available at http:/ /dailysign.al/ltoppGf. All the statistics provided below are drawn from an analysis of this 

data. 

5 james jay Carafano, "Social Media and Terrorism," The Cipher Brief, October 15, 2015, at 

https:/ /thecipherbrief.com/artic!e/socia!-media-and-terrorism. 

'Report of the Congressionally-directed 9/11 Review Commission, The FBI: Protecting the Homeland in the 21st 

Century, March 2015, https:j jwww.fbi.gov /stats-services/publications/protecting-the-homeland-in-the-21stcentury. 

'Homeland Security Committee, Final Report of the Task Force on Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter 

Travel, 

September 2015, at https:/ /homeland.house.gov /wp-contentjuploads/2015 /09 /TaskForceFinaiReport.pdf. 

'james jay Carafano, "Lessons from Mumbai: Assessing Armed Assault Threats to the United States," Heritage 

Foundation BackgrounderNo. 2219, December 10, 2008, at 

http:/ jwww.heritage.orgjresearchjreports/2008/12/lessons-from-mumbai-assessing-armed-assault-threats-tothe-united-states. 

9 David Inserra, "The Terrorist Watch List, Explained," The Daily Signal, june 14,2016, 

http:/ I dailysignal.com/2 016 I 06 I 14 /the-terrorist -watchlist -explained/. 

"James jay Carafano, "How To Stop Terrorist Travel," Forbes, November 23, 2015 at 

http: I fwww.forbes.com I sites fjamescarafano /2 015 I 11/23 /how-to-stop-terrorist -travel/# 1 70 31 d0a36a0. 

11 See, for example, comments on the recent GAO report on VWP at 

http:/ /dailysignal.com/2016/06/16/visa-waiver-program-shortcomings-and-successes/ 

12 David Inserra and Robin Simcox, "How to Turn Countering Violent Extremism Into Combating Islamist 

Terrorism," The Daily Signal, july 8, 2016, http:/ jdailysignal.com/2016/07 /08/how-to-turn-countering-violentextremism-into-combating-islamist-terrorismf. 

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37 

Mr. DESANTIS. I thank the gentleman. 

The chair now recognizes Mr. Cohen for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF RICHARD COHEN 

Mr. COHEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor to have the 

opportunity to testify before the subcommittees this afternoon. 

9/11 was the Pearl Harbor of our time. The anniversary that we 

just commemorated of that horrible day serves as a reminder of the 

continuing threat of terrorism associated with radical forms of 

Islam. But as members of these subcommittees know well, our 

country faces deadly threats from those blinded by racial and ethnic hatred, as well as rage at our government. Because the 9/11 attacks were so unexpected, so spectacular, and so deadly, however, 

these latter threats have not always been given the attention they 

deserve in the years since 9/11. 

The clearest example of this point comes from the history of the 

Domestic Terrorism Task Force the Justice Department established 

after the deadly Oklahoma City bombing. The task force was scheduled to have one of its monthly regular meetings on 9/11. But not 

only was that meeting cancelled, the task force didn’t meet again 

for 13 years as the threat associated with groups like Al Qaeda 

came to dominate the government’s attention. 

During this period, the number of hate and conspiracy-minded 

antigovernment groups skyrocketed, and the level of violence from 

the radical rightincreased by a factor of four. By 2014, State and 

local law enforcement agencies were actually more likely to see 

antigovernment extremism as a threat than extremism connected 

with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. 

For the last 8 years, President Obama has been a lightning rod 

for the radical right. He reflects our country’s changing diversity 

and has been a target of the backlash to that change. The day after 

he was first elected, Stormfront, the world’s leading neo-Nazi Web 

site, whose members have committed numerous murders, reported 

that it was getting six times its normal traffic. 

Yet, when DHS released a report assessing the likely backlash 

to the election of our first Black President, the reaction from 

groups like the American Legion and Members of Congress was so 

fierce that the report was withdrawn and the DHS unit that produced the report was allowed to whither. 

In 2014, the Justice Department finally revised the Domestic 

Terrorism Task Force after a White supremist, Glenn Miller, killed 

three people in Overland Park, Kansas, who he thought were Jewish. 

But still there are indications that the threat of terrorism associated with groups like ISIS dominates the government’s thinking. 

The Oklahoma City bombing was the first terrorist incident that 

President Obama mentioned in his speech at the White House 

Summit on Countering Violent Extremism in 2015, but it was virtually the only mention of terrorism from the radical right during 

the entire summit. 

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, a young man who appears to 

have been radicalized entirely online in the echo chambers of the 

radical right, killed nine people in an historic African American 

church in Charleston, South Carolina. Yet, 2 weeks after the masVerDate Nov 24 2008 11:20 Jul 17, 2017 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00043 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\26122.TXT APRIL

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sacre, the House Homeland Security Committee released a terror 

threat snapshot that didn’t mention the church killings. 

Congress has held multiple hearings, as it should, on the threat 

of terrorism associated with groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, but 

neither the House nor the Senate has held hearings recently on the 

threat of terrorism from the radical right. Nor have the House or 

Senate held hearings on the threat of terrorism directed at law enforcement officials by antigovernment zealots such as the Bundys. 

By focusing exclusively on Muslim American communities, CVE, 

or countering violent extremism programs, not only ignore potential threats from other communities, they often fray the bonds of 

trust between law enforcement and the Muslim American communities that are so essential to effective law enforcement. The nature 

of many of the CVE programs exacerbates this tension. 

Again, the threat of extremist violence from groups and individuals associated with or inspired by ISIS is perhaps the most significant one that we face, but it is not the only threat that merits the 

full measure of our attention. 

Terrorism from the radical right has been with us since the days 

of the Ku Klux Klan, which was born after the Civil War. In recent 

years it has been driven by a backlash to our country’s changing 

demographics and rage at our own government. As our country’s 

diversity continues to increase, the forces that propel terror from 

the radical right are likely to increase as well. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

[Prepared statement of Mr. Cohen follows:] 


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Testimony of J. Richard Cohen 

President, Southern Poverty Law Center 

before the 

Subcommittees on National Security and Government Operations 

Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Radicalization in the U.S and the Rise of Terrorism 

September 14,2016 

My name is Richard Cohen. I am an attorney and the president of the Southern Poverty Law 

Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization founded in I 971. For more than three decades, we have 

been monitoring, issuing reports about, and training law enforcement officials on far-right extremist 

activity in the United States. I have served on the Department of Homeland Security's Countering 

Violent Extremism Working Group and have testified on terrorism issues before the House 

Committee on Homeland Security and the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, 

Federal Rights and Federal Courts. I am honored to appear before you today. 

I'd like to make three points this afternoon. 

First, our country faces serious threats of terrorism associated with a variety of ideologies. 

Although the threat associated with radical or perverse forms oflslam may be the most serious, it is 

by no means the only threat that confronts our nation. 

Second, we must ensure that the government's attention to the threat associated with radical 

forms of Islam does not cause it to fail to devote the resources necessary to combat extremism 

associated with other ideologies. 

Third, we must recognize that stigmatizing Muslims will fray the bonds of trust between 

their communities and the police that are so essential to effective law enforcement. 

We Face Serious Threats of Terrorism Associated with a Variety ofldeologies 

9111 was the Pearl Harbor of our time. The devastating attacks led to the creation of the 

Department of Homeland Security and focused the nation's attention on the threat associated with 

radical or perverse forms of Islam. As the Obama Administration has emphasized, potential 

terrorism from those affiliated with or inspired by groups such as al Qaeda (and now ISIS) 

"represent[s] the preeminent threat to our country."1 The June 12 attack that left 49 innocent souls 

dead at an Orlando gay bar is a grim reminder of this fact as well as the frequency with which the 

LGBT community is targeted for hate crimes.2 

1 Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States at 2, The White House, Aug. 2011. 2 Haeyoun Park and laryna Mykhyalyshyn, "L.G.B.T. People Are More Likely to be Targets of Hate Crimes Than Any 

Other Minority Group," The Nr?W York Times, June 16, 2016, at 

http://www .nytimes.com/interactive/20 16/06/16/uslhate-crimes-against -lgbt.html? r=O. 

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As the members of the subcommittees know, however, our country faces serious threats 

from other sources as well. The death toll in our country from terrorism associated with radical 

forms oflslam since the start of2001 has been far higher than that from the radical right; however, 

the number of homicidal incidents actually has been greater from the latter source. In a study 

released in March, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism 

found that between 1990 and 2014, far-right domestic extremists were responsible for four times as 

many ideologically based homicidal incidents as extremists associated with a! Qaeda and related 

movements? During the 2005-2014 period, the ratio was 3-to-1. In a nationwide survey conducted 

in 2014 by Duke University's Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, state and local 

law enforcement agencies were more likely to see antigovernment extremism as a threat than 

extremism connected withal Qaeda or likeminded terrorist organizations.• 

The number of hate groups - organizations that vilify entire groups of people based on their 

race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or some other characteristic and that may provide 

inspiration or justification for radical-right violence nearly doubled during a 1 0-year span, from 

457 in 1999 to 926 in 2008. This growth continued during the first two years of the Obama 

Administration, to a record 1,018 groups in 2011. In our view, the most important factor driving the 

increase has been a backlash against our country's changing demographics. 

For many on the radical right, President Obama- our nation's first president of colorrepresents the kind of"change" they fear. The day after President Obama was first elected, 

Stormfront a popular neo-Nazi web forum whose members have been responsible for many 

deadly attacks (see below)- reported that it was getting six times its normal traffic. "There are a lot 

of angry White people out there looking for answers," added the Stormftont publisher, a former 

Alabama Klan leader.5 

To many on the radical right, President Obama is a Kenyan-born, secret Muslim- a fifth 

columnist. Many in the conservative mainstream, unfortunately, have contributed to this perception. 

Incendiary rhetoric in the political sphere is not without consequences. According to a 2012 study 

by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 

[C]ontentious and conservative political environments as well as political empowerment arc 

positively associated with the volume of [far right] violence; thus, it is not only feelings of 

deprivation that motivate those involved in far right violence, but also the sense of 

empowerment that emerges when the political system is perceived to be increasingly 

permissive to far right ideas. 6 

3 Twenty-Five Years of Ideological Homicide Victimization in the United States of America, Report to the Office of 

University Programs, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, March 2016, at 

http://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START CSTAB ECDB 25YearsofldeologicalHomicideVictimizationUS March2016. 

ru!f. 

4 The Challenge and Promise of Using Community Police Strategies to Prevent Violent Extremism, at 21, 63 Triangle 

Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, Duke University, Jan. 2016. The authors note that the "survey was 

conducted in early 2014, so it is possible that police perceptions may have been impacted by events that have taken 

flace since then." ld at 21. 

Stonnfront website, at https://www.stonnfront.org/forumlt52!647/. 6 Arie Perliger, Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America ·s Violent Far-Right at 5, Combating Terrorism 

Center at West Point, Nov. 2012, at httn:!lwww.ctc.usma.edu/wpcontentluploads/20 13/0 I /ChallengersFromtheSidelines.pdf. 

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Although the growth in the number of hate groups began before President Obama took 

office, his election did coincide with another phenomenon: the dramatic resurgence of a far-right 

antigovernment movement, a movement that has engaged in armed confrontations with law 

enforcement officials in recent years. This movement emerged in its current form during the 1990s 

in response to federal gun control measures and the deadly standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco. It 

comprises hundreds of armed militias and other organizations that typically subscribe to a 

hodgepodge of antigovernment conspiracy theories, including the belief that U.S. political and 

economic elites are part of international conspiracy to create a one-world government known as the 

"New World Order." It also includes so-called "sovereign citizens," who have committed a variety 

of violent acts and believe that they are exempt from federal and state laws.7 Many of the beliefs 

prevalent in the antigovernment movement are rooted in the racist, anti-Semitic ideology that 

animated the Posse Comitatus (Latin for "power of the county") in the 1970s. 

In the 1990s, this movement produced numerous acts and plots of domestic terrorism 

targeting federal officials and facilities. These include a failed attempt to blow up an IRS building in 

Reno, Nevada, with an ammonium nitrate bomb; an arson attack on an IRS building in Colorado 

Springs; a planned invasion of Fort Hood in Texas to slaughter foreign troops that extremists 

believed to be stationed there; a plot to blow up the FBI's fingerprint records center in West 

Virginia; and scores of others. 8 The deadliest, of course, was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. 

Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and injured nearly 700. 

As a result of law enforcement crackdowns and other factors, the radical antigovernment 

movement went into a steep decline after the Oklahoma City bombing and remained largely 

moribund until President Obama was elected. In 1996, we counted 858 conspiracy-minded 

antigovemment groups; in 2008, 149. But by 2012, we counted 1,360 such groups, an increase of 

more than 800 percent. Among the factors contributing to this surge has been the perception - one 

that surfaced even before President Obama was inaugurated- that his Administration would push 

gun control measures similar to the Brady Bill and the ban on assault weapons that were passed 

during the Clinton Administration.9 

As the number of radical-right groups has increased in recent years, so has the level of 

violence. The 2012 study by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center found that right-wing 

violence in the 2000-2011 period surpassed that of the 1990s by a factor of four. 10 In one plot, ncoNazi Kevin Harpham hid a bomb packed with rat poison-coated fishing weights in a backpack along 

the route of the MLK Day Parade in Spokane in January 2011. Harpham rigged the bomb to 

7 "Sovereign Citizens: A Growing Domestic Threat to Law Enforcement," FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, 

Counterterrorism Analysis Section, September 2011, at https://leb.fbi.gov/2011/september/sovereign-citizens-agrowing-domestic-threat-to-law-enforcement. 

8 For a list ofradica1-right terrorist incidents since the Oklahoma City bombing, see Terror ji·om the Right, Southern 

Poverty Law Center, at https://www.splcenter.org/20 100 126/terror-right. 9 Brian Montopoli, "NRA Begins Push to Tarnish Obama on Guns," CBS News.com, Sept. 23, 2008, at 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nra-begins-push-to-tarnish-obama-on-guns/; Donna Leinwand, "Record Number of 

Anti-Government Militias in USA," USA Today, March 5, 2013, at 

http://www. usatoday.com/story/news/nation/20 13/03/05/southern -povertv-law-center-militias-gun-control/19644 J 1/. 10 Arie Perliger, Challengers jrom the Sidelines: Understanding America's Violent Far-Right at 87, Combating 

Terrorism Center at West Point, Nov. 2012. 

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detonate with a remote car starter device he had in his pocket. When the suspicious backpack was 

spotted, the MLK parade was rerouted and a bomb squad deactivated the weapon. 

The number of organized hate and radical antigovernment groups has declined in the last 

few years (to 892 and 998, respectively); however, the level of activity from both of these sectors 

has not significantly diminished. Much of the activity in the white supremacist sector has migrated 

to the web, where extremists can disseminate and absorb propaganda and connect with other 

extremists in relative anonymity. Since President Obama was elected, for example, the number of 

registered members on Stormfront, perhaps the most important neo-Nazi web forum in the world, 

has more than doubled and now stands at over 300,000. In addition to its registered members, the 

site attracts millions of visitors who are fed a steady stream of crude racist and anti-Semitic vitriol. 

The level and threat of violence from the radical right also remains high, and much of it 

comes from "lone wolves"- persons who may be inspired by, or who justify their violence on the 

basis of, ideological extremism. Last year, we issued a study- The Age of the Wolf- that found that 

46 of 63 domestic terror incidents (74%) culled from academic databases and our own research files 

over the previous six years were the work of a single person. Ninety percent were the work of no 

more than two people. 11 A 2014 DHS intelligence assessment noted a "spike within the past year in 

violence committed by militia extremists and lone offenders who hold violent anti-government 

beliefs." 12 In February 2015, DHS warned of attacks by sovereign citizens, citing 24 acts of 

ideology-based violence, threats or plots (mostly against law enforcement targets) since 2010. 13 

Antigovernment extremists have killed at least 10 law enforcement officers in recent years. 

As we saw this summer, lone-wolf terrorism is not solely the province of white supremacists 

or those who adhere to radical forms of Islam. Micah Johnson, the heavily armed sniper who 

murdered five law enforcement officers in Dallas on July 7, had demonstrated on his Facebook page 

an affinity for three hate groups- the New Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and the Black 

Riders Liberation Party- that espouse black nationalism. Gavin Long, who killed three police 

officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge on July 17, claimed membership in an obscure, 

African-American branch of the sovereign citizen movement. 

Extremist websites serve as incubators and provide justification for violence. Our 2014 

report on Stormfront showed that its registered users have committed numerous murders in recent 

years. 14 Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people in 2011 because he 

thought they were enabling Muslim immigration, was the most deadly Stormfront user. Richard 

Poplawski, who killed three law enforcement officers in Pittsburgh in 2009, was another Stormfront 

poster. 

Stormfront is merely one example of web forums that promote racial hatred. Frazier Glenn 

Miller, the former neo-Nazi leader who killed three people he mistook for Jews in Overland Park, 

11 The Age of the Wolf Southern Poverty Law Center, Feb. 12, 2015, at http://www.splcenter.org/lone-wolf. 12 Domestic Violent Extremists Pose increased Threat to Government Officials and Law Enforcement, Office of 

Intelligence and Analysis, Department of Homeland Security, July 22, 2014. 13 Sovereign Citizen Extremist Ideology Will Drive Violence at Home, During Travel, and at Government Facilities, 

Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Department of Homeland Security, Feb. 5, 2015. 14 White Homicide Worldwide, Southern Poverty Law Center, Aprill6, 2014, at http://www.splcenter.org/getinfonned/publications/White-Homicide-Worldwide. 

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Kansas, in 2014 regularly posted comments on Vanguard News Network, a forum with the slogan 

"No Jews. Just Right." Racist and anti-Semitic threads can be found on many other sites, including 

mainstream forums like Reddit, which now has a community of crudely anti-black sites known as 

"the Chimpire." 

Dylann Roof, the alleged shooter in the June 17,2015, massacre at the Emanuel African 

Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, represents the modern face of much 

domestic terrorism: the extremist who acts alone after being radicalized online. Roof had not been a 

member of a racist hate group. Instead, he appears to have been introduced to and indoctrinated into 

the world of white nationalism entirely online. In a 2,400-word manifesto, he described becoming 

"racially aware" in the echo chamber of white supremacist websites following the controversy over 

the death ofTrayvon Martin in 2012. On the site of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, he 

discovered demonizing propaganda about black-on-white crime. He wrote that he "saw the same 

things happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries," then 

"found out about the Jewish problem." As he was murdering his victims, Roof told them that black 

people were "taking over our country" and "rap[ing] our women." 

Roof, like Breivik, also reflects something else: the international nature of the white 

nationalist movement. 15 On his jacket, he wore the flags of the former apartheid regimes of South 

Africa and Rhodesia. Like his European counterparts, he believed that the white race is facing 

genocide. Thomas Mair, the alleged killer of British Parliament member Jo Cox, is another 

example. Our files contain documents reflecting that he purchased hate propaganda as well as 

manuals on making homemade bombs and pistols from the National Alliance, once the most 

influential U.S.-based hate group whose founder wrote the book that was the blueprint for the 

Oklahoma City bombing. Just as the United States has seen an increase in the number of hate 

groups in response to our country's changing demographics, Europe has seen the rise of a powerful, 

far-right movement that rejects multiculturalism. In a 2013 speech to white nationalists in Britain 

and France, Jared Taylor, who later served as the spokesperson for the Council of Conservative 

Citizens following the Charleston massacre, put it this way: "The fight in Europe is exactly the 

same as ours." 

In the United States, a growing white nationalist movement goes by a new, sanitized name: 

the Alternative Right, or Alt-Right. 16 The term was coined by Richard Spencer, a young white 

nationalist leader who heads the National Policy Institute and is one of the leading voices of the AltRight. Spencer has called immigration a "kind of proxy war- and maybe a last stand- for white 

Americans." He also has called for a '"peaceful ethnic cleansing." And he has rejected the American 

ideal of equality under the law, as stated within the Declaration of Independence, declaring instead 

that "all men are created unequal." 17 

15 Morris Dees and J. Richard Cohen, "White Supremacists Without Borders," The New York Times, June 22,2015, at 

http://www.nytimes.com/20 15/06/22/opinion/white-supremacists-without-borders.htm I. 

16 For a detailed description of the Alt-Right, see the Southern Poverty Law Center website, at 

https://www.splcenter.ordfighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alternative-right. 

17 Profile of Richard Bertrand Spencer, Southern Poverty Law Center, at https://www.splcenter.org/fightinghate/extremist-files/individual/richard-bertrand-spencer-O. 

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During the presidential campaign season, the Alt-Right has been energized and has gained a 

foothold in the mainstream as a result of inflammatory political rhetoric about immigration that 

reflects fears about the loss of white hegemony. 18 The anger within the movement is not likely to 

dissipate after the election; however, whether its energy is channeled into political activity or into 

violence after the election is impossible to know. In the wake of the Brexit vote to leave the 

European Union- a move overwhelmingly supported by older working class whites from postindustrial areas similar to our own Rust Belt- a wave of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and antiminority hate crimes swept the country. 19 The presidential election in the United States, of course, is 

different than the Brexit vote. But it shares many of the same themes regarding immigration, 

multiculturalism and globalism. 

I close this section with a discussion of something distinctly domestic: the terrorism in the 

West directed at the federal government by a movement offar-right groups and individuals united 

by their anger at the government and its management of public lands. 

The potential for deadly violence from this movement was on vivid display in April2014, 

when the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) attempted to confiscate cattle belonging to 

Cliven Bundy on federal land in Nevada. Bundy, who subscribes to beliefs rooted in the white 

supremacist doctrines of county supremacy (Posse Comitatus) and sovereign citizens, had refused to 

pay more than $1 million in grazing federal fees and fines. Despite his lawlessness, hundreds of 

armed militiamen from across the country answered his call to come to his ranch and stand against 

the government. As the confrontation neared a climax, militia snipers lined hilltops and overpasses 

with rifles trained on federal agents, and Bundy stated, "We're about ready to take the country over 

with force." 20 Later that day, the government abandoned its effort to confiscate Bundy's cattle. 

During the confrontation and its immediate aftermath, Fox News' Sean Hannity repeatedly 

trumpeted Bundy as a hero. Senator Dean Heller of Nevada called the Bundy family "patriots."21 

Senator Ted Cruz appeared to put the blame on President Obama and the federal government for 

"using the jackboot of authoritarianism to come against the citizens."22 Likewise, Texas Gov. Rick 

Perry said he had "a problem with the federal government putting citizens in the position of having 

to feel like they have to use force to deal with their own government."23 Bundy also received 

18 David Weigel, "The 'alt right' finds a home inside the Republican convention," The Washington Post, July 21. 2016, 

at https://www.washingtonpost.cornJpolitics/the-alt-right-finds-a-home-inside-the-republicanconvention/20 16/07/21/5890518e-4f8c-11 e6-aa 14-eOc 1 087f7583 story.html. 19 Adam Lusher, "Racism unleashed: True extent of the 'explosion of blatant hate' that fol1owed Brexit result revealed,'' 

The Independent, July 28,2016, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-racism-uk-post-referendumracism~hate·crime-eu-referendum-racism-unleashed-poland-racist-a7160786.html (500 "racist incidents'' documented in 

the month following the Brexit vote). 20 Don Hernandez and Joseph Langdon, "Federal Rangers Face Off Against Armed Protesters in Nevada 'Range War,,. 

The Guardian, April 13, 2014. at https://www.theguardian.com/world/20 14/apr/13/nevada-bundy-cattle-ranch-armedprotesters. 

21 "A List ofCliven Bundy's Supporters, Now That We Know He's a Pro-Slavery Racist," The Wire, April24, 2014, at 

http://www .thewire.com/politics/20 14/04/a-list-of-cliven-bundys-supporters-now-that-we-know-hes-a-pro-slaveryracist/3611541. 

22 Miranda Blue, "Ted Cruz: Bundy Ranch Standoff'Tragic Culmination' ofObama's 'Jackboot of Authoritarianism," 

Right Wing Watch, April23, 2014, at http:l/www.rightwingwatch.orglcontentlted-cruz-bundy-ranch-standoff-tragicculmination-obamas-jackboot-authoritarianism. 

23 /d 

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support from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization that claims 

the support of hundreds of sheriffs and promotes the doctrine that sheriffs should resist the 

enforcement of federal laws they consider to be unconstitutiona1.24 

Two months later, two antigovernment zealots who had been at the Bundy ranch, Jerad and 

Amanda Miller, murdered two police officers in cold blood at a Las Vegas restaurant. Bundy 

supporters say the Millers had been asked to leave the ranch. But it should come as no surprise that 

they were attracted to the talk of violent rebellion. On the bodies of the dead police officers, they 

left the most recognizable emblem of the militia movement- the Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" 

flag along with a swastika and note saying the revolution had begun. They went on to murder 

another man before being killed in a shootout with police. 

Tense confrontations between federal officials and antigovernment activists erupted across 

the West in the 18 months following the standoff at the Bundy ranch. In June 2014, for example, 

two men pointed a handgun at a BLM worker in a marked federal vehicle while holding up a sign 

that said, "You need to die. "

25 Threats and assaults against national forest and rangeland employees 

rose sharply during this period, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. 

Incidents involving BLM personnel increased from 15 in 2014 to 28 in 2015; those involving U.S. 

Forest Service employees jumped from 97 to 155, after several years of declines. 26 

On January 2 of this year, Cliven Bundy's sons Ammon and Ryan led a group of armed 

militia extremists who seized the headquarters building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 

Oregon. The group demanded, among other things, that the federal government cede ownership of 

the 1.4 million-acre Malheur National Forest to local authorities. Bundy's sons were eventually 

arrested on January 26 as they drove to a public meeting to discuss their demands. Riding with them 

was Robert "LaVoy" Finicum. After Finicum tried to drive through a roadblock, he was shot and 

killed by police as he reached for his pocket, apparently for a handgun. 

Finicum's death has since become a rallying cry for the movement. Seven hundred people 

attended his funeral in Utah, and by the end of April there had been more than 80 events in his 

honor across the country27 Days after the shooting, an article on the website of the Oath Keepers, a 

conspiracy-minded antigovernment group that claims 30,000 law enforcement officers, soldiers. 

24 Mark Potok and Ryan Lenz, "Line in the Sand," Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, June 13, 2016, at 

https:/ /www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intell igence-report/20 16/line-sand. 25 Matt Lee-Ashley, Congress Should Cof?front the Rise of Violent Extremism on America's Public Lands, Center for 

American Progress, March 24, 2016, at 

https:/ /www .americanprogress.org!issues/ green/report/20 16/03/24/13 3 730/congress-should-confront-the-rise-of-vio lentextremism~on-americas-public-lands/. 

See also: David Neiwert, "In Wake of Bundy Standoff, Utah BLM Wrangler Threatened By Armed Men in Pickup," 

Hatewatch blog, Southern Poverty Law Center, May 8, 2014, at https://www.splcenter.org!hatewatch/2014/05/08/wakebundy-standoff-utah-blm-wrang!er-threatened-anned-men-pickup. 

26 "Attacks Against Federal Range and Forest Workers on Rise," Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility," 

May 31, 2016, at http://www.peer.org!news/news-releases/attacks-against-federal-range-and-forest-workers-onrise.html. 

27 "In the Aftermath of LaVoy Finicum 's Death, Growing Number of Rallies Push Martyrdom Narrative," Hatewatch 

blog, Southern Poverty Law Center, at https://www.splcenter.org!hatewatch/2016/05/03/aftennath-lavoy-finicumsdeath-growing-number-rallies-push-martyrdom-narrative. 

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military veterans and others as members,28 said, "We vow to continue on with LaVoy's legacy; his 

sacrifice will not be in vain."29 In June, a Finicum associate who had been at the Bundy ranch and 

who leads a Utah militia group was charged with plotting to blow up a BLM cabin in Arizona. 30 

We Must Combat All Forms of Violent Extremism 

After the shock and horror of the 9/11 attacks, a dedicated, comprehensive and forceful 

response to the threat associated with radical forms of Islam, both here and abroad, was an absolute 

necessity. No one could possibly argue otherwise. The question we have raised at various points is 

whether threats from other forms of terrorism have been given the attention they require. 

We have had reasons to be concerned. After the deadly Oklahoma City bombing on April 

19, 1995, then-Attorney General Reno formed a special task force, the Domestic Terrorism 

Executive Committee, to coordinate the country's response to the threat of domestic terrorism. The 

task force was scheduled to hold one of its monthly meetings on September 11,2001, but did not do 

so for obvious reasons. But the task force did not miss just one meeting. As the country's focus 

shifted to the new and devastating threat, the task force did not meet again for 13 years. 

The shadow of 9/11 has not been the only factor leading to a reduced focus on other forms 

of terrorism. Partisan politics appear to have played a role as well. In April 2009, a DHS 

intelligence assessment intended for law enforcement officials, entitled Rightwing Extremism: 

Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, 

was leaked to the news media31 Despite the report's accuracy, then-DHS Secretary Janet 

Napolitano withdrew it following an outcry by those who claimed, falsely, that the report tarred 

conservatives as potential domestic terrorists. More significantly, the DHS unit responsible for the 

report was allowed to wither. In the wake of the controversy over the report, the Washington Post 

reported that DHS "cut the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, 

canceled numerous state and localla~ enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of nearly a 

dozen reports on extremist groups."3 

Daryl Johnson, the former DHS senior domestic terrorism analyst who was the principal 

author of the 2009 report, later stated, "through reckless neglect at nearly all levels of government, 

domestic terrorism not tied to Islam has become a cancer with no diagnosis or plan to address it." 

There are, he said, hundreds of government analysts looking for threats associated with radical 

forms oflslarn but "mere dozens" monitoring other forms of potential threats.33 

28 For a fuller description of the Oath Keepers, see https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremistfiles/individual/elmer-stewart-rhodes-0. 

29 "Rest in Peace LaVoy," Oath Keepers website, at htms://www.oathkeepers.org/rest-in-peace-lavoy/ 30 "FBI: Utah Militia Leader Planned to Bomb US-Owned Cabin," The New York Times. June 23,2016, at 

http://www. nytimes.com/apon line/20 16/06/23/us/ap-us-ranching-standoff-utah-m i litia.html. 31 PDF on Southern Poverty Law Center website, at 

http://www.splcenter.org/sites/defaultlfiles/downloads/resource/DOJ rwextremism2009.pdf. 32 "Homeland Security Department Curtails Home-Grown Terror Analysis," Washington Post, June 7, 2011, at 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics!homeland-securitv-department-curtails-home-grown-terroranalysis/20 11/06/02/AGOEaDLH storv.html. 33 "For Domestic Hate, Apply the Vigor and Strategy Used for Muslim Terror," Daryl Johnson, The New York Times, 

June 24, 20 15, at http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/20 15/06/24/charleston-and-the-threat-of-homegrown-hategroups/for-domestic-hate-app1y-the-vigor-and-strategy-used-for-muslim-terror. 

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In 2010, the year after the DHS Rightwing Extremism report was withdrawn, I was asked to 

serve on Secretary Napolitano's Countering Violent Extremism Working Group34 At my request, 

one of my colleagues, a federally certified law enforcement trainer, was invited to serve as a subject 

matter expert for the Working Group. Neither of us had success in getting the group to focus on the 

threat of terrorism from the radical right. 

Over the last two years, we have seen renewed attention to the threat of radical-right 

terrorism from the federal government. In 2014, for example, after white supremacist Frazier Glenn 

Miller killed three people he thought were Jewish in Overland Park, Kansas, Attorney General 

Holder reconstituted the domestic terrorism task force that Attorney General Reno originally 

established after the Oklahoma City bombing. More recently, Attorney General Lynch created a 

new position, the Domestic Terrorism Counsel within the Counterterrorism Section of the Justice 

Department's National Security Division, to better address domestic terrorism issues. Still, there are 

indications that the threat of radical-right terrorism may not be getting the attention it requires. 

In February 2015, for example, when President Obama addressed the White House Summit 

on Countering Violent Extremism, the first terrorist incident he mentioned was the Oklahoma City 

bombing. But the discussion that followed focused almost exclusively on the threat associated with 

radical forms of Islam. Similarly, last year-just two weeks after the Charleston massacre- the 

House Committee on Homeland Security released a Terror Threat Snapshot that contained no 

mention of Charleston or the threat of terror from the radical right. 35 

Hearings on the government's response to terrorism committed by ISIS or other groups or 

individuals who espouse a radical version oflslam are surely appropriate. But so are hearings on the 

government's response to other forms of terrorism, including that which poses a danger to federal 

employees, federal lands, and the public from the antigovernment terrorism we've seen rising in the 

West. 

Stigmatizing the Muslim Community Undermines Trust 

Muslim-American communities have been vital in the effort to combat violent extremism.36 

As Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said, "[W]e have to 

make quite clear that [Muslim] communities are part of the solution and not part of the problem."37 

Yet, the reality is, the relationship between law enforcement and Muslim communities in America, 

which is so critical for effective law enforcement in the long run, 38 is often frayed. 

34 https:l/www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets!hsac eve working group recommendations.pdf. 35http:/lhomeland.house.gov/sites!homeland.house.gov/files/documents/July%20Terror%20Threat%20Snapshot%20 0. 

o9i. 

36 Kristina Cooke and Joseph Ax, "U.S. Officials Say American Muslims Do Report Extremist Threats," Reuters, June 

16, 2016, at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-florida-shooting-cooperation-idUSKCNOZ2l3 U. 37 Michael Leiter, Testimony Before Committee on Homeland Security at 32, U.S. House of Representatives, at 

https://homeland.house.gov/hearinglunderstanding-homeland-threat-landscape-considerations-ll2th-congress/. 

38 Report on the National Summit on Empowering Communities to Prevent Violent Extremism at 8, Office of 

Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 2015; Understanding Community Policing: A 

Framework for Action at vii, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, 

August 1994, at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/commp.pdf. ("Without trust between police and citizens, effective 

policing is impossible."). 

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According to a recent study funded by the Justice Department and conducted by the Triangle 

Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security/9 there are numerous factors behind the tension and 

mistrust. But they start with the Muslim community's perception - one based on fact- that a double 

standard is at work, that they are singled out for special community policing programs because law 

enforcement officials look at them with suspicion. 

This sense of being unfairly targeted is magnified by the widespread belief- one also based 

on fact- that informants are being deployed in Muslim communities, particularly in their places of 

worship. It is exacerbated by the discrimination Muslims often experience in their daily lives, the 

scrutiny they experience at airports, and the vilification to which they are routinely subject in the 

media and entertainment industry. Furthermore, according to the Triangle Center study, 

[V]irulent anti-Muslim bigotry has even infected our political process 

with 16 state legislatures enacting laws intending to ban legal application of 

Islamic principles in courts, some members of Congress calling into question 

the loyalty of Muslim American civil servants, and presidential candidates 

stating that a Muslim should not be able to serve in high office or that certain 

mosques should be closed. The trends have only been compounded in the 

aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, which generated open 

public discussion about religious tests to determine admissibility of refugees, 

religion-based surveillance, and, of course, the proposal by one presidential 

candidate to temporarily bar foreign born Muslims from entering the United 

States.40 

Incendiary anti-Muslim rhetoric can play into the hands of recruiters for ISIS and similar groups. 41 

The FBI's treatment of the Charleston and Orlando killings reflects an aspect of the double 

standard at work here. Within hours of the massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando by a U.S.-born 

Muslim, the FBI labeled it terrorism. In the days following the Charleston attack last year, on the 

other hand, FBI Director James Corney said the killings of African-American churchgoers by a 

white supremacist was not an act ofterror.42 Both cases, however, fit the definition of terrorism 

under federal law, 43 as do the actions of the antigovernment militiamen at the Bundy ranch in 2014 

and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year. 

Since 9/11, we've seen three distinct spikes in hate crimes targeting Muslims and those 

perceived to be Muslims, another factor that contributes to the Muslim community's sense of 

39 The Challenge and Promise of Using Community Police Strategies to Prevent Violent Extremism, Triangle Center on 

Terrorism and Homeland Security, Duke University, January 2016. 40 !d. at 23-24 (footnotes omitted). 41 Liam Stack, "Qaeda Affiliate Uses Video of Donald Trump for Recruiting," The New York Times, Jan. 1 2016, at 

htt]://www .nytimes.com/20 16/0 1102/world/africa/al-qaeda-uses-video-of-trump-for-recruiting.httnl? r=O. 42 Andrew Husband, FBI Director Says Charleston Shooting Not Terrorism," Mediaite, June 20, 2015, at 

htt]:l/www.mediaite.com/tv/fbi-director-says-charleston-shooting-not-terrorism/ 

43 See 28 USC §2331. 

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alienation and one that may contribute to radicalization. 44 The first spike began immediately after 

the deadly attacks launched by a! Qaeda that killed almost 3,000 innocent victims, including a 

number of Muslims. The FBI hate crime statistics for 2001 showed a 1,600 percent increase in antiMuslim hate crime incidents in the United States- 481 incidents reported to the FBI, compared to 

28 reported a year before. 45 

The second spike came in 2010 amid the heated rhetoric surrounding a proposed Islamic 

cultural center near the site of the World Trade Center attack- the so-called "ground-zero mosque." 

The FBI statistics showed then a 50 percent rise in hate crimes targeting the Muslim community 

that year. 46 

The third apparent spike began in 2015, a year marked by the extremist attacks in Paris and 

San Bernardino, and by the incendiary, anti-Muslim rhetoric in the presidential campaign. One 

Muslim-American organization reported that last year there were more attacks on mosques 

vandalism, harassment and intimidation - than in any other year since it began tracking them. Most 

of the attacks occurred after the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris. 47 

Following 9/11, President George W. Bush delivered a series of speeches emphasizing that 

Muslims and Arabs are not our enemies.48 "[O]ur war is against evil, not Islam. There are thousands 

of Muslims who proudly call themselves Americans, and they know what I know - that the Muslim 

faith is based upon peace and love and compassion."49 He also appeared publicly with imams and 

other Muslim leaders. At least in part because of his leadership, anti-Muslim hate crimes decreased 

in 2002 by about 67 percent- a remarkable drop. The lesson, of course, is that it matters what our 

leaders say from their bully pulpits. 

44 Triangle Center Study at 23; Jeff Guo, "Hating Muslims Plays Right Into the Islamic State's Hands," The Washington 

Post, Nov. 17, 2015, at httos://www.washingtonpost.cornlnews/wonk/wp/2015/11/17/isis-wants-you-to-hate-muslims/. 45 Because of limitations in the collection of data, these numbers vastly understate the problem; more than half of all 

hate crimes are never reported to police and many others are incorrectly categorized. 46 "FBI: Dramatic Spike in Hate Crimes Targeting Muslims," Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, March 

1,2012. 

47 "Number of Incidents Targeting U.S. Mosques in 20 15 Highest Ever Recorded," Council on American-Islamic 

Relations," December 17.2015, at https://www.cair.cornlpress-center/press-releases/133!3-mosques-targeted.html 48 https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/ramadanlislam.html (compilation of the "President's Words: 

Respecting Islam"). 49 ld 

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50 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

The chair will recognize, if he wants, the ranking member of the 

Government Operations Subcommittee for his opening statement. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And let me echo what 

Mr. Cohen just said. 

I think it is a great distortion for us to focus only on the threat 

from the radicalization within the Muslim community in this country or abroad. It begs the question of lax gun control laws. It begs 

the question of the lack of universal background checks. It begs the 

question of hate speech. It begs the question of incitement at the 

fringes of the right-wing media that has enabled and empowered 

people to believe that their prejudice, their racism, their anti-Semitism, their hatred is somehow vindicated, justified. 

And if they are at the edge mentally? Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, last time I checked, was not an Islamic radical. He blew 

up fellow Americans, including children. In my home State of Virginia, Virginia Tech, that tragedy did not involve somebody who 

was involved in radical Islam. He was a Korean American who was 

mentally ill. And until Orlando, he had the dubious record of having the single worst terrorist massacre, gun massacre, in American 

history. This coincided with the tragedy in Charleston at a Black 

church. That was a White supremacist. 

So there is plenty of hate to go around. Radicalization is a broader concept than just one religion or one ethnicity, and sooner or 

later this Congress has to come to grips with that. 

So I hope we broaden the dialogue, and I hope we take heed of 

Mr. Cohen’s guidance, because I think we would be well served if 

we did. 

With that, I yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman yields back. 

The chair now recognizes himself for 5 minutes. 

Mr. Mayer, does law enforcement need to change some of these 

prevention and investigative methods? If you look, Mateen had a 

lot of interaction with the FBI, and yet he ended up committing a 

devastating attack. The Tsarnaevs were on the radar. Nidal Hasan 

at Fort Hood was very much, should have been on the Army’s 

radar for some of his behavior leading up to that devastating attack. So are these just things where nothing could have been done, 

or do we need to maybe change the investigative and prevention 

methods? 

Mr. MAYER. I think we actually need to make some reforms. I 

mean, in those cases, the reporting thus far seems to indicate that 

there was a disconnect between the Federal law enforcement entities and State and local, that there was not a sharing of information and intelligence of what was going on related to those individuals, and that threats, in fact, had been in the communities. 

Additionally, I think in my written testimony, I believe Mr. 

Cohen in his as well, talks about he had been removed from an investigation and therefore fell off of the list, so when he bought the 

guns there was no trigger. And I think that we should seriously 

consider where if you have been under investigation for this kind 

of violent extremism, that at least a red flag is risen that would 

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low-up, determine if there is a new threat there, and if additional 

surveillance needs to be done in terms of human intelligence. 

Because, again, as we get into this lone wolf and small cell environment, if we don’t increase the amount of human intelligence 

work being done, and, again, do it in a way that protects civil liberties, it will make it extremely difficult in the age of encryption 

for us to make sure we can follow the threat all the way to the end. 

So I think there are some things we need to do differently, yes. 

Mr. DESANTIS. Mr. Inserra, stopping attacks before they occur is 

obviously what we want to do. Once people are here, it’s very much 

more difficult. If someone’s a U.S. citizen, you can’t treat them the 

same as you would a foreign terrorist operating overseas. 

What, in your analysis, if any, have you looked at things like terrorists travelling here? We have the Visa Waiver Program. This 

committee has done a lot of work on that. The fact of the matter 

is, if you are in Brussels or one of these places and you have a 

passport, a European passport, you are going to be able to come 

here. We have disputes about the refugee program and whether 

those people are vetted. 

And so does part of the strategy involve identifying people who 

could create a risk and using our border security and other laws 

to prevent to be able to prevent them from even coming here in the 

first place? 

Mr. INSERRA. Certainly. That certainly is part of the piece of the 

puzzle. But I will note that, as part of my testimony, most of the 

plots that we currently are facing homegrown plots. So we don’t see 

too many people who are coming in through the Visa Waiver Program or other legal immigration flows, and very few of those folks 

have come radicalized with the intent to attack the United States, 

at least in the past several years. Most of the threat is from homegrown radicals. All of them, in fact, most recently have been, except 

for, I think, the wife of the—— 

Mr. DESANTIS. The San Bernardino attacker. She clearly. So, I 

mean, that is just an example. She is obviously somebody who was 

coming here intending to harm the United States. There was evidence, pretty available evidence, of her being a militant Islamist, 

and yet she kind of gets a rubber stamp to come here on a fiance 

visa. 

Mr. INSERRA. Yes. It certainly speaks to the importance of getting intelligence from our local partners, from our international 

partners, because the more information we can get flowing, as Matt 

talked about, at the State and local level, that can help them with 

their investigations, but it is also important that we are getting information from our international partners. And that information 

has to be flowing, especially in today’s interconnected world. We 

have to be getting that information from our international partners. 

Mr. DESANTIS. Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, there does seem to be a 

trend, and this is not just in the United States. If you look in Western Europe, there is a much stronger homegrown threat than there 

was 10 years ago. We are seeing it here in the United States. And, 

yes, some people are natural born Americans. Some have immigrated here. 


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But why is this happening now? Is it because you see the rise 

of the Islamic State and that is inspiring more people? Or is there 

something else? 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. I think you have a confluence of a few 

different factors at play. One is, indeed, the rise of ISIS. We can 

see an explosion in homegrown jihadist cases since ISIS was able 

to capture territory in Iraq and Syria and declare itself a caliphate. 

At the same time, the two factors I pointed to in my testimony, 

social media and encryption, both play a role. Social media allows 

much more interconnectedness. It can facilitate trajectories of 

radicalization across ideologies. And encryption has allowed much 

more robust networks to be at play. 

I would point to two other things as well. One of them is I think 

that across Western states, including in the United States, there is 

a declining trust in government. A lot of ideologies, ranging from 

jihadism to sovereign citizens to extreme right or extreme left terrorism, profit from a situation where it seems that the government 

has a great disconnect from citizens. 

We can certainly see these sentiments at play, and I think focusing on the question of how well is the U.S. Government doing institutionally, how much transparency does it have, how well is it seen 

as effective, is a very important question. 

The final thing that I would point to is that across the Middle 

East and North Africa, we have a situation where multiple countries are experiencing great problems. That has helped to drive the 

refugee crisis that you point to. Looking at recent trends in violence in Europe, both jihadist violence and also far right violence, 

we can see how this human migration into Europe does have a 

clear nexus with some of the recent incidents. 

Mr. DESANTIS. My time has expired. I now recognize the gentleman from Massachusetts for 5 minutes. 

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And, again, thank you for your testimony to all the members of 

the panel. 

One of our tasks in investigating radicalization is to look at the 

attacks and try to discern what motivated the individuals who conducted these attacks. And I want to point to the situation in Orlando where Omar Mateen killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, 

and I think he wounded about 53 others. 

Now, the FBI had investigated him a few years prior. He had 

made some statements that his family had connections with Al 

Qaeda. He also made some statements, apparently, to witnesses 

that he had joined Hezbollah. So he was investigated in 2013 by 

the FBI. 

Then, in 2014, he had some connections, some links to Moner 

Mohammad Abu-Salha, who was a suicide bomber, and he was an 

American. I think he went to the same mosque as Mr. Mateen, and 

so there were connections there. The FBI went back in again and 

did due diligence and investigated him again. 

Then it seems like he dropped off the screen again, and we don’t 

hear from him again until the attacks in 2016. 

Now, he called, he made a couple of 911 calls. He said during the 

attacks that he pledged allegiance to ISIL. I think he called back 


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again and reiterated that. And he said himself at that moment that 

that is why he was doing that. 

Now, under the rules of evidence—I know I have three attorneys 

here—under the Federal Rules of Evidence, when you have a statement from someone, a dying declaration—he certainly knew he was 

going to die. He was in a shootout with the police. He was completely surrounded. He had a lot of weapons, but he knew he was 

going to die. He again said that that is why he did it. It was in 

support of ISIL. 

Now, under the Federal Rules of Evidence, we try to discern the 

evidence that is most reliable and we try to keep out the evidence 

that is least reliable. And under our rules, under the Federal 

Rules, we allow a dying declaration to come in because of its veracity. Well, not because of veracity, but that is in the mind of the person, and they know they are going to die, and so we give it enhanced credibility. 

Now, despite all of that, the two investigations by the FBI, the 

connections with Abu-Salha, his own statements, the day after the 

attacks, I know that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and others 

said we are going to launch an investigation to find out why he did 

this. And I just wonder, I just wonder, are we purposely looking 

away from this issue sometimes because of the sensibilities involved? 

Let me turn it around. What would lead me to believe that with 

all that evidence and his own statements, the dying declaration, 

what would lead me to believe that that was not the reason that 

he took that action and attacked those people in Orlando? 

Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, have a crack at it. 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. I don’t think there is anything that 

should lead you to believe that that didn’t represent his intention. 

There of course was some rather salacious gossip that came out 

afterwards about him possibly being a closeted gay. I put it that 

way because he by all accounts was highly homophobic, and so 

there is the cognitive dissonance argument. But none of that evidence has really stacked up, and the FBI has said publicly that 

they believe that it was highly exaggerated. His previous time in 

the Pulse nightclub seems to be consistent with him casing the 

nightclub. 

I think we do tend to be very trepidacious about attributing any 

sort of causal power to ideology. That is true within this field of 

study as a whole. And I think it is a trepidation that doesn’t necessarily match with how people are actually motivated. 

Mr. LYNCH. I was just wondering how we weigh the evidence. 

Mr. Mayer. 

Mr. MAYER. Yeah. I think oftentimes we don’t want to see a cigar 

that is just a cigar. And for some reason that is good. We need to 

be cautious. We are in a horrible fight with a very determined 

enemy that doesn’t play by any rules of civilization. 

At the same time, I find it somewhat ironic that we don’t take 

the same caution when it comes to other types of violence. We are 

very quick to then jump in and put a label on that even before 

there are facts, especially the Omar Mateen facts, none of those 

types of facts, but we will jump in rapidly and label those types of 

attacks. 


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So I think probably an ounce of caution is okay, but when the 

facts start to build, maybe we need just to call the cigar, the cigar. 

Mr. LYNCH. Okay. My time has expired. I yield back. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman yields back. 

The chair now recognizes Mr. Meadows for 5 minutes. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

So, Mr. Mayer, let me come to you. So you were saying that 

sometimes we will not label something what it really is. Why is 

that? Why do we not do that? 

Mr. MAYER. One, I think there are the reasons where it makes 

sense where we have got to be careful before we cast judgment and 

make sure that the facts fit what it is we are going to say. But once 

they are there, we need to, I think, call it what it is. 

Mr. MEADOWS. So do you see the radicalization of Islamic terrorism to be one of the key national security threats that we are 

facing today? 

Mr. MAYER. Oh, I most certainly do. I have spent a decade writing about it. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Is it the key? Is it the top priority that we need 

to be facing as it relates to terrorism? 

Mr. MAYER. Oh, as it relates to terrorism, yeah, of course it is, 

yeah. I mean, we have got to first stop it at its source. 

Mr. MEADOWS. The reason I ask is that Mr. Cohen seems to believe that radical right-wing groups are of equal concern. 

Is that correct, Mr. Cohen. 

Mr. COHEN. That is not what I testified to either in writing or 

here. I wouldn’t argue with the point that the threat of terrorism—— 

Mr. MEADOWS. Well, you brought those up. So I guess the question, you were just saying that are we spending a disproportionate 

amount of time on radical Islamic extremists to the exclusion of 

right-wing extremists? Is that what you were saying? 

Mr. COHEN. I think there is no question but that that is true. 

Mr. MEADOWS. So, Mr. Cohen, if you are looking at that, is it not 

true that our law enforcement groups, the FBI, et cetera, they 

know how to deal with other extremist-type groups, that that is not 

a new phenomenon? Your group has been involved in that since the 

early 1970s. Isn’t that correct? 

Mr. COHEN. Since about 1980. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Okay. So since 1980, your group has been involved in that. So this is not something new that law enforcement 

is having to figure out today. It is not changing radically in the 

way that they are radicalized, although they may use the Internet 

to give out information a little bit more, but it is not inherently different than what your group has addressed since the early 1980s. 

Is that correct? 

Mr. COHEN. It is correct. And if I could just add one point. I 

think law enforcement has a great deal of expertise in these areas, 

but I also think that the record is clear that after 9/11 law enforcement took its eye off that ball. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Well, I would disagree with you there. 

Mr. COHEN. That would be fine. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Because let me tell you what I found in talking 

to my law enforcement officers of both Democrats and Republicans, 


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sheriffs of both parties, is they understand how to go after the traditional threats. They have been well trained. They understand the 

investigative techniques. In fact, they can actually anticipate many 

times—obviously not all the times because of the horrific incident 

that you talked about in South Carolina where the gentleman was 

actually caught in my State. And so we understand how to do that. 

Law enforcement does that. 

But what they are not prepared for is this new terrorism threat 

in their communities of which they are, honestly, we are having to 

do unbelievable training, but they still don’t understand it, and so 

that is the reason for the hearing today. Does that make sense, Mr. 

Cohen? 

Mr. COHEN. I understand what you are saying. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Okay. And if I look at the numbers, I think the 

other thing that is troubling is that, I start to look at the numbers, 

the number one group that we have to be concerned about really 

with total attacks in the last 2 years was the Taliban first, in 2014 

and 2015, then ISIS, or ISIL, and Boko Haram after that. So, I 

mean, if you look at the totals in terms of where we are at. 

But here is the concern that I have. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Mr. Mayer, in our inability to name it for what 

it is, because we call it violent extremism at times instead of violent Islamic extremism, and we do that many times trying not to 

attach a religion to it, but we miss the whole point of what some 

of that might be in terms of going after the real enemy, don’t we, 

Mr. Mayer? 

Mr. MAYER. I think we do. In addition to that, we also chill the, 

I think, interest, ability of everyday Americans then to kind of 

speak up when they think something may be missed because they 

have been taught that if they raise their voice—— 

Mr. MEADOWS. They are afraid to be either racist or whatever. 

Mr. MAYER. Yeah, something like that. So I think that is without 

a doubt an issue we’ve got to address, because I know we saw in 

San Bernardino the neighbor did not raise concerns because they 

didn’t want to be labeled. And as a result, there was not an opportunity to kind of go into that house and potentially see the stockpiles that were being put together. 

Mr. MEADOWS. So your message to them today would be that if 

they see something that is of concern to them, even at the risk of 

being politically incorrect, they need to quietly reach out to their 

law enforcement agencies in the community if they see something 

that is of concern. Is that correct? 

Mr. MAYER. I think that is correct. And, hopefully, the law enforcement community has done its job over the years to build relationships where they can do that in a soft-handed way that isn’t 

going to essentially look like it’s profiling or things like that. It’s 

going to be responsible, it’s going to be done discreetly. Sometimes 

people see things that aren’t there, but we need to be vigilant, because that’s one of our key elements of defense, domestically speaking. 

Mr. MEADOWS. I thank the gentleman. I yield back. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman yields back. 

The gentlewoman is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Thank you so much. 


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Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for your testimony here. 

I wanted to talk with you all about not just radicalization, but 

the potential of once an individual may be radicalized, how to prevent terrorist attacks from those individuals. 

We’ve learned in the most recent and historically deadly domestic terrorist attacks that in that instance the shooter, Omar 

Mateen, had at one time been listed on the FBI’s terrorist watch 

list. And this has revived a debate here in Congress about proposals prohibiting individuals from those lists in purchasing weapons and particularly guns. 

According to a CNN poll, 85 percent of Americans support banning people on Federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms, 

and that includes 90 percent of Republican individuals in this 

country. 

Mr. Cohen, it is so good to see you here. Our last meeting was 

in Alabama some time ago. 

Mr. COHEN. On voting rights. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Yes. And I wanted to ask you, what do those 

numbers say to you about U.S. opinions on efforts to prevent suspected terrorists from buying guns? 

Mr. COHEN. Obviously, the issues that you raised are very, very 

serious ones. And I don’t think that we at this point have a position on some of the measures that have been brought up in Congress. 

One thing that Mr. Mayor said that I do think is worth considering, Mr. Mateen, of course, had been investigated twice by the 

FBI. It would have been possible to put a notation in the NICS system about that to alert the officers who had investigated him that 

he was buying a weapon. 

Now, maybe that would have been arguably unfair, but it 

wouldn’t have prevented him, but it could have, perhaps, if a law 

enforcement agent had suspected that, ‘‘Boy, that was a close call,’’ 

it might have led him to renew the investigation and find something out that could have prevented those deaths. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Mr. Mayer, I see you nodding your head in agreement on that. 

Mr. MAYER. Well, sure, whenever anyone says they agree with 

what I have to say, I nod my head. 

Ms. PLASKETT. I agree with that as well. 

What you’re talking about reminds me of a proposal, one of the 

amendments when the Senate took up this legislation, Senator 

Feinstein’s amendment, which reflected legislation proposed in 

2007 which would give the Attorney General the discretion to block 

a gun sale to a prospective buyer listed on a terrorist watch list; 

or uniquely, the measure would also require notification to the FBI 

if someone who had been on the terrorist watch list within the last 

5 years was attempting or purchasing to buy a gun. 

And that, Mr. Mayer, I understand is in your testimony what you 

call, I quote, ‘‘common sense’’ to require the FBI to be notified of 

those purchases. 

Had this law been in place, the FBI would have been notified 

that Mr. Mateen was trying to buy a gun. 

Mr. Mayer, do you have any additional thoughts on that? 


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Mr. MAYER. I think that is common sense. I mean, if you look 

at it this way, had the FBI gotten the alert that he had bought the 

gun—because I think you’ve got to be careful about saying prohibited from buying the gun, he hadn’t done anything wrong at that 

point, but buying the gun—they could have either themselves or 

through local law enforcement gone to the gun shop, asked questions—was there any type of nervousness, suspicious behavior, 

things that would have tinkled your bell? 

Ms. PLASKETT. So they would have been able to revisit him, Mr. 

Mateen, having been on the watch list, if at least they had been 

pinged or notified that, hey, this individual has purchased a gun. 

Mr. MAYER. Well, possibly not on the watch list, but just go talk 

to the gun store owner, and if there was enough evidence there, 

they then could have maybe started more surveillance, monitoring 

undercover, and then had enough evidence to go to a judge for a 

warrant inside the home, and then they could have done some different stuff. 

So the point is it could have started a chain of events that could 

have prevented the Orlando massacre from happening had we had 

some type of system in place that didn’t stop a constitutional right 

for him to buy a gun, but at least notify law enforcement that 

somebody who had been under surveillance before was now engaging in a next step to potential violence. 

Ms. PLASKETT. And, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, would you agree as 

well? 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. Yes, I do agree with that. And I’d point 

to another example as well, which is there’s a case in Little Rock 

in which a man named Carlos Bledsoe carried out an attack at a 

joint Army-Navy recruiting center. Prior to carrying out that attack, he had gone into a Walmart to purchase a .22. He did not use 

it in the attack. The reason he went into the Walmart to buy that 

gun was to see if he was on a watch list. 

Now, there was no notification, but it was specifically part of his 

attack planning to buy that weapon. So it is another example of 

where it could have helped in terms of investigation. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Thank you. 

All of the examples and the testimony that you’re giving here, 

points that we can’t know for sure, but it’s possible that Senator 

Feinstein’s measure would have in some measure been able to help 

foil Mr. Mateen’s plan. Unfortunately, that amendment failed, as 

did amendments that have required background checks on practically all gun sales. 

But what I can say at least is that the Senate at least attempted 

to have a discussion on this. They put it up for a measure and 

there was a vote. Unfortunately, here in the House we have not 

had that hearing, that debate, or that discussion or that vote, and 

we would desperately love to have that. And I believe that some 

of your testimony shows that that would be true as well. 

Would you say so, Mr. Cohen. 

Mr. COHEN. I would. And also I would say that there is a lot of 

misunderstanding about the Heller decision. It leaves plenty of 

room for reasonable measures relating to the sale and possession 

of firearms, and I think that point is not well understood, quite 

frankly. 


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Ms. PLASKETT. Thank you so much. 

And thank you for the time, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentlelady’s time has expired. 

The chair recognizes Mr. Duncan for 5 minutes. 

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

A few months after 9/11, The Wall Street Journal had an editorial which said, when they noticed that almost every department 

and agency had submitted additional requests for money based on 

security, they said any time an agency requests more money for security we should give it twice the weight and four times the scrutiny. 

And then, a year after 9/11, a Tennessee corporation, FedEx, told me they had spent $200 million on security that they wouldn’t have 

otherwise spent if 9/11 hadn’t happened. 

About that same time, when I was driving into work here one 

morning, I heard on NPR that 1 year after 9/11 we now had over 

3,000 registered lobbyists on homeland security. 

And then, a few years ago, I read this article by Ian Lustick, a 

professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He said: ‘‘Why is the 

war on terror so enormous, so all encompassing, and still expanding? The fundamental answer is that Al Qaeda’s most important 

accomplishment was not to hijack our planes, but to hijack our political system. 

‘‘For a multitude of politicians, interest groups, professional associations, corporations, media organizations, universities, local and 

State governments, and Federal agency officials, the war on terror 

is now a major profit center, a funding bonanza, and a set of slogans and sound bites to be inserted into budget, project, grant, and 

contract proposals. For the country as a whole, however, it has become a maelstrom of waste.’’ 

Then, last year, CNN had this. It said: ‘‘Defending the country 

against terrorism—especially the apocalyptic variety practiced by 

ISIS—is expensive. How expensive? ’The answer is a lot and very 

hard to break out,’ said Gordon Adams, a national security budget 

expert. Adams estimates that the U.S. spends at least $100 billion 

a year on counterterrorism efforts.’’ 

And lastly, the Nieman Watchdog Web site at Harvard University estimated that we’ve spent over $1 trillion on domestic security 

efforts since 9/11, and it said, quote: ‘‘For the counterterrorism 

spending since 9/11 to be fully justified, Homeland Security would 

have had to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 Times 

Square-style attacks a year, or more than four attacks a day.’’ 

Now, I want to make clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be spending any money, but I think we’re spending much of our terrorism 

money in the wrong way. I can tell you, one former Member of Congress said we did everything we needed to do on the planes when 

we secured the cockpit doors. Yet we spend billions at the airports 

now, and we’ve got these air marshals that fly back and forth, back 

and forth, the easiest job in the Federal Government. There have 

been more air marshals arrested than arrests made by air marshals. I think they now spend, it comes out to over $200 million 

per arrest. 

And the big threats now are, I think, totally different. I think 

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matic, for instance, than the planes if somebody blew up a major 

college football game or a mall at Christmas or poisoned the water 

supply of a major city or something like that. 

So I think that, number one, we’re wasting an awful lot of money 

that, to me, could be spent in much more helpful ways, to get better housing for people or cure cancer or education or almost anything. And yet we are pouring it down this security rat hole just 

because everybody in Congress is scared to vote against anything 

that says security and all of us want to be as tough as possible. 

But I also think that we need to use a little common sense on 

some of these things. I’m the only Republican left in Congress who 

voted against the war in Iraq. I think I am the only Republican 

who wants to close down Guantanamo because we’re spending ridiculous amounts to keep Guantanamo open. So I look at things a 

little differently from most people, I guess. 

I’m out of my time really, but if the chairman will allow it, I 

would be interested to hear comments about how we can more efficiently spend all this money that we are spending on security 

measures. 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. Sir, I think it’s a great question. I assume you want to go down the line. 

Mr. DUNCAN. Yes. 

Mr. DESANTIS. His time is—so if you want to go, and then I’m 

going to recognize Mr. Hice. So go ahead and say what you were 

going to say, but the time has expired. So then I’m going to recognize Mr. Hice after you finish your comment. 

Mr. GARTENSTEIN-ROSS. All right. 

So the last mass market book I wrote, ‘‘Bin Laden’s Legacy,’’ gets 

into at great detail a lot of wasteful spending that we’ve used in 

pursuing the war on terrorism. I also, as you can see in my truth 

and testimony form, do work for a company that is a contractor for 

the Federal Government, Valens Global, as does Ian Lustick, not 

for the same company, but the first person you quoted also works 

in that industry. Both of us have offered critiques from within the 

industry. 

The main thing I would say is the way Federal Government 

tends to spend its money doesn’t make any sense to me, right? It 

is not just Homeland Security spending, but every kind of spending 

that is done makes almost no sense. If it were private industry it 

would never be done that way. 

Even when it is meant to save money, like lowest cost technically 

acceptable bids, we’ve seen bids where the difference between the 

winner and the loser was 3 cents. Now, any of us, if we were looking for a contractor to fix our HVAC system or to do our roof, we 

would never say, ‘‘Okay, honey, the problem is settled, this one 

wins by 3 cents,’’ right? We’d start to look into quality. 

Inherently, the government tends to make proposals cost a large 

amount of money. I’ve see proposals that have cost millions or tens 

of millions of dollars for a contractor to put together. And when 

that’s the system, of course the product is going to cost so much 

more. 

I think looking at the process of acquisition, and then the second 

thing is monitoring and evaluation of what the benefit is that we’re 


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getting, focusing on those two questions could help to produce a 

needed revolution in this area. 

Mr. DUNCAN. Thank you. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from 

Georgia for 5 minutes. 

Mr. HICE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I really appreciate this 

hearing. 

All of us understand deeply how serious the problem is, and the 

radicalization in homegrown terror is something that we have got 

to get on the front end of. So I appreciate each of you showing up. 

Mr. Chairman, I would ask unanimous consent to enter a 2014 

article from the Journal of Forensic Sciences entitled ‘‘Bombing 

Alone: Tracing the Motivations and Antecedent Behaviors of LoneActor Terrorists.’’ 

Mr. DESANTIS. Without objection. 

Mr. HICE. Thank you very much. 

This was actually co-written by Dr. John Horgan, who is a leading scholar at Georgia State University. And the reason I wanted 

to bring this article up, he traces—analyzes, I guess, is a better 

word—119 loan-actor terrorists, particularly leading up to events 

before the act that they committed. And some of the findings, I’m 

not going to go into a great deal of detail here, but I want to bring 

a couple of highlights out of this article that I found personally just 

to be astounding. 

In 79 percent of these cases others were aware of the individual’s 

commitment to a specific extreme ideology, almost 80 percent of the 

time. In 64 percent of the cases family and friends were aware of 

the individual’s intent to engage in terror-related activity. And the 

reason is because the person verbally told them what they were 

going to do. 

In 58 percent of the cases other individuals had specific information about this individual and their intentions prior to the act. And 

in nearly 60 percent of the cases, the offender actually made public 

statements. 

I mean, when you get this kind of information, I would think 

that a study looking at 119 different actors, you can draw some 

pretty specific conclusions, and the information here to me was 

pretty startling. 

I’m sure each of you are aware of the case in my area, the Tenth 

District of Georgia, Leon Nathan Davis was actually in prison for 

drug trafficking, and it was while there that he was converted to 

Islam. But when he got out of prison he was radicalized by online 

media and social media and that type of thing. 

And, I mean, just like the studies that I just referenced by Dr. 

Horgan, Davis did similar things, he made public his intentions. 

And, fortunately, he was on his way to Turkey, from Atlanta to 

Turkey, and, fortunately, the Atlanta police, along with the FBI, 

intercepted, and he is today serving 15 years. We’re grateful for 

that. 

But I guess what keeps so many of us up at night is just the big, 

huge question mark: How many Davises are there out there that 

we’re not catching? And we all know they’re out there. 

And I don’t really know who to address this couple of questions, 

so I’m just going to kind of open it up to you, but if you would be 


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as brief as possible. But what can be done to continue to improve 

communications between Federal and local law enforcement as 

we’re trying to capture these people? 

Mr. MAYER. I think one of the things that we need to do is make 

sure that they are in the same room, and oftentimes they’re not. 

We have created a system that we have a bifurcated system. We 

have a JTTF somewhere in a city and typically we have a State 

and local fusion center elsewhere, and they may be connected 

through intelligence pipelines or email, but they are not there 

physically together. 

So I think to the degree that we can bolt them together, that will 

help us make sure that information and intelligence is populated 

across that room in order to ensure we give ourselves the greatest 

chance of detecting and stopping a potential attack. 

Mr. HICE. Well, let me just throw this out one step further in 

this. What can we do to help in the whole communication between 

Federal and local communities so that when family and friends or 

others see stuff they go to the authorities rather than stay silent? 

Mr. MAYER. Well, I think you have to build relationships. You 

have to create an environment where law enforcement can build relationships with the at-risk communities, because if they don’t 

exist, there is going to be a lack of trust. 

I mean, remember, many of the folks that are coming come from 

countries in which law enforcement is not a good thing. And so 

we’ve got to kind of tear down those historical mistrust notions and 

get to a point where they know that they can talk to law enforcement and it doesn’t mean that their son is going to be thrown in 

jail or sent to Guantanamo Bay, it simply means they are going to 

create an off-ramp to get that person away from the radicalization 

pathway and elsewhere and back into the fold of the community. 

So we have got to, I think, increase those relationships, which is 

why I put out the piece about a month ago on creating regional 

outreach groups all over the country, including in Atlanta. 

Mr. HICE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. DESANTIS. The gentleman yields back. 

I ask unanimous consent for a series of articles involving the 

Southern Poverty Law Center be placed into the record. Without 

objection, so ordered. 

Mr. DESANTIS. I’d like to thank the witnesses for attending 

today. And without further business, this hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 3:40 p.m., the subcommittees were adjourned.] 


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APPENDIX 

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING RECORD


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KING-6430 with DISTILLERInsert offset folio 36 here 26122.036

PAPER 

J Forensic Sd. March 2014, Vol. 59, No. 2 

doi: 10.1111/1556-4029,12312 

Availub!e online at: nnlioelibrary.wiley.com 

PSYCHIATRY & BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES 

Paul GU/, 1 Ph.D.; John Horgan, 2 PILD.; and Paige Deckert,3 M.S., A.B.D. 

Bombing Alone: Tracing the Motivations and 

Antecedent Behaviors of Lone-Actor 

Terrorists*·t.:t 

ABSTRACT: This article analyles the ll:ociodcmographic network chnracteril>tic.~ <~nd antecedent behaviors of 119 lune..nctor terrorisls. This marks a dt:parturt from existing analyses by largely fucusing upon behavioral aspects of each offender. This article also examines whether 

lone~.actor terrori.~:rs differ bared on their ideologies or network COnfll!( . .'tiviry. The unalysis lead5 to St:\'en condu!iiOn!;.. TIKm: was; no unifonn 

profile identified. In the lime leading np to mo$t lone-actor terrorist even~. other people generally knew about the offender'.~: grievance. extremist ideology, views. and/or intent to engage in violence. A wide mnge of activities and e:qreriences preuded lone nctors• plots or events. Many 

but not all tone-actor tem>tists were rociaJiy isolared. Lone-actor terrorists regularly engaged in a detectable and observable mngc of activilie.<o 

with a wider pteSJOUre group. social movemem, or terrorist organization. Looe-actor terrorist event.<o were rnrely sudden and impulsive. There were distingui.sh<~ble behavioral differem.:cs between subgroups. The implications for policy conclude ttlli article. 

KEYWORllS: forensk" science, terrori:;m, terrorist behavior. lone~actor tetTOrism. lone-wolf terrorism. typology, motivation 

This article analyzes the sociodemographic network characteri.'itics and antecedent behaviol's of Tone-actor terrorists. leading up 

to their planning or conducting a terro1ist event Previous 

research has examined the strategic qualities of lonc-nctor terror~ 

ists (CTA. 2011), perceptions of the threat posed by lone actors 

{ l). the narratives that promote 1one~actor terrorist events (2), 

lone~actor terrorist attack charncteris.tics and impacts (3). and 

individual ca....e Studies (for example f 4-6 }), TI1is research marks 

a departure from that domain because it largely focuses upon 

behavioral aspects of each offender. 

This paper also examines differences between subgroups of 

lonc:Mactor tetTorists. In the limited literature thaf currently exist.'!, 

offenders tend 10 he depleted in a bimuy fashion: su~jects either 

•·are .. or "are not" a lone-actor terrorist Lone-actor ten·orists are 

lhereforc typically treated in a homogeneous manner. M exception 

being P<l:ntucci's (7) typology. Anecdotally. however. there are a 

number of ea.10ily distinguishable differences in lonewactor terrorw 

JDeprutment of Security and Crime Science, Univetsity College London. 35 Tnvi.'it.ack Square, London WCif:19EZ, U.K. 2

School of Criminology and Justice S!udiC$.. Univer.;ity of Ma.uachuJo>eus 

Lowell, Hea1lh and Social Sciencet; Building:. I Univcnity A venue, MA 

01854. 

:toepnnment of Psychology. Moore Building. Pennsylvania State UniverM 

sily, PA 16802. 

"Pre:remed in pm1 ut the Amerkan Society of Criminology Annual Meet~ 

iu~~~~=ob;~~~:;~~~ :~rtment of Homeland Security's Science and 

Technology Directt\rate nnt! coordinated through the U.K. Home Office. 

:The views >tnd conclusions contained in thil\ d1lCUmen1 nre tho...c of the 

authors and should no! be interpreted a." necessarily representing the official 

1>nlicies. either exprel\~d or implied. (If the Department t)f Homeland Set"U· 

rity or lhe Horne Offn:e. 

Received If!. Oct. 2012; and in revised fom\ 3 Jun. 20!3: accep!ed 21 

April 2013. 

t.": 1013 American A..:ndcmy of Forensic Sdene~~ 

ists' characteristics.. behaviors, and connectivity with other groups. 

Specifically, this mtide examine.~ whether 1he characteristics and 

behaviors of lone-actor terrorists differ based on their ideologie~. 

network connectivity, or level of operational success. 

The questions explored in this study are the following: 

• What. if any. demogra.phic characteristics define lone actors? 

• What ideologies are associated with lonewactor terrorisl 

evenrs? 

• To what extent are clo~e friends and family or wider 

networks of coconspirators typically aware of the lone~actOr 

terrorist'~ intent to engage in rerroristwrelared offenses? 

• To what extent are coconspirators typically involved in the 

planning stages: of the offender's intended terrorisnH-elaled 

activities? 

• How socially isolated do lone~actor terrorist offendel'!; tend to 

be'? 

• L'i there a significant difference between lone offende~ and 

those who commit terrorismwrelated offenses on behalf of :t 

group? 

• Are there key life history events that may be relevant in 

undel'$tanding the development of lone actof:'? 

• Are there. difference.<; between loneMactor teiTOrists based on 

their ideology or network connectivity? 

Method 

Sample 

The sample includes 119 individuals wh.o engagc,d in or 

planned to engage in lone-actor terrorism within the United 

St.ates and Europe and were convicted for their actions or died 

in the commissioning of their offense. For the purposes. of this 

project, terrorism is defined as the use or threat of action where 

This is an open nccts..~ article onder the terms of che Crl;!utivc Commons Attributinn·NonC'onumrcial Licen~. which pemlil!i u:>e. distrib11tion .and repro<.lrn..iion in any medium. provided the original work is pmperly cited mu.l is no1 used for commercial purpo'-CS425 
65 


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426 JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES 

the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to 

intimidute the public or a section of the public, andfor the use 

or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a poJitical, reJigions, or ideological cause. Terr01ism can involve vioJence 

against a person, damage to property. endangering a person's 

life other than that of the person committing "the action, creating 

a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section 

of the public. or facilitating any of the above actions. ln addition to including individuals who actively planned omd 

conducted violent attacks, our sample include.:; lone actors who 

engaged in nonviolent hehavion- dmt facili1ated or encouraged 

violent actions carried out by others or behaviors that intended 

to cause only strucnu-al damage. For example. some may ptiori~ 

tize causing infrastmcturol damage as in the case of isolated 

dyad Ellis Edward Hurst and Joseph Martin Bailie. Both men 

held grudges against rax authorities and planned to bJow up a 

United Stares Internal Revenue Service building in December 

1995. They decided to pJan tbe detonation for a Sunday evening: to ensure the building would be empty. Despite the 1001h 

JED failing to detonate due to a faulty fuse, the timing and 

delivery of the lED itself shows rational strategic thought on 

behalf of rhe perpetrator~. who sought not to cause human 

injury but rather engage in an expressive act against a symbolic 

target. Other examples include Ryan Gibson Anderson and 

Kevin Gardner, wbo separately almed to provide insider know!~ 

edge of U.S. and U.K. military capabilities and Army Camp 

weaknesses to wider terrorist networks, 

111e s."Ullple includes individual terrorists (with and without 

command and control links) and isolat:ed dyads in our actor database. Individual terrorists operate autonomously and indepen~ 

dendy of a group (in terms of training, preparalion, and target 

selection. etc.), In some cases, the individual moy have I"'<ldical~ 

ized toward violence within a wider group but left and engaged 

in Hlicit behaviors outside of a formal command and control 

snucrure. Individual terrorists with command and contml links 

on the other hand are trained and equipped by a group-wl1ich 

may also choose their targets-but attempt to carry out their 

attacks autonomously.l~o/aled dyads include pairs of individuals 

who operate independently of a group. They may become radicalized to violence on their own (or one may have radicalized 

the other). and they conceive, develop. and carry out activities 

without direct input from a wider network. Although not techni~ 

cnlly "lone" actors, they are included for u number of reasons. 

Firnt, a key component of this project focuses upon tbe network 

quZ~Iities of terrorists who are not mcm~rs of tenorist groups. 

Second, an initial revlew of our CilSes showed that isolated dyads 

often fonued when one individual recruited the other specifically 

for the terrorist attack. The formation of a dyad, in some cases, 

may be a function of lhe type of tetrorist attack planned. Finally, 

by including these cases. it added to our sample, making the 

types of inferential statistics used later more applicable. 

Prior to data collection. the authorS examined the academic literature on lone-actor tetmrism and built an actor dictionary. pnr 

ducing a list of names that fit the above criteria. Further names 

were also sourced through tuilored search strings developed Md 

applied to the LexisNexis "All English News" option. More 

individuals were also identified through the Global Tenurim~ 

Database developed by the National ConsOI'tium for the Sludy of 

Terrorism and Re.o;ponses to Terrorism (START} and lists of 

those convicted of terrorism~related offenses in the Uniled King~ 

dom and the United States. The decision was rhen made to limit 

the population to post-1990 events because a large component of 

our data would be coded from the LexisNexJ~ archive which is 

generally quite sparse before the 1990s, in totaL 119 lone-actor 

terrorist offenders fit the specified geographical, temporal. and 

operational criteria. 

Data Collection and Au.ulysis 

The codebook. used in this project was developed bused ou a 

review of literature on individuals who commit a wide range of 

violent and nonviolent crimes~ are victimized, and/or engage in 

high-risk behaviors as well as a review of other existing 

codeboolcs u~ed in the constnu::tion of terrorisnHe{ated databa'\p 

es. 1l1e variables included in the codebook spanned sododemo~ 

graphic infmmation (age, gender, occupation, family 

characteristics. relation.strip status. occupation. employment, etc.), 

antecedent event behaviors {aspects of the individual's behaviors 

toward others and within their day-to-day routines), event~specific hehavion; (attack methods, who was targeted). and post~ 

event behaviors and experiences (daims of responsibility, arre-.t/ 

conviction details. etc.). 

The .authors collected data on demographic and background 

characteristics and antecedenl event behaviors. by examining and 

coding infonnation contained in open-source news report~. 

swom Olffidavits, omd when possible, openly available firsthand 

accounts. The vast majority of our sources came from tailored 

Lexis.Nexis searches. The authors also analyzed relevant documents across online public record depositories such a.-, documentdoud.org, biogmphie."i: -of five lone actor~ in our sample 

{Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh. David Copeland) Etic 

Rudt)lph and Bruce lviu::~) and all available scholarly articles. 

Each observation was coded by three independent coders. 

After an observation was coded, the l'e.~ults were reconciled in 

two stages {coder A with coder B, and then code~ AB with C). 

In cases when three coders could not agree on particular vari~ 

abies, !he project's postdoctoral research fellow resolved difference.~ based on an ex:.amination of the original sources that the 

coders relied upon 10 make thelr as .. o:;essment:t. Such decisions 

factored in the comparative reliability and quality of the sources 

(e.g .• report5 that cover trial j'Jfoceedings vs. repom issued in the 

immediate aftermath of the event) and the sources cited in the 

report. Due to time constraints, no efforts were made to check 

the veracity of reponing against p1imary sources unless they 

were readily available online. 

ll is irnpottant to emphasize some limitations inherent in the 

sources w.-ed in this study. First. che sample only includes jufor~ 

mation on individuals who planned or conducted incidents 

reponed in the media. It is possible incidents were mlssed that 

either {i) led to convictions but did not register any national 

media interest but may have been reported in local level sources 

not -covered in the LeKis.Nexis archives or (ii) were intercepted or 

disrupted by security forces without a et)nvi<::tion being made. 

Second, as the level of detail reported varied significantly across 

incidents. data collection was limited to what could reasonably be 

collected for each case. For example,. Pennsylvania srate police 

lieized raw cxp1osives and homemade lEDs in a 34~year~old 

man's home in Milesburg, PA in December 201 L This received 

no national coverage. Finally, it is often difficult to distinguish 

between missing data nnd variables that should be coded as n 

"no". Given the nature of newspaper reporting, it is unrealistic to 

expect each biographicaJfy oriented story to contain lengthy 

passages that list each variable or behavior the offender did not 

conduct (e.g., the offender was not a substance abuser, a fanner 

convict, recently exposed to new media, etc.). For the descrip~ 

tive analysis tha;t follows. wh¢re pos$ible. the authors report or 
66 


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distinguish betwet:n missing data and ''no·· answers, but it shouJd 

he kept in mind that the likely result is that ''no" answers are substantially undercounled in the analysis. In the cotnpatisons among 

lone actors based on their ideologies or network connectivity, 

each variable is treated in the analysi~ dichotomously (e.g., the 

response is either a "ye.~:· or not enough infonnation to suggest a 

yes). Unless otherwise stated, each of the below reported figw-e"> 

are of the whole sample (ll9 individuals). 

Despite these limitntions, open~source uccounts can provide 

rich data. This hn..;; been demonstrated in other studie."> focusing 

upon fhe sociodemographic characteristics, operational behaviors 

;md developmemat pathways of members of fonnnl leJ.Torist 

organizations. While this study has a wider reJuit and includes 

nonincideuHelated behaviors., given the particularly low base 

rale of lone--actor terrorism. the volume of re.po11ing tends to be 

much higher compared to campaigns of violence where trials 

and convictions are a weekly occurrence. For example, educa· 

tiona! data are accountable for 65% of our lone-actor sample. 

This is compared to <JO% of Gill and Horgan's (8) sample of 

Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) militants. frn· whom 

level of education could generally only be inferred from the indi~ 

vidual's. occupational status. 

Results 

Overall Clwmcferislics and Belwviors 

GeJu!er-Our lone-actor terrorist sample is heaviJy male--oriented. In total, 96.6% are male and there are only four instances 

of females e.ngaging in such behaviors. The figure of 3.4% being 

female clo~ely resembles studies that focus upon membership 

profiles of terrorist organizations/networks. For example, women 

accounted for 4.9%·of a sample of 1240 members of the PIRA 

{9). 2.7% of a sample of 222 dissident lri1>h Republicans (8), 

and 6.4% of Reinares' (10) sample of ETA members from 1970 

to 1995. There is an ongoing debate about the nature of female 

rect'Uitment and the wles women typically engage in within rer~ 

rorist groups (11). Much of this debate concerns the relative 

degree to which women typically conduct behaviors that are 

supportive of and facilitate violence as opposed to actually 

committing from line violent activities. ln tenns of our t'eroale 

subset, there is. also such a distincri(}n. Two of the females in 

o\ll' sample committed violent ac~. Roshonara Choudhry stabbed 

a Labour Pruty MP, Stephen Timms. in May 2010 in revenge 

for supporting the Iraq Wac and the subsequent deaths of innocent people within Iraq. Rachelle "Shelley" Shannon shot Dr. 

George Tiller (who was later a!i:sassinated by lone actor Scott 

Roeder) outside his abortion cJinic in Kansas in 1993. Shannon 

wa.<> also found guilty on 30 counts of being connected to sever.Jl 

arson attacks agains1 a total of nine abortion clinic.'i. 'l1\e other 

two females engaged in facilitative behaviors. For example. 

Sheila Roma was con:vict!!d in March 2009 of disseminating ter~ 

rorist puhlicatinnfi. She produced two verslons of a leaflet enti~ 

tied, Th~ Cali. which encouraged individuals to commit terrorist 

acts against Westem forces. The intention was to distribute these 

leaflet<; bodl frmn her home and outside of particular mosques 

near her home in Oldham. England. Houria Chahed Chentouf 

was atso convicted in 2009 in the United Kingdom for posses."~ 

ing documents likely to be useful for potentiaJ terrolists. She 

was stopped at Liverpoors John Lennon airport with USB stick 

containing more than 7000 files including lnstntctions on how to 

set up training ctunp,c; and manufacn1re IEDs a.-; well a." a lisr 

of potentially suitable targets. Investigators also later found 

GILLET AL • LONE ACTOR MOTIVATION ANO BEHAVIOR 427 

hand-wrinen documents that suggested Chentouf was consider~ 

ing movjng from facilitative. ro violent actions. The document"> 

apparently considered whether she and her children should 

become suicide bombers { 12). 

Agt:' of First Ten-orist Activiry--Figw-e l below examines the 

age at which offenders committed their first terrorism~related 

activity lhat led to a subsequent arrest and conviction unless the 

offender died in rhe cou~c of the terrorist event itself. Offen~ 

der's age ranged from 15 to 69. with a mean of 33, a mode of 

22. and a standard deviation of 12. This average age is much 

older than studie:.: that have focused upon Colombian militantsaverage age of 20 (13), the PIRA-average age of 25 ({4), and 

finally al-Qaeda-related terrorists-average age of 26 {15). ln 

fact, it is the second oldest srunpl~ of terrorists that the authorS 

are aware of, behind a sample of contemporary dissident llish 

republicans--->~.vemge age of 35 (8). Many in the dissident sam~ 

p!e had previous)y been members of PlRA, howe\'er, suggesting 

that their average age of first ten'Otist i11volvement would be 

younger. 

Figure l compares the lone~actor data set with data on PIRA 

and the Basque. separatist group Enskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) 

in terms of the relative distribution of age groups. These groups 

were chosen because they are the sole studies with comparable 

and available dara. The percentage of those over 30 years of age 

in our sample of lone actors is substantially larger than in the 

two other samples for which comparative figures arc available. 1t 

is almost two and a half times iarger than in the PIRA sample 

and more than eight times larger than in the ETA Salnple. The 

proportion of those under the age of 20 i~ also approximately 

four times smaller than in the ETA and PIRA sample~. As 

dt!picred in Fig. L those between 21 and 23 years of age and 

tho,.~e over 30 encompass more than 70% of the lone actors in 

the sample. suggesting that the onset nf tone-actor engagement 

in terrorism has a different temporal trajectmy than that of 

engaging in terrorism within fonnal groups. 

Relatinnshtp Staltls nnd Fami{:y Chamcteristics-Of the. 106 

individuals for whom relationship status data were available, 

50% were single individuals who had never married. A few 

(6.6%) were in relationships but had not yet married, Almost a 

quarter (24.5%) were married, and n further 18.9% had eithe1· 

separated from their spouse (3.8%) or were diVt)rced (15.1%). 

The percentage of married individuals in this sample is lower 

!han that associated with al-Qaeda-related te1rorists (73%) (14), 

PlRA (41.6%) {13), and contemporary dissident republicans 

ETA 

•cl8 

a18-20 

PIRA ey21·23 

24·2.6 

u27·29 

lo!'leActors. •"'' 

FIG. 1--Agl" whc11 cmnmirfing jirsl urrmisln-r~luled offmsc that rcmltctl 

in cmwkrion. 
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428 JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES 

(50%) (8), but higher than that associated with ETA (11.6%) 

(10) and Pakistani militants (14%) (16). Given the relatively 

older age of this sample, the marriage rates are low. When we 

consider the oft--cited t'indil1g that crirni11ill offending decreases 

as individuals age due to biographical constraints such as marriage, lt is also 1tot surprising to find such a comparatively older 

sample to have a high proportion of unattached individuals. 

Just more than a quarter (27.7%) had children, 34.5% were 

reponed not to have children, and in 37.8% of case.."i. data on 

children were unreported. This figure i~ comparatively much 

)ower th<tn Gill and Horgan's (14) study of PI.RA militants in 

which 41.4% had children, especially when we lake into consideration that the tont:HtctoT sample is a much older cohort of individuals. 

Of the 65 observations on which parental relationship status 

wa.-. available, 47.7% were married, whi.Je the remainder were 

divorced (30.&%), sepomed (7.7%), widowed (7.7%), or never 

married (3.1% ). 

Education-This section outlines the distribution of cduGational achievement among members of the sample for whkh 

data were available (77 individuals). 1n total, approximately a 

quarter's (24.7%) highest educational achievement was either 

altending or co1npJeting high school or secondary education. 

A further 32.5% either attended a community college, trade 

school. or university undergraduate education without graduat~ 

fng. An additional 22.1% completed some fonn of community 

college, trade school, or university education and graduated. 

Another 20.8% participated in graduate school and either failed 

to graduate (6.5%), graduated with a master's degree (6.5%}, or 

graduated with a doctoral degree (7 .8% ). In sum, there is a gener.Uly even distribution across the spectrum of educational 

achievement (depicted in Pig. 2), 

.Employmeni-Despite the generally high educational achieve~ 

ment among our cohort, this was nor immediately apparent when 

viewing the types of employment they were in at the time of 

their terrorism~relnted activi1y. Employment data were available 

for 112 of 1he sample. Of these individuals, 40.2% were unem· 

ployed and a further 9.8% were still studenrs. The other hnlf of 

the sample were employed hut mainly concentraled within the 

service industry (23.2%). Much smaller percentages were in pro~ 

fessionaJ c)Ccupat.ions (10.7%). construction {4.5%), clerical/ 

administrative/sales positions {4.5%), and agriculture (1.8%). 

These figures ar~ largely different from the studies cited e.'U'Iier 

on PfRA and ETA as well as Horgan and Morrison's (17) 

sn1dy of di:\sident republicans particularly in terms of those 

GraduateS 

(OroppedOu 

7% 

PhD 

Some Univer11W 

32% 

• unemployed 

8Services/Aaricutture 

ilStudent 

Construction 

Jill cteri<:ai/Sales/Admln 

a Professional 

•Other 

FI:G. 3-Compnt'(lfive (J('(:uJwlionol rategm}' br11okdmvn. 

unemployed and those in the construction industry {see Fig. 3). 

In both the PIRA and ETA samples, rhe construction industry 

was the largest employer. PIRA and ETA were comprised of 

comparntively fewer unemployed individuals compared to the 

lone-actor terrorist data set 

Militmy Experience-A qua11er (26%) had military expcri~ 

cnce. Of this ~11bs:et, 76.7% had s..ince left the army. the vast 

majority of whom for nonnal reasons. Some. however, had been 

ejet;ted from the anny for various offenses (such as racint behav~ 

ior in the ca.'e of SeM Glnespie), and others had been suspended 

and faced court.tnarrial (such as Naser Jason Abdo on child pornography charges). Of those who had military experience, 23.3% 

had actuol1 combat experience. 

Criminal attd Otha Illicit Activities-Significantly, 4l.2% of 

the sample had previous criminal convictions, and thi~ figure is 

far higher than what is anecdoraJly suggesr~d regnrding members 

of fonnal terrorist organizations, who prefer recruirs with clean 

record!' as they are unJike1y to mise red flags among the security 

community. Offense..~ illduded threats to life, firsr~degree robbery, criminal damage, custodial and second-degree assault. fireanns offenses including possession, obstructing law enforcement 

officers, drunk driving. grand larceny, vehicle theft, blackmail, 

lewd and dlsorderly conduct. drug possession, counlerfeiting. 

criminal use of explosives, vandalism, attempted murder, child 

neglect, restraining order violations. theft, income tax issues, 

child pornography possession. graffiti, and somewhat strangely 

·'possession of a carcass of a protected bam owl''. Of this subset, 

63.3% served time in jail. During jail time, at least 32.3% of this 

subset adopted the ideology and rJdicalized (a~ reported. in 

open~source news articles) for the event th~y later conducted or 

planned. Of the full sampte, 37.8% had previously engaged in 

violent behaviors. More dum a fifth (22.7%) had a his.tory of 

substance abuse. At least 27.3% had no previous convictions or 

history of imptisonment. 

Mental Health-Just less rhan a third (31.9%) had a history of 

mental illness or personality disorder. In the vast majority of 

the~e case.~. the diagnosi!i had been made before the individual 

engaged in terrorism-related activities. Naveed Afzal Haq, for 

example, had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Of this 

cohon, many were prcscJibed medicine, others were conunitted 

into residential programs and psychiatric institutions, others were 

hospitali7.ed. and some engaged with counsel1ng servkc:s. Some 

lone actors were only diagnosed upon their arrest and subsequent 

trial (for example, Ted KRczynski was diagnosed with paranoid 

schizophrenia). 
68 


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OtherS% 

FIG. 4-Lont'-I.ICior ideolngicnl oricn1atimJ. 

ldeological Justifit.:alions 

AI·Oaeda 

lnspired43% 

As Fig. 4 iJlustrate.", the fonewactor terrorists in nur ~ample 

had a range of ideologies. Religiously inspired lQne actors constitlttc the large~t set of :Jctors at 43%, This is {X-"'fhaps not a sur~ 

prising finding given bow loosety connected ai~Qaeda's 

transniltional network has become over time and al-Qaeda · s 

growlng emphasis upon lone-actor auacks: (for example, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire. magazine has been a consistent advocate of this str:ltegy}. Those in~-pired by right-wing 

ideo1ogie.s oonstitute the second h•rgest group representing a 

third of the total sample. The third largest grouping is a clustering of individuals driven by single-issue causes such as antiabortion or environmental campaigning. The bahulCe between these 

groups has changed over time. Only 7.8% of religiously oriented 

ft)nc actors engaged in their terrorist actions before 200 I, 

whereas the cor,re.~ponding figures for tight-wing extremists is 

32.5% and single-issue offenders is 47.6%. 

Historically, there have been very few lone~a<..1or incidents 

involving left~wing or nationalist inspired individuals. For four 

of our cohort, it was extremely difficult to 'ategorize the indivklu:U's ideological orientation and motivation. This is either 

because the individual's ldeology was self-made (as in the ca!:1-e 

of Ted Kaczynski) or economically oriented {as in the case of 

Dwight Watson and arguably Bmce Ivins). 

Awan!IU'SS of !JJtentitms 

In most c.ases, other individuals knew something concerning 

some aspect of the offender's grievance. intenl, beliefs, or 

extrcmis.t ideology prior to the event or planne.d event. In 58.8% 

of cases, the offender produced letters or p\tblic statement.~ prior 

to the event outlining: his/her beliefs {but not nece. ... ~arily his/her 

violent intenn. This figure aggregates both viltual and printed 

statements in ncw$papers and leaflets, etc. 1n 82.4% of the cases, 

other people were aware of the jndividual's grievance d1at 

!ipurred the terroris.t piOl, and in 79%. other individuals were 

aware of the individual's commitment to a specific extremist ide~ 

ology. In 63.9% of the cuses. family and friends were aware of 

the individual's intent lo engage in temlrism-related activities 

because the offender ve(bally told them. This is comparatively 

lower figure than the 81% found in a study of school shooters 

(18). bl 65.5% of cases, the offenders expre,;;:c;ed a desire to hurt 

others. This desire was communicated through either verha! or 

written statements. These findings suggest therefore that friends 

and family can play important roles in efforts that seck to 

GILLET AL. • LONE ACTOR MOTIVATION AND BEHAVIOR 429 

prevent terrmist plots. Of those who were manied or in a 

relationship, 24.2% of the offenders' spouses or partners were 

members of a wider ne1work associated with the ideology that 

inspired the lnne~actor terrorist. Finally, in 22.7% of the c.ascs. 

tl\e individual provided a specific preten-orisr event warning. 

There i£ also much evidence to $Uggest that others were aware 

of the indlvidual's disp(1sirion, but not necessarily their intent In 

53.8% of the cases, the offender was characterized bv close 

friends/family as an angry individuaL Of this subsamPie (64 

.individuals). there is a suggestion that the offender's anger was 

noticeably increasing in 62.5% of the ca.~:es. 

Pre-Event Behaviors 

This section provide.') an overview of our findings concerned 

with rhe bchavion; the indivjdual engaged in prior ro the te1Toris1 

evem or plnnned event A fift11 (20.2%) of the toral sample converted lo a religion before engaging or plruming to engage in an 

event. Not all of those who converted were nece.<::sarily religiously motivated offenders, however. Some, such as Leo Fel~ 

ton, were motivaled by right~wing ideologies .. Others, such as 

James Kopp, were single-issue offenders. Of the al-Qaedainspired offenders, religious converts account for 37.3%. The 

religiosity of 29.4% of the a\-Qaeda~inspired lone-actor !enmist'i 

noticeably incre.:~sed in lhe buildup to their terrorist event or 

planned event. 

Half (50.4%) changed address within !he 5 years plior to their 

terrorist even! planning or execution. Significantly, of those who 

did change addl·ess, 45% did so within 6 months of their eventual terrorist attack or arrest. A further 20% changed address 

between seven and tweJve months prior to the terrorist event or 

preemptive arrest. Altogether, this means that just Jess than a 

third of our total sample (32.8%) changed address in the. yem 

before their terrorist plot either occurred or was prevented. 

As noted earlier, 40.2% were unemployed at the time of their 

ntre1it or terrorist event. Many were chronically unemployed and 

consistently stl'uggled to hold any form of employment for a signific:mt amount of tim~. Of the unemployed subset, however, 

approximately a quarter (26.6%) had Jost their jobs within 

6 months and a furtJler J 5.5% between seven and twelve month~ 

before the event. On a related note. 25.2% experienced finu11cial 

problems. Of this: subsample (30 individuals), 56.6% experienced 

financial problems within n yenr of their terrori~t attack or plot. 

Many (32.8%) of the offenders were charaCterized as being 

under an elevated level of stre$S due to a number of reasons. Of 

this sub5amplc, 74.3% of the case.<> of elevated stre."is occurred 

within a year of the terrorist attack or plot. Very few had 

recently (e.g., within 5 yean;) experienced a death in their family 

(6.7%} that may h<~ve served as a catalyst for the intended violence that followed Very few dropped out of M:hooJ or Jeft uni~ 

versity (10.1%) before their terrorist event or planned event. 

Approx:Jmately one in five of those lone <tctors in guinfu) 

employment demonstrated worsening work pelfonnance in the 

buildup to their terrorist event or plot Very few (6.7%) were 

interrupted in working on a proximate goal in the year before 

their tenvrist event or planned event. Some (12.6%) noticeably 

increa'ied their physical activities and outdoor excursions in the 

buildup to their !errorist even!. At lea.<~t 15.1% subjectively experienced being the target of nu act nf prejudice or unfairness. On 

a related note. 19.3% subjectively experienced being disrespect· 

ed by others, while 14.3% experienced hcing the victim of 

verbal or physical assault. At least 25.2% of the fuil sample \Vas 

chru-acterized as. suffering from long-term sources of sn't:!'is. 
69 


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GILLET AL. • LONE ACTOR MOTIVATION AND BEHAVIOR 431 

posses.'led a stockpile of weapons for the commissioning of the 

offense. 

Just over half of the observations (51.2%) successfully 

executed their terrorist atU\ck, Of this satnple (n = 6t), the 

majority of offender~ (61.2%) used their persona! vehicle to tra~ 

vel to the attack location, while od\ers took puh!ic transport 

(16.1%), walked (9.6%}, or rented a car (12.9%). 

In 21% of the case~. the individual expres..'ed reroorsclregret 

following their event and subsequent arrest Of the.se cases (25 

individuals). 44% larer changed their beliefs/ideological orienta~ 

tion. At least 16.6% expressed no remQrse for their actions, and 

data were unavailable for lhe rest of the cases. 

Comparing Subgroups of Lone.~Actor Terrorists 

The descriptive analysis of our data abtwe illustrates that there 

i::: no reliable profile of a lone~actor terrorist. In this section, the 

authors ex.:unine specific subgroups of lone~actor terrnrists to 

explore whether the individual characteristics and behaviors of 

lone~actor terrorists differ across these distinctions. 

Comparing Lone-Actor Terrorists by Ideology 

~errorist groups are commonly distinguished across motivational and ideological domains (19-21). The three most prevale.nt ideologies held by rnembers of our lone-actor terrorist data 

set were right-wing, singlc~issue {an.ilnal rights, antiabortion, 

environmentalism). and al-Qaeda-reiated ideologies. In Table l, 

the major differences jn individual characteristics and :mtecedent 

event behaviors associated with lone actorn who held these ideologies are outlined. To identify differences between ideoJogical 

groups, 2 x 2 chi-squared analyses (or F!shtl:t"s exact tests 

where appropriate) were run for each ideological domain against 

each antecedent and behavioral v~U'iable (e.g., right wing vs. 

single issue/al·Qaeda), A one~way ANOVA comparison of 

means test was used for the average age V<Uiable, 

As the results suggest, there are distinctions among !one-actor 

tem)rist.; with specific types of ideDJogies. The aver.lge age of 

ai-Qaeda~related lone actors was 10 years ymmg;er than that of 

either the right~wing or singte~issue cohorts. Member.\ of this 

subgroup {compared to a combination of right-wing and singleissue lone acton\) were also !cignificantly more likely to be 

students or have a university degree and/or some experience of 

university. They were significantly 1e~s likely to have previous 

criminal cmwict1on.s or experi~nce of imprisonment at the time 

of their terrorist event. Given the ideo1ogicaJ beliefs of this sub~ 

group. it is also not surprising that they were :-;\gnificantly more 

likely to seek legitimization from religious, political, social. or 

civic lenders prior to their terrolist event or plot and significantly 

mt~re likely to be religious converts. They were also ~ignificantly 

more likely t() learn through virtual sources and to be living 

away from home during the phase when they adopted their 

extremist ideology. There was also a significantly higher indica~ 

tion of command and control links with this subgroup (mainly 

through others helping them procuring weaponry or through 

orbers knowing about the specific attack plan}. Historically, alQaeda~related lone--actor· terrorists have bel!n ~ignificantly Jess 

likely to be U.S.~ba.sed compared to tho~e espousing right~wing 

or $.ingle-is.sue ideologies. They have also been significantly les!' 

likely to join a wider pressure group or social movement in the 

buildup to their terrori~t event and significantly less likely to 

successfully execute their terrorist attack. 

Compared to both single-issue and al-Qaeda-inspired offenders. tight~wing lone-actor terrorist~ were significantly less likely 

to have experienced any fonn of university education, work as a 

professional, be a student, be a religious convett, or be living 

away from home when they adopted their radical ideology 

or have children. They were mtlfe likely to be employed in 

TABLE 1-Comparing lrme a~tor.t llrmss ideological domaitl.~. 

Town size <20,000 

University experience 

Worked in construction Work~tl as a pn.lfCS!<ional 

Student :1t time of event 

Unemployed 

Vernal s1a1emems to friends/family llhom intent or belids 

Relig,it\U!'<COflvert 

Sought legitimitation 

Uvcd a\vny from home when ideology at.lop1~d 

Othen; helped procure lh\::ttponl)' 

Engaged Ill dry mns 

Recently joined a wit!cr group/movement 

Evidence \'If command nn<l Cl"'ntml links 

Basetl in the United Slates 

ln 11. rclarion!ihip 

Previous criroin:~l conviction 

Previously imprixoned 

Provided n pre-event W<Jming 

Spousc/p3rtner pan of o wider movemt"n1 

Learned thtough vtnual soun.-es 

History of memal mne.->"-

Othcrs. aware of indh•iduar 1<: planning 

Children 

Univeniity degree 

Average age 

Su~.'\.-essful exe<:uliM of terrorist auack 

Righ1 Wing (11 = 40) 

37.5%*•" 

1~%**• 

12.5%**" 

2.5%* 

2.5%* 

50%* 

52.5%** 

2..5%*** 

7.5%"* 

15%** 

10%*** 

17.5%** 

47.5%** 

5%** 

52.5% 

20<1-

50% 

'27.5% 

17.5% 

5% 

37.5% 

30% 

52.5% 

15%** 

5% 

36.3 ye.:tr:t; 

51.5% 

Sina:le Issue (11 "'21) AI-Queda Related (11 -"' 52) 

28.6% 9.6%"'"'"' 

52.4% 50%** 

0% 0%•• 14.3% 11.5% 

4.8% \7.3()1•U 

38.1% JO.RCA: 

7J.4<.:f. 71.2% 

!91> 36.5%*** 9.5% 28.8<k"** 

J9% 38.5«i*** 

33.3% 32.7%* 

47.6%** 30.8'}( 

38.1% 23.H.f:H 

4.8o!Jf J0.8!lH*** 

71.4%"'** 28.3%*•• 5241J.*U 2!.2% 

6L9%** 26.9%*h 

47,6%.** 19.2%* 

.~8.1%* 21.1% 

19**"' ).8% 

19!fl"'*· 65.4%"'** 

52.4%$."' 25o/• :\tU%*"' 69,2%** 

42.'~%* 28.8% 

4.8% 17.3%** 

36.8 yeari 26.7 yenrs** ... 

66.7% 40.4%*• 
70 


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432 JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES 

construction al the time of their terrorist even!, to be based in a 

town wilh a population smaHer than 20,000, and to have joined 

a wider pressure group or social movement before their tetrorist 

action. In tenns of specific event planning activities, they were 

significantly more likely to solely ohtain the weapons and technology needed for the event but also -significantly Ies..<> likely to 

engage in dry nm.s. display evidence of command and control 

Jinks. make verbal statements to friends and family about their 

intent or beliefs, or seek legitimization for their intended action 

from epistemie authority figures. 

Compared to both a\-Qaedlt and right-wing offenders. singleissue lone-actor terrorists were significantly more Jikely to be in 

a relationship (and to have a spouse involved in a wider movement of activist politics), have children. be based in the Unlted 

States, have previous crim1ual convictions and bave previously 

he~n imprisoned. More than half had a history of mental illnes::s. 

They were also significantly more likety lo engage in dry runs 

and provide pre-event wrunings and far less likely to learn 

through virtual sources. Single-issue lone-actor terrorists were 

also significantly less likely to have others aware of their 

research, planning. or intent to engage in a terrori!'it attack. 

There was very little to differentiate among these subgroups. 

of lnneMactor terrorists in tenus of making verbal statements to a 

wider a.udien~ outside of their immediate friends and family or 

other people knowing about the individual's griev<UlCe or 

extremist ideology prior to the event There were al~o no differences in their historie~ of substance abuse. military engngement. 

and experience.'i of hands-or\ training; engagement with literature 

and propaganda {of a wider movemem and of other tone achxs): 

face-to--face jnteractions with members of a wider nelwork; or 

posses~ion of close associales involved in criminal activities. 

Comparing Lmltt-Actor Terrorists by Network Connecrivity 

While comparing and contra1l:ting: lone-actor ten·orist' across 

ideological domainR has revealed ~orne interesting re:mlts, 

perhaps a more impanant comparison for lhe practitioner community is one £hat e::c::unines tone-actor terrorists based on how 

operation;.tlly connected they are 10 a broader 11etwor.k. of activists. Depending upon tbe level of connectivity. different investigative strategie5 or disruption efforts may be necessary, Table 2 

illustrates the ~1atistically significant difference5 between individ~ 

ual terrorists without command and control links, and individual 

terrorists with command and control links and isolated dyads. 

Compared lo isolated dyads ~nd those with command und 

control Jinks, the results suggest that individuals without 

command nnd contml links were more likely to have military 

experience, previous criminal convictions, be based in the United 

States, hold either singleMissue or rigltt·wing ideo1ogies1 be char~ 

acterized as socially isolated, and have a history of mental iJl. 

ness. They were significantly less likely to learn through vit1ual 

sources, increase their religiosity before their event, recently join 

a wider pressure group or social movement. attempt to recruit 

others, or have family or dose associates involved in poHtical 

violence or crime. Unsurprisingly, compared to both those with 

command and control links and isolated dyads, those without 

command and control links were also significantly Jess likely to 

interact either face-to face or virtually with members of a wider 

network or have other~ aware of their planning, help build their 

IEDs. or help procure weaponry. TI1ey were also significantly 

less likely to be alMQaedu inspired. They were also significantly 

more likely ro succes.,.fully execute their terrorist anack, 

Apart from network·relnted behaviors, there is little to differ· 

entiate between those with command and control links with 

those belonging to the other two subgroups. They were signifi~ 

canlly more likely to have had others notit.:e an increase in their 

religiosity and be inspired by ai~Qaeda. They were significantly 

less likely to be influenced by right~wing or singleMissue ideolo~ 

gies, be characterized as social1y b1olated, have previ()US criminal 

convictions, military experience, or be' based in the United 

States. They were also significantly Je,~s likely 10 successfully 

execute their ten·OJist attack, 

lrulividualii Wilhout Command Individual., With Comnmml Isolated Dyads 

Based in the United States Previous military cllperiencc 

Previous criminnl conviction 

Held a PhD 

Lived alone 

Lived .away from h(')me when ideology adopted 

Received tn1ining 

Learnt lhroug:ll vinu;1l snurce:-< 

Hi:;wry of mcntsl illncs~ 

Soci;:~lly isolated 

Recemly joined a widt..-r group/movement 

Ntniceable increa,--e i11 relig1o:<.ity 

F:Jmilylclo:<~e nssoci;;.tel\ involved in \)('lllt~al vlolentcA.Tirnc: 

hneroctc:d fnce~to..f;;.IX wilh. wider network 

Jnternctetl virtually with wiclet network 

Others helped pl'OI.'tlre \Yeaponry 

Olhers helped build l£D 

Otherr.. uware of individu~~:l's planoin~ 

Auemptetlto rccmit mbers 

Consumed propa~;an<l::~ from a wider movement 

N~Qncda related 

Sinp..te is10ue 

Righi wing 

Succe....:~fully ~:xecutW 1111 au:.ek 

::md Control Link.~ (n =- 87) {%) 

:S:'i-2""""' 

31"*" 

47.1'** 

2,.) 

40.2 

23 

20.7 

40.2**"' 

35.6~·· 

51.5"' 

27.6** 

2:.l'** 

27.6*** 

39.1"'"* 

1&:7"""* 

17.2>:.>;;* 

6.9"'** 

42.5"'** 

27.6-H 

fi5.5* 

333*-*~ 

23*• 

39.t""" 

515** 

2111d Control Uok.~ (n =- 21) {%) (n • II)(%) 

4.8*' ... 36.4 

4.8** 9.1 19-''> ~6.4 

" l!U"''"' 

3l:U 9.J** 

42.9* 27.3 

333 o• 66.7* 72.7" 

19 9.1 

33.3* 45.5 

J7.6 4;i.S 

6L9*'~'""' 27.3 

51.1** 63,6~* 

61.9 90.3~*"' 

57.1''* 63.6<\'0 

.'\$;.1* 45.5'• 

3.3,3"'** 27.3 

100**"' l00'1

"''* 33.3 Rl.8~"'* 

!l'i.7* 72.7 

76.1*$~ 63.6 

4.R* 

9.5*• 36.4 " 

::n.J• 213 
71 


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TABLE 3-Comparing .tlt<'CC~sfid hmt aci<IJ".'i /(1 imt'raptnlltm~ acwts. 

Did the Individual Succ!!..~l'fullv 

Cornmit an AU.'lck'l • 

Univ~ity experience 

SodaUy isolated History of mental illnes.~ 

PreviOIL~Iy rejected from wider g:rnup 

Other's aware of rese:m:h/p1anning 

or prep.'1rntion for event 

Attempted to recruit oilier'!; 

l..-.!11nll through virtual source~ 

Bomb·tnaking Manuals lu horne 

Rec~ntly exposed !O new media 

Interacted virtually wilh wider nc1work 

R('ad or consumed \iternturtlpropnganda 

from a wider movement 

Re~d m consumed litentture/flropnganda 

abmu other lone actor:; 

R~ad or consumed litemture/prupag:ui(J~ 

of other lone AcWTS 

*p < 0.1: ..,.p < 0.05; •••p < O.OL 

Yes(n :::f>H No (n"' 58) 

('k) (%) 

S4.t••.to 24.1 7Q5U'(I. .34.5 

39.3+- 24.1 

16.4"'* ).4 

)6.1 79.3*** 

24.6 44.8•* 

29 . .5 ()J.8*** 

JLI 10.1*~* 

19,7 41.4**~ 

24l .. ~.6*""' 

52.5 84..5'*** 

!1.5 43.1**"' 

8.2 22.4** 

For isolated dyads, it is also largely the case that little ~epa~ 

rate5 them from the other two subgroup:'. other than networkrelated behaviors. Compared to the other two subgroups. isolated 

dyads were significantly more likely to attempt to rectuit others 

and hold a PhD. Ioolated dyads were significantly tess likely to 

receive hands-on training or live alone. 

Comparing Suc-cessful atul Foiled Lone·Actor Terroriszs 

This section outlines the .significant differences between those 

!one-actor terrorists who succes~fuHy executed an attack and 

those who did not. To calculate whether differences were s.lgnificant, chi-squared tests were used for each variable (Table 3). 

Interestingly, those who successfully conunitted an attack 

were significantly less likely to engage in a number of networkrelated behaviors including having other's aware of their a!tack 

planning, attempting to recruit others, Jeaming through virtuul 

source-s, possessing bomb-making manuals. being recently 

exposed to new media, interacting virtually with members of a 

wider net work, and consuming/reading propaganda relaled to 

either a wider group or other lone-actor terrorists. Successful 

lone-actor terrorists, however, were significantly more likely to 

have university experience, be characterized as being sociaUy 

isolated, have a history of mental illness, or have previously 

been rejected from a wider group or movement. 

Discussion and Conclusion 

This ;micle focused on 119 lone->~ctor terroris[S and the behaviors that underpinned the development and/or execution their 

plots. In total. seven key findings were identified. This section 

summarizes these findings and higf;llights their implications. from 

a preventative and investigative perspective before concluding 

with a disCU!\i'ion of potential avenues for future research. 

Finding.f and Implications 

Finding I: There was no unifonn profile of lone~actor terror~ 

isis. 

Although heavily male-oriented, there were no unif01m 

variables that charncteri1.ed all or even a majority of lone·actor 

tetrorists. The sample ranged in age from 15 to 69. Half were 

GILLET AL • LONE ACTOR MOTIVATION ANO BEHAVIOR 433 

single, 24% were married, and 22% were separ-ated or divorced. 

Twenty·seven percent had chiJdren. Educational 1\chievcmem 

varied substantially with approximately a qum1er either having 

attended or finishing high school, approximately a (bird of the 

sample having attended, but not graduating from some form of 

university, 22% completing nn undergraduate degree. and 21% 

ha\·ing attended or finishing some form of graduate school. In 

total, 8% held a PhD, while 40% of the sample was. unemployed 

al the time of their terrorist <:tttacks. or arrests, 50% held jobs 

(11% professional position~). and 10% were srudents. Twentysix percent had served in the military. Finally, forty-one perceni 

had previous criminal convictions, 31% had a history of mental 

health problems, and 22% had a history of substance abu~e. 

Thus. no clear profile emerged from the data. Even if such a 

profile were evident. however, an over-reliance on the. use of 

such a profile would be unwammted. because many more people 

who dn not engage in lone-actor terrorism would share these 

characteristics, while others might not but would still engage in 

lone-actor terrorism. 

Finding 2: In the time leading up to most lone-actor terrorist 

events, eviden<:e suggests that orher people generally knew about 

the offender's grievance, extremist ideology, view~\. and/or intent 

to engage in violence. 

For a large majority (83%) of offenders, others were aware of 

the grievances that later spurred their terr01ist plots or nctionl-1. In 

a similar number of case..~ (79% }. others were aware of the individual's commitment to a specific extremist ideology. In 64% of 

cases, fomlly and friends were aware of the individual's intent to 

eugage in a terrorism~rclated octiviry because the offender verbally told rhem. In 58% of cru."es, other individuals possessed 

specific information about the lone actor•s research. planning. 

and/or preparation prior to the event itself. Finally, in a majority 

(59%) of ca~s. the offender produced letters or made public 

statements prior to the event to outline h1slher beliefs (but not 

his/her violent intentions). These statements include both letters 

sent to newspapers., self-printed/disseminated leaflets, and starements in virtual fontms. 

These tindings suggest that friends. f::1mi!y, and coworkers can 

play important roles in effort~ that seek to prevent or disrupt 

lone.actor te1mrist plots. In many cases, those aware of the individual's intent to engage in violence did not report this information to the relevant authorities. It is important therefore to 

provide informc.Hion to the wider public on the hehaviornl indicators of radicalizalion lo violence as well as appropriate outlets 

for this infonnation to be repmted and subsequenlly investigated. 

ln any event, this finding may have significant implications for 

the development of operational investigations. 

Indeed, most of the valiables related to others having knowledge of the lone actor's views and intent were far more common 

across lone actors than any sociodemogmphic characteJistics. 

This suggests that k)ne-actor ten·orii't.~ should largely be characterized by what they do rather than who they are. 

Finding 3: A wide range of activities and experiences. 

preceded Jone actors.' plots or events. 

Although the <l.Uthors found it i~ more important to focus on 

what lone-actor terrorist~ do thau who they ~U"C. it is sdll important to r~cognize thnt no single set of behaviors underpins loneactor terrorism. Half of the sample changed address at least five 

years ptior to their terrorist event planning or execution. Of the 

40% who were unemployed, 27% .had lost their jobs withhl sh 

monrhs, and a further 16% hetween seven and twelve months 

before the event. On a related note. 25% ex;perienced financial 

problems. Thiny-three percent of the offenders were charJcterized 
72 


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434 JOURNAL OF FORENSIC SCIENCES 

as being under an elevated level of stress due to a number of rea· 

sons. Of this subsample, 74% experienced elevated stress within 

a year of the terrorist plo1 or event Approximately one in five of 

those lone actors in gainful employment demonstrated worsening 

work perfomlance in the buildup to their terrorist plot or event. 

Fifteen percent 5ubjective1y experienced beiog the targe! of an act 

of p1·ejudice or unfairness. 19% subjectively experienced being 

disrespected by others, and 14% experienced being the victim of 

verbal or physiClAl as.'\autt. A ftfth of the sample converted to a 

religion before cngag:ing or planning to engage in an event. Thir· 

teen percent noticeably increased their phy~ical activities and out~ 

door excursions. 

Thus, behaviorally, the lone-actor terrorist sample was also 

diverse. The behaviors related to the individual's rndicalization 

and trajectory into lemlfism were not overly similar from cas.e to 

case. Sitnilarlyt !he rhythm <.l.Jld tempo of each developmenbl 

trajectory also differed. 

Finding 4: Many but not an lone-actor tent~rists were socially 

isolated. 

More than a quarter of the sample (27%) adopted their radical 

ideology when living away from home in another town. city, or 

country. Thirty-seven percent lived alone al the time of their 

event pJanning and/or execution, and 53% were characterized as 

socially isolated by sources within the coded open-source 

accounts. 

Some lone-actm teJTorists experienced problems with personal 

relationships. In these case.<>, social isolation tended not to be a 

long-standing occurrence but instead was derived from more 

recent interpersonal conflict For example, 31% experienced 

problems ill dose personal relationships (e.g .• family, romantic 

rela1ionships}. Of this subsample, 33% experienced these diffi~ 

culties within the 6 months prior to planning or conducting 

their terrorist event. Eleven percent of the full sample e:\perienced being ignored or treated poorly by someone impm1:ml to 

them in the buildup to their terrorist plot or event. AdditionaUy, 

8% experienced someone impo11ant to them demonstrating lh<lt 

they did not care about the individual in the buiklup to their 

offense. 

A popular perception exists that lone~actor terrorists arc 

isolated from the rest of society while their grievances grow and 

plots develop. This is perhaps best illustrated by the example of 

Ted Kaczynski, the so-called .. Unabomber:· Collectively, however, lone-actor terrorists are more likely to be socially embedded within wider nelworks than be socially isolated. While those 

who :u-e socially isolated are a minority. they do represent a specific threut to investigatiom.: that rely upon intercepting communicalillns or receiving warnings from friends and family. Effotts 

aimed at comb:.1ting socially isolated lone actors may additionally need to consider issues pertaining to the supply chain of 

weapons, bombing materiaJs, and the operationRI manuals that 

are available online. 

Finding 5: Lone~actor terrorists regularly engaged in :1 detectR 

able and observable range of activities with a wider prcsNure 

group, .'locial movement, or terrorist organization. 

Approximately a third of lhe ~ample had recently join~ a 

wider group. organizatiou, or movement that engaged in contentious politics. Jnst less than a half (4&%) interJcted face~to-face 

with m~mbers of a wider network of political activists, and 35% 

did so vinua1ly. In 6R% of the c<~ses. there is evidence to suggest 

that the individual read or consumed literature or propaganda 

associated with <1 wider movement Fourteen percent previously 

engaged in fundrnising or financial donations to a wide.r network 

of individuals as.."ociated with either licit pre.<>sure groups or 

illicit groups who espoused violent intentions. One in six {17%) 

sought legitimization from religious, political, social. or civic 

leaders prior to the event they planned. 

There is evidence to suggest that in 17% of the cases there 

may have been wider command and control links specifically 

associated with the violent event that wns planned or carried out. 

fn approximately a third of the cases (35%), the lone actor had 

tried to recruit others or form a group prior to the event. In 24% 

of cases, other individuals were involved in procuring weaponry 

or technology that was used (or planned to be used) ln the 

terrorist event bul did not themselves plan to ptlrticipale in 

the violent Jctions. rn t3%- of cases, other individuals helped the 

lone actor assemble an ex.plosiw device. 

Much of the concem regarding lone-ac(or terrorism !items 

from the panicular challenges of detecting and intercepting lone~ 

actor terrorist events before they (X:CUT. Although they vary sig~ 

nilicandy in their effectiveness, there is a cmumon perception 

that tone~actor plot<:. are virtually undetectable. The u·aditional 

image of a Jone~actor terrorist is that of an individual who creM 

ates his/her own ideology and plans and execuh.'>S attacks with 

no help from oth~..'l'S. Our fmdings suggest, however, that many 

lone-actor terrori"ts regularly internet with wider pressure groups 

and m<:~vements either face~to~face or vjrrually. This .couggests 

that traditional counterterrolism measures {sucl1 ;u; counterintelligence, HUMINT, interception of communications, surveillance 

of pers;ons. etc.) may have applicability to the early de!eclion of 

certain Jone·actor terrorists at specific moments in their pathway 

toward violence, 

Finding 6: Lone-actor terrorist events were rarely sudden and 

impulsive. 

Training for the plot typically «eum::d in a number of ways. 

Approximately a fifth of the sample (21%) received some fonn 

of hands~on training. while 46% learned rhrough virtUal sources. 

In half the cases. investigaton; found evidence of bomb~making 

manuals within the offender's home or on his or her property. 

The fact that much strategic and tactical pJanning goes into lone~ 

acror u~rrorhH events is demonstrated by the finding that 29% of 

offend~rs engaged in dry runs of their intended activities. 

Typically. loneRactor terrorist events emerge from a gradual 

chain of behaviors. l11is chain includes the ~teps of udopting an 

extremist ideology, thinking about engaging in violence, aC({Uiring the necessary materials and/or lr<~ining. and fina.lly commlt~ 

ting the offense. These behaviors may be observable prior to the 

commission of events. Although che development of a lone-actor 

terrorist event ls rarely impulsive, at times there is very little 

time between the offender choosing to use violence and conunit· 

ling an attack. 

Finding 7: Despite the diversity of lone-actor terro1ists, there 

were distinguishable differences between subgroups. 

While no uniform profile exist~ acro."s our sample, there were 

signiticant differences when we compared subgroups. For exam~ 

pie, compared to right-wing offenders and single-issue offenders, 

those intl:pired by ai.Qaeda were younger and more likely ro be 

srudent.s and to h<~ve sought legitimization from epistemic 

authority figures. They were also more likely to learn through 

virtual sources and display ~'ome form of command and control 

!inks. Right·wing offenders were more likely to be unemployed 

and less likely to have ltny universily expe~ience, make verbal 

statements lo friends and family about their intent or beliefs, and 

engage in dry runs or oblain help in procuring weaponry. SingJc-isS:ue offender:r; were more likely to be in a relationship, have 

climinal conviction~. have a history of mental illness. pmvide 

specific pre-event warnings, and engage in dry nms. They were 
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les.CJ likely to learn through vinunl :mun:es or have others nware 

of their plauning. 

This suggests the importJnce of not trealing all lone~actor 

terrorists homog~neously and may have impliciltion:s. both for 

prevention and disruption as well as subsequent inve~tigation. 

Future Directions 

While the data. anulysis. and findings. throughout this article 

are novel and important, it has <.\nly scratched the surface of 

what is <:1 deeply complex and unfolding contemporary phenome~ 

non. Together the results suggest the importance of focusing 

upon an analysis of behavior rather than attempting to identify 

and suhsequently interpret what arc realistically only scml-l'tabte 

(a! best) sociodemographic characteristics. What we lack, howM 

ever, is an adequate control group to fully realize the significance of ~ome of the de.~riptive findings. While the subgroup 

comparisons consistently found significant differences. it would 

he worthwhile to open the observations and dam collection pro¥ 

tocols to those individuals involved in fully or semi-autonomou:-; 

groups. lbrough such an endeavor. a comparative approach 

would illustrate whether the descriptive findings related to ante~ 

cedent behaviors and experiencl!:- are inherent to lone-actor ter~ 

rorists or whelher they are part of a wider trajectory in terrmism 

us a whole. An understanding of the."e dynamics would provide 

a wider evidence base to infonn counterterrorism policies and 

pr;~ctice~. On a much more aspirational scale, there is illso little 

evidence of tlte prevalence of these variables runong !he wider 

public and thus how much they lruly distinguish lone-actor 

terrorist<> from law-abiding citizens. 

Other methodologies will also provide other ftu1her insight 

At the time of writing, there remain no publicly available iDlerviews undertaken by re.'iearchers with lone-actor terroril'ts with 

the specific pUfJX'lSe of understanding how individm1ls decide to 

undertake violence as an individual. absent of fo1mal lerrorist 

group membership. Little Is also known aboul the individlUII 

sociopsycholog.ical and practical constraints that need to be overcome to succe..'\s:fully execute a lone~actor terrorist attack. 

FioaJJy, the finding that many of our sample had performed acts 

of criminality prior lo their terrorist plotting suggests that it may 

bt! worthy to omalyze these individu<tls from a t:riminal caret:rs 

perspective. Such a perspective would provide insight inro how 

individuals desisr from one Hlegal activity and ultimalely tmnsition toward other illegal (but politica11y or !:{'X:iatly dtiven) activ~ 

ities. 

References 

I Chermak SM. Freilich JD. Simone J. Surveying American ~lnte police 

ng:encies ahotu ltmc. wolves, fl.lT..riRht criminolity. and far.-right and blamlc Jih::!Jist criminal collaboralion. Stud Conflict Tem;r:ism 

2010;J3:1019-41. 

GILLET AL. • LONE ACTOR MOTIVATION AND BEHAVIOR 435 

2. Kapl"n l Leader~!>$ re:.;t:~-tance. Terrorism Pnlil Violence l997:9i3}.R0-

95. 

3. Spaaij R. The enigm:<'l. nf lune wolf terrori«m: an a.~:..e.'lsmcnt. Stud Ct\11-

!licl Tmori<;.m 20tO;JJ:854-70. 

4. Waits C. Sh1lN 0. LlMOOmber: the s.::cn:t life of Ted Kaczynd::L Helena. 

MT: Helena lrukpcn.dent Record, 1999. 

5. Michd L. Herbo:cl D. Americnn terrofi~t: Timothy McVeigh and the 

Ok!.ilio~tr~ dl)' ht)mbing. New Y~1rli.. l'OY: H::trper. 2001. 

6. Willman D. The mimge mon: Bruce Ivins. tht :uuhwx :tttad.:.s, and 1he 

Americo's rush to wnr, New York.. NY: Bantam. 2011. 

7. Paolucci R. A typofogy of lone wotvcs: preliminary analysis of lone 

bla.mtst terrorists. R!!:port for the lnlenuuional Centre for the Study of 

Radicalisatwn and Political Viol!!n~. 20J t: http:/licsdnfolwp<ontt::nll 

uplr-adV20l2/JO/l302002992ICSRPaper_ATypologyofLolleWolve~_Pil!lt~ 

ucci.pdf. 

8. Htlrg<~n J_ GUt P. Who becomes n disj;ident'f PaUtnn in lhe mobilisation 

and recruitmenl of violent dissidenl Republic<~ns. h1: T.lylor M, Cunie 

M, editor:>- Dissident Irish republicanism, London. UJ<..: Continuum 

Pre.'-!., 2011;~3-<>4. 

9. Bloom ""'l Gill P, Horgan J. Tiocf111dh ar mna: wonw.n in the ProvJsional 

Irish Rt:puhlican A:rmy. Bchav Sci Tttrrorism Polit Aggr 2012:4(1}:60-

76. 

10. Rein1\l'es F. WOO are the- temlrisu? Annlyring d:mnge:. in ~~x:iulogkai 

profile among memhcrs of ETA. Stud Omflict Tc.rrori~m 2004;27:465-

88. 

l!. Bloom M. Bombshell: women and t1~tmrism. Pbihtdelph.ia. PA: University ofPennsVIV"&litl Press. 20!1. 

12. Si;ll(O)i. R. S!uart H. A..hmcd H. r!'IJamisl terrmlsm: the Brilis:h <:onnertioi\S, London, U.K.: Center for Social Cohesion, 2010. 

13. Aorcl,-Moni~ M. Joining gucrrillil gmup.'i it~ C{)lombia: individual m1lli~ 

vations and processes for entering a violent organJz::uion. Srud Conflict 

Tem)rism 2007:..'0(7):615-34. 

l·L Gill P, Horg~:~on J. Who were the Volunteer!;:? Th.: shifting ~odological 

.and operalionnl profile of 1240 Pn.wisional Irish Republican Army memben. Terrori~m Pl.'llit Viokno.-e 20\3:25(3}:435-:56. 

15. S<~gem:m M. Understanding tenor neiWt)fkS- Philadelphia. PA: Uruversity 

of Pennsylvama Pre~~. 2004. 

16. F:~ir C. Who ::u~ P..aki:mm·s nulitanJs and their families'! Tomnrism PQlit 

Vklence 2008:2.0(1):49-65. 

17. Horgan J. MoniM>n JF. Here to stay? The rising threat of ..,-iolent di~s.ident Republicanism in Nonhern Jrcl:md. T erron~m Polit Vioh!ncc 

2008;23:M2-<lQ. 

18.. VMsd>.uil B. Fein RA. Reddy M. B(lrum R. Modzele.~ki W. The final 

report and findings. nf the safe school iniliativ~: implic:ntil)i'l~ for the J'~· 

venlion of school attacks in the United State-s;. WashingiOn. DC: Uniled 

States Secret Service and United State!!: Department of Education. 2002. 

19. Mer.ui A. A das~fi~tion o( terrori~t grouP-"· Terrori50l i978:l{~­

-1):33l-4b. 

20. Sc!tuilz R. C1mceptualizing poliric<Jl terrorism: a typology. J Im AIT 

!t}78;3J(t}:7-1.S. 

21. Asal V, Rethemeyer K. Th~ nature or the beast the orgnuizarional :md 

network dwacleristics uf mgnnizatinnuJ lethality. J Pol.it 20C)fl.~70:437--

49. 

Add.itilma! information and reprim requc~ts: 

Puul Gill, Ph.D. 

Department of Securily ond Crime Science 

llniveuity CoUeg<: London 

35 Tavi.'1tock Squore 

london WC I H 9EZ 

U.K. 

E-mail: paul.gifl@ud.ac.ul:. 
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911312016 www.counterpunch.org >> King of the Hate Business » Print 

- www.counterpunch.org -http:/ /www.counterpunch.org -

King of the Hate Business 

Posted By Jeffrey St. Clair- Alexander Cockburn On May 15, 2009@ 12:00 am In article,articles 

2014 onward 1 Comments Disabled 

What is the arch-salesman of hate-mongering, Mr. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center 

doing now? He's saying that the election of a black president proves his point. Hate is on the rise! 

Send money! 

Without skipping a beat, the mailshot moguls, who year after year make money selling the notion 

there's been a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, have used 

the election of a black president to say that, yes, hate is on the rise and America ready to burst 

apart at the seams, with millions of extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan 

robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other, available for sneak 

photographs from minions of Chip Berlet, another salesman of the Christian menace, ripely 

endowed with millions to battle the legions of the cross. 

Ever since 1971 US Postal Service mailbags have bulged with Dees' fundraising letters, scaring 

dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of hate-sodden 

America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC. Nine years ago Ken Silverstein wrote a 

devastating commentary on Dees and the SPLC in Harpers, dissecting a typical swatch of Dees' 

solicitations. At that time, as Silverstein pointed out, the SPLC was "the wealthiest civil rights group 

in America," with $120 million in assets. 

As of October 2008 the net assets of the SPLC were $170,240,129, The merchant of hate himself, 

Mr. Dees, was paid an annual $273,132 as chief trial counsel, and the SPLC's president and CEO, 

Richard Cohen, $290,193. Total revenue in 2007 was $44,727,257 and program expenses 

$20,804,536. In other words, the Southern Poverty Law Center was raising twice as much as it was 

spending on its proclaimed mission. Fund-raising and administrative expenses accounted for $9 

million, leaving $14 million to be put in the center's vast asset portfolio. 

The 990 non profit tax record for the SPLC indicates that the assets fell by about $50 million last 

year, meaning that like almost all non profits the SPLC took a bath in the stock crash. So what was 

thr end result of all that relentless hoarding down the year, as people of modest means, scared by 

Dees, sent him their contributions. Were they put to good use? It doesn't seem so. They vanished 

in an electronic blip. 

But where are the haters? That hardy old stand-by, the KKK, despite the SPLC's predictable howls 

about an uptick in its chapters, is a moth-eaten and depleted troupe, at least 10 per cent of them 

on the government payroll as informants for the FBI. As Noel Ignatiev once remarked in his book 

Race Traitor, there isn't a public school in any county in the USA that doesn't represent a menace to 

blacks a thousand times more potent than that offered by the KKK, just as there aren't many such 

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schools that probably haven't been propositioned by Dees to buy one of the SPLC's "tolerance" 

programs. What school is going to go on record rejecting Dees-sponsored tolerance? 

Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate like the arms manufacturers inventing new 

threats and for the same reason: it's their staple. 

The SPLC's latest "Year in Hate" report claims that "in 2008 the number of hate groups rose to 926, 

up 4 per cent from 2007, and 54 per cent since 2000." The SPLC doesn't measure the number of 

members in the groups, meaning they probably missed me. Change that total to 927. I'm a hate 

group, meaning in Dees-speak, "one with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of 

people," starting with Dick Cheney. We love to dream of him being water-boarded, subjected to 

loops of Schonberg played at top volume, locked up naked in a meat locker. But the nation's haters 

are mostly like us, enjoying their (increasingly circumscribed) constitutionally guaranteed right to 

hate, solitary, disorganized, prone to sickening relapses into love, or at least the sort of amiable 

tolerance for All Mankind experienced when looking at photos of Carla Bruni and Princess Letizia of 

Spain kissing. 

The effective haters are big, powerful easily identifiable entities. Why is Dees fingering militia men 

in a potato field in Idaho when we have identifiable, well-organized groups which the SPLC could 

take on. To cite reports from the Urban League, and United for a Fair Economy, minorities are more 

than three times as likely to hold high-cost subprime loans, foisted on them by predatory lenders, 

meaning the big banks; "all black and Iatino sub prime borrowers could stand to lose between $164 

billion and $213 billion for loans taken during the past eight years." 

Get those bankers and big mortgage touts into court, chief counsel Dees! How about helping 

workers fired by people who hate anyone trying to organize a union? What about defending 

immigrants rounded up in ICE raids? How about attacking the roots of southern poverty, and the 

system that sustains that poverty as expressed in the endless prisons and Death Rows across the 

south, disproportionately crammed with blacks and Hispanics? 

You fight theatrically, the Dees way, or you fight substantively, like Stephen Bright, who makes only 

$11,000 as president and senior counsel of the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center's 

director makes less than $50,000. It has net assets of a bit over $4.5 million and allocates about 

$1.6 million a year for expenses, 77 percent of its annual revenue. Bright's outfit is basically 

dedicated to two things: prison litigation and the death penalty. He fights the system, case by case. 

Not the phony targets mostly tilted at by Dees but the effective, bipartisan, functional system of 

oppression, far more deadly and determined than the SPLC's tin-pot hate groups. Tear up your 

check to Dees and send it to Bright,( http://www.schr.org/) or to the Institute for Southern Studies 

(http://www.southernstudies.org.html) run by Chris Kromm, which has been doing brilliant 

spadework on the economy, on poverty and on exploitation in the south for four decades. 

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SECOND CLASS JUSTICE 

Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, with $300 million and offshore accounts 

and investments, still want your money 

Posted on September 7, 20i 2 by SSnqht 

• The Other Side, an ecumenical religious magazjne, ~the work of Morris Dees and the Southern 

Poverty Law Center in 1989 as "the aggressive distribution of junk mail, soliciting funds for more junk mail.'' 

It said Dces's operation was "the kind of organization that saps the financial strength of a caring public, 

turning money that could be used for good into little more than junk mail and a fat endowment for its o\vn 

well-paid hmyers." 

It told its readers: ''You'd have to be absolutely bonkers to give SPLC a penny.,. 

You'd have to be even more bonkers today. By mrw, the Center now has sapped enough from a caring public that 

despite spending millions each year it had over $302,826,ooo at the end of fiscal year 2014 (according to its 

mailings) as well as t\vo buildings knO\vn as the "poverty palaces" in Montgomery, Alabama offshore accounts 

in the Cayman and Bermuda Islands, and investments in several foreign corporations and investment companies. 

As one article observed, it "is probably the richest poverty organization iu the history of the world .. , 

Dees, a multimillionaire who had already made a fortune in junk mail sales of evel)ihing from doormats to 

cookbooks before starting the Center in 1971, has continued to raise millions upon millions of dollars through junk 

mail, telemarketing, internet and e-mail solicitations and other means using various aliases and schemes and 

hiding the Center's enormous \Vealth. 

'Ibis wealth is a11 the more remarkable because the operating expenses of the Center during this time have been 

substantial- many would say extravagant. The Center pays high salaries (Decs was paid $365,000 and President 

Richard Cohen $359,000, according to its ~.QJ.3.Jax returns, many times the salaries of rca1 non-profit public 

interest organizations). It has built two buildings- one with a very expensive sculpture in front of it. 

The Center brags a lot about some things, hut hides its success in raising money. 'Vhen mentioned in the 

solicitations, the information about the S302 million is printed in the lightest type in a very small font so that it is 

difficult to read even with a magnifying glass. Usually the print is in the same color as the paper it is printed on, 

making it partkularly hard to notice or rE"ad. It will not disclose its invE"stments in foreign corporations and 

investment companies. 

But some people have noticed over the years. The respected \niter ,John Egetton wrote an article titled "Poverty 

Palace" in 1988 that questioned the fund raising tactics of Dees and others at the Center. At that time- 17 years 

after its creation- the Center's endowment was $22 million. 

The Montgomery Advertiser in 1994 did a comprehensive expose of the shady fund raising practices of Dees and 

the Center, the high salaries of the staff, the lack of almost any black employees, and the mistreatment of the few 

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blacks who worked there. These articles ran over several days under the general title "Charity of Riches." The 

Adt•ertiser's findings are set out in the in.itinL~ in the series. 

Two years later, USA Today called the Center "the nation ·s richest civil rights organization vvith $68 million in 

assets." Andrea Stone, ''Morris Dees: At the Center of the Radical Storm," USA Today, August 3, 1996, A-7. 

Harper's magazine rel)Orted in 2000 that Dces had promised to stop fund raising once the cndovvn.1ent reached 

S55 million. but then changed it to $100 million. Nevertheless, although the endowment had reached $120 

million by 2000, Hm·per's found the Center ''spends most of its time- and money- on a relentless fund-raising 

t'ampaign 

Harper's reported that some oft he Center's junk mail solicitations \vere ''flagrantly misleading." One example 

was a letter sent out in 1995 when the Center had more than $60 million- that told its readers that the "strain 

on our current operating: budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.·· 

But there was no strain. SPLC raises far more from its junk mail, telemarketing, e-mail and other solicitations, 

and interest on its millions than its spends on fundraising and the ·work it does. Harper's reported in 2000 that 

the year before the Center had raised S27 million in donations and received another $17 million from investments 

for a total of $44 million in income, but spent only $13 million. SPLC raked in .$5_4.A2_Q_,SQ.9. in tY 2013. 

In 2007, Harper's ran a follow up story reporting that in 2005 the Center had an income of $44 million, ''which 

dwarfed total spending ($29 million)." That is how Dees has accumulated $302 milhon by 2014. That was more 

than double of the $120 million it had in 2000, a doubling of the $60 million it had in 1995. 

Much of the junk mailing, telemarketing and e-mail solicitations are done under various names and schemessuch as Klan Watch, Wall of Tolerance, and Teaching Tolerance. Appeals carrying the names celebrities implore 

people to give the Center money to support its '"dangerous'' work ''against the forces of hate, injustice, and 

intolerance." 

One solicitation, reported by the Montgomery Adver·tiser :"initial article, described that a poor woman who 

needed an overcoat decided to make a donation to the Center instead of bu)ing the coat. Of course neither that 

woman nor the people who received solicitations urging them to follow her example realize that they were giving 

to a multimillion dollar organization with a highly paid staff that would not have any difficulty buying an 

overcoat. This is "reverse Robin Hood" fundraising asking the poor to give to the rich. 

The Center is not really about ''Poverty" or "Law,'' Dees has found that tracking the speech and activities of "hate 

groups" -largely duplicating the work of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other law 

enforcement agencies is a lucrative area for his fundraising appeals. But Dees has been criticized for slapping 

the label "hate group" on groups that cannot fairly be characterized as such. Sec reports by CNN. the American 

Thinker, and the Weeklu Standard. 

Dees claims that because he monitors hate groups, he is in danger and that is yet another reason to donate to the 

Center. In 2009, President Richard Cohen sent a solicitation saying contributions were urgently needed to protect 

Dees: 

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Q: t-vhat were the instructions? 

A: 11w instructions I.L'ere to kill [1\1orris Dees]. 

Q: llou.) close did you get to killing Mr. Dees? 

A: l.Vithin days. 

-Testimony ojfornwr neo-Nazi, Nov. 12, 2008 

Dear Friend, 

Thankfully, this plot to kill Morris was thwarted by an FBI infonnant. But according to the same 

informant, there are many other white supremacists bent on seeing Morris dead because of his 

courtroom victories against violent hate groups. 

That's \IVhy I'm asking you to make a special contribution to help us pay for our critical security 

measures. VVe need your help to keep Morris, the SPLC, and our staff safe so that \Ve can continue to 

do our vital work. 

Help us ensure the safety of our staff. 

Donate today. 

Our security analyst, a former CIA agent, has stressed the need for enhanced security measures at 

the SPLC, "in light of recent attacks in 2009 against high profile targets associated with Civil and 

Human Rights causes.'' 

Our security costs nre staggeling, but the:-/re a measure of the threat that we face. 

Please be as generous as you can and make a special, tax-deductible contribution today to help 

proted Morris and the staff. 

Cohen offered no explanation for why the Center could not protect Dees with the millions it already had, saying 

only "our securityT costs are staggering." 

The nexi year, Dees made an unusual move for a man in danger of being killed by exircmists. He aHowed the 

Montgomery Advertiser to nm a huge spread of photographs of his htxurious home, not characteristic of people 

who believe they are in danger. After the newspaper published the photographs of his home, Dees had the 

audacity to solicit funds to proteet the SPLC staff because people might know whe1'e its members were living: 

October 11, 2012 

"Keepfue/irzg thefire SPLC. Very soon 

you will find ynw·sclfscreaming in pure 

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agony as you burn tL'ithin it." 

-Posted on a neo-Nazi website, Sept. 9 

Dear Friend of the Center, 

\Ve can't shrng offthreats like the one above. 

More and more, white supremacists are posting our pictures, names, and addresses online .• Just two 

months ago, a neo-Nazi actually posted pictures of the home of the SPLC president, Richard Cohen, 

with this provocative note about his apparent vulnerability: ;'[It] doesn't look like their fortress-like 

office building." 

That's why I'm asking you today to make a generous contribution to help protect my colleagues. I 

simply can't ask them to continue their work without taking the appropriate precautions. 

SPLC's security staff wocks 24/7 

Extremists arc furious vvith us because we continue to do more than any other private organization 

in America to stand up to the radical right. .,. ''" ·)' 

\Ve won't back down, I can tell yon that. But I must do e\'erything I can to ensure the safety· of my 

dedicated colleagues and their families. 

Your role in this fight for justice- and our security- is crucial. Please send a special gift today to 

he]p keep the SPLC staff safe from violent hatemongers who wish to harm us and to help us pursue 

our ·work for justice and tolerance. 

Sincerely, 

Morris Dccs 

Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center 

P.S. Our security team is on increased alert after a spate of extremist violence across the country. An 

extra gift right now would go a long way toward ensuring the safety of our staff. 

Again, Dees offered no explanation as to why SPLC cannot protect its staff with the millions it already had. 

Dees sent out a shameless solicitation in 2011 claiming that SPLC needed donations to protect the lives of police 

ofticers. This was to be accomplished by distributing to police departments a video and "other training tools'' the 

SPLC had produced on identifying ''potential domestic threats." 

Some solicitation just appeal to the ego like pa)ing the Center to have one's name engraved on its '·Wall of 

Tolerance.'' Although the fnnd raising appeal:; made it sound like the narnes would be engraved in stone, the 

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9/1312016 Morris Oees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, with $300 mJ!Iion and offshore accounts and investments, still want your money I SECOND CLASS J. 

·'wall" amounts to nothing more than a projector flashing the names on a vvall at SPLC's office. Dces has also 

raised money for a long time by soliciting contributions to distribute slick materials on teaching tolerance to 

school children. 

The Center has employed some ver,:,.' capable staff who have done good work in voting rights, employment, prison 

conditions, capital punishment, juYenile justice and other areas. But the amount of good the Center has 

accomplished is embarrassingly small in comparison to the enormous wealth that it has. At times, Dees has taken 

a fe\V cases based primarily on the potential for using them for fund raising. The Center has \VOn large judgments 

and received considerable publicity for suits against the Klan and other hate groups. One of its most famous case 

was a I'<Tongful death suit brought in1984 on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, mother of Michael Donald, a black 

teenager who had been murdered by the Klan in Mobile. The judgement was for $7 million. Dees has used the 

case to raise millions. It is still mentioned in some of SPLC's junk mail today. 

Unmentioned is that in some of the cases the organizations and people sued had no la'A)'er to defend them. Nor is 

it mentioned that those sued were not ahlc to pay the judgements against them. Beulah Mae Donald did not 

receive $7 million for the lynching of her son because the total worth of the United Klans of America and the 

people sued was about $175,000. Henry Hayes, who killed her son, was sentenced to death and executed by 

Alabama. 

A remarkable number of people who have worked at the Center do not speak highly of Dees or their experience at 

the Center. Dennis Sweet. a prominent African Aml:'rican l.awyer in Jackson, l\lississippi, who served in the 

Mississippi legislature, has been particularly outspoken in his criticism ofDees. He was the second black lavvyer 

to work at the Center. Both left the Center because of the treatment they received there. 

Sweet, who had been an outstanding public defender in Washington, DC before going to SPLC in the early 1980s, 

spent hvo years at there. "Morris treated me differently. He came after me,'' Sweet says in one of the 

Montgomery Advertiser articles about unequal treatment of black employees at the Center. "I had just left an 

environment where I vvas told I was one of the brightest," Sweet said, ''I\Jorris wanted to say I was a moron." 

Sweet has been a very successful lawyer in ,Jackson since leaving the La\v Center. 

Next to raising money, Dees' other great accomplishment was winning in 1992 the confirmation of Alabama's 

leading advocate of the death penalty, Ed Carnes, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit 

over the opposition of the entire civil rights community. President George H. W. Bush appointed Carnes near the 

end of his presidency. Civil rights leaders- such as Benjamin Hooks: of the NAACP and Joseph Lmvery of the 

Southern Christian Leadership Conference- opposed the nomination, pointing out Carnes's defense of 

outrageous racial discrimination in capital trials in Alabama, his advocacy of the elimination of important legal 

protections for people facing the death penalty. and his opposition to competent legal representation for people 

facing the death penalty. With Decs' support, Carnes was confirmed in a close vote by the Senate, putting an 

aggressive advocate for the death penalty on the Court and denying incoming Pre::;ident Bill Clinton the chance to 

appoint someone to the seat. As expected, Carnes has been an aggressive supporter of the death penalty and 

opponent of eivil rights as a judge. 

Despite all this deception and flimtlammery, the American Bar Association gave Dees its highest award, the ABA 

Medal in August, 2012, raising questions about whether due diligence was performed befor(' the award was made. 

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9/1312016 Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, with $300 million and offshore accounts and investments, still want your money I SECOND CLASS J ... 

And despite the Center's millions, the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation mvarded $100,000 to Dees in 2011 

as a recipients of its Gruber .Justice Prize. 

However, it is highly unlikely that the Foundation's grant or other money raised will be used to protect Dees or for 

the "dangerous" work "against the forces of hate, injustice, and intolerance." Instead, as has been repeatedly 

pointed out throughout the Center's history, it \vi.ll be spent on more junk mail, telemarketing and e-mail 

solicitations to raise money that will be spend on even more junk mail, telemarketing and e-mail solicitations. 

Share this: Share 

ThiS entry was posted m General Bookmark the pPrmahnk 

SECOND CLASS JUSTICE 

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9/13/2016 DC shooter wanted to kilt as many as possible, prosecutocs say- CNN.com 

HOil'f:-

prosecutors say 

By Carol Cratty and Michael Pearson, CNN 

0 Updated 6:41AM ET, Thu February 7, 2013 

Floyd Leo Corkins was ctrrested at th0. shooting scene 

Story highlights 

NEW: The president of the FRC accuses the 

Southern Poverty Law Center of "inciting 

violence" 

Floyd Corkins, pleads guilty, says he wanted 

to intimidate those who oppose gay rights 

He faces up to 70 years in prison when 

sentenced April 29 

Building manager wrestled with Corkins and 

disarmed him after being shot in August 

incident 

After years of thinking it over, Floyd Corkins finally had a plan. 

He'd bought a gun and learned how to use it. He'd loaded 

three magazines. And he had stopped by Chick-fil-A to pick up 

15 sandwiches. which he planned to smear in the dying faces 

of staffers he expected to kill at the Family Research Council in 

Washington. 

It would be a statement, he said, "against the people who work 

in that building," according to documents filed in u.s. District 

Court. where Corkins pleaded guilty on Wednesday to three 

charges related to the August shooting at the conservative 

policy group. 

Corkins told Judge Richard Roberts that he hoped to intimidate 

gay rights opponents. 

The shooting came amid intense debate over remarks against 

gay marnage by an executive with the Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A 

restaurant chain and the company's support for groups 

considered hostile to gay rights. 

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9/1312016 DC shooter wanted tok1ll as many as possible, prosecutors say· CNN.com 

.. -~, ~-ldorse Chick·fii·A and also Chick·fii·A came out against gay marriage, so I was going to use that as a 

statement." prosecutors quoted Corkins as telling investigators. 

Corkins, 28, pleaded guilty to committing an act of terrorism while armed, interstate transportation of a firearm 

and ammunition. and assault with intent to kill while armed. 

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Related Video: FRC shootrng vict1111~ 

lnst:ncts took over 02.16 

Prosecutors dropped seven other charges. 

The charges carry sentences of up to 70 years in prison. 

However, the sentence could be shorter because Corkins has 

no prior criminal record. 

Corkins will be sentenced April 29, prosecutors said. 

The act of terrorism charge alleges that Corkins wanted to kill 

building manager Leo Johnson and other Family Research 

Council employees "with the intent to intimidate and coerce a 

significant portion of the civilian population of the District of 

Columbia and the United States." 

It is a District of Columbia law passed in 2002 but never 

before used. 

According to prosecutors' account of the attack filed on 

Wednesday, Corkins got into the Family Research Council's 

building by telling Johnson that he was there to interview for 

an internship. 

After Johnson asked for identification, prosecutors say, 

Corkins reached into his backpack, retrieved a handgun and 

leveled it at Johnson's head. 

Johnson ducked and lunged at Corkins before he could fire a 

shot, according to prosecutors. 

As the two struggled, Corkins fired three times. hitting 

Johnson once in the arm. before the building manager was 

able to wrestle him to the ground, disarm him and hold him at 

gunpoint until police arrived. 

As he lay on the ground, Corkins said something to the effect, 

"'It's not about you.' It's about the FRC and its policies," 

according to the prosecution account. 

Corkins .. who had chosen the research council as his target after finding it listed as an anti·gay group on the 

website of the Southern Poverty Law Center had planned to stride into the building and open fire on the people 

inside in an effort to kill as many as possible, he told investigators, according to the court documents. 

If he'd been successful and escaped, his plan was to go to another conservative group to continue the attack. 

prosecutors said. A handwritten list naming three other groups he planned to attack was found among his 

belongings, prosecutors said. 

According to the documents. Corkins had thought about such an attack for years but "just never went through 

with it." 

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. ·~ -·~~ went to the store the day before the attack for two hours of training. 

U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen said Corkins' guilty plea "makes clear that using violence to terrorize political 

opponents will not be tolerated." 

At the time of the shooting. Corkins lived with his parents in Herndon, Virginia. and volunteered at a Washington 

center for the !esb1an, gay, bisexual and transgender community. 

In August, FBI investigators said in an affidavit that investigators had interviewed Corkins' parents after the 

shooting. and they said their son "has strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals 

in a fair manner," 

The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed the Family Research Council as a hate group since 2010, pointing to 

what it describes as its anti-gay propaganda and legislative agenda. 

On his nightly radio show on Wednesday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins mentioned the plea deal 

and accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of playing a role in the shooting bY inciting hatred and violence 

rather than fighting it a claim he has repeatedly made since the shooting. 

"The Southern Poverty Law Center is dangerous. They are inciting hatred, and in this case a clear connection to 

violence." he said on the radio broadcast. "They need to be held accountable, and they need to be stopped before 

people are killed because of their reckless labeling and advocacy for homosexuality and their anti-Christian 

stance." 

A spokeswoman for the center declined to comment on the plea deal or the research council's comments, but 

referred to a statement from the organization last year. standing by its designation of the Family Research Council 

as a "hate group." 

"As people who care about human dignity, we have a moral obligation to call out the FRC for its demonizing lies 

and incendiary rhetoric about the LGBT community," the statement said. "The fact that we list the FRC as a hate 

group because of its demonizing propaganda does not make us the hateful one. Spreading demonizing lies is 

what is dangerous, not exposing them." 

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9/1312016 The Hate List! Foretgn Policy 

The Hate List Is America really being overrun by right-wing militants? 

BY J.M. BERGER MARCH 12, 2013 

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual "Year in Hate and Extremism" report last week, and as 

usual. it was terrifying. In an article for the SPLC's Intelligence Report magazine, researchers said they had 

identified an "alHime high" of 1,360 antigovernment groups active during 2012 and about the same staggering 

number of hate groups as last year, a total ofl,007. 

Many news organizations, from wire services to TV networks, covered the new figures uncritically. The SPLC 

looms large in most discussions of American extremism, in large part because they have little or no competition. 

Very few journalists cover domestic extremism on a regular basis, and those who do tend to work for publications 

that have an overt political slant. 

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There are no significant academic centers that regularly publish objective and rigorous data on non~Islamic 

domestic extremism {although a few notable individual efforts can be found). Government attempts to explore 

the issue are often consumed by political backlash, and a recent look at domestic right~wing extremism by the 

Countering Terrorism Center at West Point ignited a firestorm over its excessive political exposition, while its less 

than crystal~clear methodology raised other questions. 

For better or worse, the SPLC remains the go~ to media source for data on domestic extremists of the non~Muslim 

variety, with the Anti~Defamation League coming in second in terms of published resources. Those journalists 

who do cover domestic extremism often rely on the SPLC for facts and figures. 

The problem is that the SPLC and the ADL are not objective purveyors of data. They're anti-hate activists. There's 

nothing wrong with that- advocating against hate is a noble idea. But as activists, their research needs to be 

weighed more carefully by media outlets that cover their pronouncements. 

"The Year in Hate and Extremism" report classified domestic extremists in two broad categories: hate groups and 

antigovernment organizations. The raw numbers for antigovernment outfits were unavailable, but the data on the 

1,007 hate groups cited in the report can be found online. 

Many groups take exception to their inclusion on the hate list, arguing their content is legitimately political. 

Rather than get bogged down in that particular argument, let's simply look at the methodology of the list. 

The SPLC presents its hate group data by state, rather than in one unified list. When the state entries were 

gathered into a single spreadsheet, the total number of groups came to 1,007, as advertised. But once you get past 

simply counting the rows, serious questions arise. 

The biggest issue raised by the hate list is when a local group should be deemed a separate entity from a national 

group. When you go to fmd the raw data online, the SPLC's site explains that it counts counted "1,007 active hate 

groups in the United States in 2012," including "organizations and their chapters." But "The Year in Hate and 

Extremism" did not make the "chapter" distinction explicit. It is rarely drawn out in the organization's frequent 

media appearances, nor was it mentioned in a letter from the SPLC to the Justice Department warning of the 

growing threat. 

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One of the clearest examples of how this counting methodology can be confusing concerns the American Third 

Position Party, or A3P, which is listed 17 times, with each of those instances counting as a separate hate group. 

A3P is a national political party devoted to white nationalism. We don't say there are 102 political parties in the 

United States because the Republicans and Democrats each have a national party as well as state chapters {not to 

mention local chapters), and there are states which have A3P listed more than once. 

Similarly, the American Nazi Party is listed six times, and the Council of Conservative Citizens is listed 37 times. 

There are many more. When you filter the list for organizations with identical names, the list of 1,007 becomes a 

listof358. 

So why doesn't the SPLC describe its list as 300 or 400 hate groups with 1,007 chapters around the country? 

"These are groups," said Heidi Beirich, who heads the SPLC Intelligence Project. So if A3P activists gather in Las 

Vegas, "it's a group of people who get together to promote these materials." And if a different group of A3P 

members gather in another state, that's a different group, according to the SPLC's count. 

Some of the duplicate names on the list are legitimately distinct- for instance, there are at least two major 

splinter groups of the Aryan Nations (although seven appear on the list). But others appear clearly problematic, 

like "Georgia Militia," which is listed 14 times. One listing has a county as its location, another says "statewide," 

and the remaining 12list no location and contain no links to additional information. 

While there is an argument for separately counting local skinhead gangs with a national affiliation or Ku Klux 

Klan affiliates, it's not a slam dunk. 

If three Klan chapters in one state are part of one specific national Klan organization, should they count as 

separate groups? If a skinhead gang is part of the Western Hammerskins, do you count both the local and the 

regional? The SPLC counts the Midland Hammerskins and the Northern Hammerskins three times each, and the 

Confederate Hammerskins nine times. 

And what about the Jewish Defense League (counted nine times). the National Socialist Movement {55). or the 

Nation of Islam (105)? 

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The list isn't pristine on other fronts either. The Political Cesspool is a website and podcast, the Crocker Post is a 

blog, and Silver Bullet Gun Oil is a business that markets offensive tchotchkes to anti~Muslim extremists. VDARE 

is a white nationalist website with multiple authors, but it does not on the face of it appear to be a traditional 

boots·on·the~ground organization, at least not according to a profile written by the SPLC. 

"We try very hard to avoid listing just a guy at a computer," said Beirich. "So we look very hard at other activities, 

like flyering, meeting, other activities, something that indicates it's more than just a guy working at a computer." 

Beirich said some pure websites might have slipped through their filters, but argued that VDARE is an 

organization working actively to promote a specific agenda, citing a recent webinar with "several participants" as 

evidence of its organizational activities. 

Radical bookstores and racist record labels also appear on the list. Are these hate groups, or hate businesses, or 

just businesses? Are they peddling specific ideologies or making a buck off of several? Do they hold meetings? 

Write tracts? Burn crosses? 

Reasonable people can debate these reasons for including or disqualifying each of these listings, but the number 

of entries that require such debate is staggering given the specificity of the SPLC's reporting. We're not talking 

about a difference of 5 or 10 percent in the relative counts; it's 65 or 70 percent. 

"I do not think it's misleading," said Beirich. "I think it would be much more misleading to say here's 10 or 15 

groups than to point out, the way we do, the way those groups are functioning. We want to show the geographic 

reach of those groups." 

Counting an organization like A3P as one instead of 17 would "distort the data in a different direction,'' Beirich 

said. "It would look like there are American Third Position people active in just one location, and that would be 

false." 

But at the end of the day, it's not clear how it's a "distortion" to say "400 groups in 1,0071ocations around the 

country" as opposed to "1.007 groups." 

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~/1312016 The Hate List I Foreign Policy 

These distinctions also pertain to the broad numbers on antigovernment groups provided in "The Year in Hate 

and Extremism" report. Most coverage of the report focused on this realm, where the SPLC reported massive 

growth during President Obama's first term. 

Although the data was not made available, the questions raised by the hate group list are at least as relevant for 

antigovernment organizations. If a statewide militia has chapters in several towns, is it more than one militia? If a 

Patriot movement group under one umbrella has one or two (or even five or six) people in each of17 different 

states, should we count 17 groups? 

These questions are more important than ever in the age of online organizing. During the 1990s, hosting a 

"chapter" implied a certain amount of organizational activity that is no longer necessary. Geography is still 

important. but it's not necessarily supreme. 

Based on my own tracking of antigovernment extremism, I'm fairly certain the movement has grown in recent 

years, perhaps substantially. But most of the movements I track are geographically diffuse, even though they 

operate under a single organizational banner. I'm skeptical that the number of distinctly separate 

antigovernment organizations in the United States runs anywhere close to the 1,360 reported by the SPLC. 

If there is any lesson in all of this, it's that the study of domestic American extremism shouldn't be the exclusive 

province of activists. Academics and journalists- a lot of them- need to turn their skills and objectivity toward 

this problem and start collecting evidence that can be published and rigorously reviewed. 

As of today, journalists investigating domestic extremism have few alternatives to the SPLC when seeking 

information about the size and shape of extremist movements in the United States. Reporters have to work with 

the information they can obtain, but they should read- and carefully explain- the fine print. 

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9/1312016 National Rev1ew Online 1 Print 

NATIONAL REVIEW 

The SPLC and Slant 

By Patrick Brennan - March 15, 2013 

Domestic-terrorism expert J. M. Berger had an interesting piece for Foreign Policy this week in 

which he lays out the serious flaws with the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the 

problems with monitoring domestic terrorism in general. He explains: 

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual 'Year in Hate and 

Extremism" report last week, and as usual, it was terrifying. In an article for the 

SPLC's Intelligence Report magazine, researchers said they had identified an 

'all-time high" of 1,360 antigovernment groups active during 2012 and about 

the same staggering number of hate groups as last year, a total of 1 ,007. 

Many news organizations, from wire services to TV networks, covered the new 

figures uncritically. The SPLC looms large in most discussions of American 

extremism, in large part because they have little or no competition. Very few 

journalists cover domestic extremism on a regular basis, and those who do 

tend to work for publications that have an overt political slant. 

For better or worse, the SPLC remains the go-to media source for data on 

domestic extremists of the non-Muslim variety, with the Anti-Defamation 

League coming in second in terms of published resources. Those journalists 

who do cover domestic extremism often rely on the SPLC for facts and figures. 

The problem is that the SPLC and the ADL are not objective purveyors of data. 

They're anti-hate activists. There's nothing wrong with that- advocating 

against hate is a noble idea. But as activists, their research needs to be 

weighed more carefully by media outlets that cover their pronouncements. 

In fact, it turns out, the SPLC's "Year in Hate and Extremism" probably seriously overstates the 

presence of hate groups and dangerous domestic groups. Berger explains why, specifically, the 

SPLC hugely inflates their headline numbers with a bizarre counting system. Only on the site 

where you find the raw data, and in none of their media releases, do they make it clear that the 

"1,007 hate groups" number counts individual chapters of national or regional groups. For 

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instance, "the American Nazi Party is listed six times, and the Council of Conservative 

Citizens is listed 37 times. There are many more. When you filter the list for organizations with 

identical names, the list of 1,007 becomes a list of358." Or look at '"Georgia Militia,' which is 

listed 14 times. One listing has a county as its location, another says 'statewide,' and the 

remaining 12 list no location and contain no links to additional information." 

The SPLC has various justifications for this methodology, hut they don't seem all that 

convincing. Berger concludes that "based on my own tracking of antigovernment extremism, 

I'm fairly certain the movement has grown in recent years, perhaps substantially," but that's, of 

course, no justification for the SPLC not to be as clear as possible in measuring that growth. 

Berger's absolutely right that the media should be more circumspect in reporting the SPLC's 

observations as fact, in part because they are an advocacy group, not a scrupulously unbiased 

research organization. (It's possible to be nonpartisan but not adhere to the standards of 

academic research.) 

But another problem runs beyond what he identifies: The SPLC is not just far from an 

ideal source because it's an anti-hate activist group, but because it's a lejiist anti-hate activist 

group. They definitely don't regularly say this (they do acknowledge themselves to be activists), 

but they eventually admitted as such to NR's Charlie Cooke back in 2011. Not only does the 

SPLC have a liberal stance, they actually just do not consider or research leftist domestic-terror 

or hate groups (except those that are otherwise specifically racist, such as black nationalists). 

When Charlie asked them about whether, in light of a serious bomb plot uncovered at Occupy 

Cleveland, they were going to cover the Occupy movement, an SPLC rep told him, "We're not 

really set up to cover the extreme Left." 

The fact that they arc "anti-hale activists" and not objective researchers only suggests subtle and 

implicit bias and sloppiness, like what Berger documents. But further, the SPLC's bias is 

explicit: They purposefully do not cover or condemn the hateful or violent groups on their end 

of the ideological spectrum. It is scandalous, therefore, for the media to report the SPLC's 

findings without fairly explaining what they do, no matter if they are the only source of data on 

this topic or not. 

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9113/2016 King of Fearmongers! The Weekly Standard 

THE MAGAZINE: From the April 15 Issue 

King of Fearmongers Li4¥45M 

Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, scaring donors since 1971 

APR 15, 2013 I By CHARLOTIE ALLEN 

Last August a 28-year-old gay-rights volunteer named Floyd Corkins entered the office lobby of 

the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian traditional-values group headquartered in 

Washington that condemns homosexual conduct and opposes same-sex marriage. Corkins took 

a gun from his backpack and fired three shots at building manager Leo Johnson, one of them 

wounding the unarmed Johnson in the arm before he wrested the gun from Corkins. On 

February 6 Corkins pleaded guilty to three felonies: committing an act of terrorism while armed, 

interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition (he had bought the weapon in Virginia), 

and assault with intent to kill while armed. He faces a sentencing hearing on April 29 that could 

include up to 70 years in prison. According to federal prosecutors' statements in court 

documents, Corkins told investigators that he had intended to kill Johnson and numerous other 

FRC employees. His backpack contained 15 sandwiches from the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, 

whose founder, S. Truett Cathy, contributed through his family foundation to several 

organizations opposed to gay marriage, including the FRC. According to prosecutors, Corkins 

said he had planned to smear the faces of the dead FRC employees with the sandwiches once 

his shooting spree ended. 

Corkins found out about the FRC from the ever-expanding (at least in recent years) list of "hate 

groups" tracked on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil-rights 

behemoth bursting with donor cash headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama. Cofounded in 

1971 by MorrisS. Dees Jr. and Joseph Levin Jr. (who is now general counsel), the SPLC started 

out fighting legal battles against lingering segregation in the South. More recently-and more 

lucratively, its critics say-it has transformed itself into an all-purpose anti hate crusader, 

labeling 1,007 different organizations across America at last count as "anti-gay," "white 

nationalist," "anti-Muslim," "anti-immigrant," or just plain hateful (one SPLC category is "general 

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9/1312016 King ofFearmongers I The Weeldy Standard 

hate"). The SPLC put the FRC on its list of "anti-gay" organizations in 2010, and the SPLC's 

"Hate Map" page, whose banner displays men in Nazi-style helmets giving Sieg Hell salutes, 

lists the FRC among 14 hate groups headquartered in the District of Columbia. The Hate Map 

doesn't include the groups' street addresses, but those typically take only a few seconds to find 

with Google. Besides the chicken sandwiches and some 50 rounds of ammunition found on 

Corkins's person was the address of the Traditional Values Coalition, another D.C.-based "antigay" group listed on the SPLC's Hate Map. 

At the time of the shooting, FRC president Tony Perkins lost no time doing a sort of reverse • 

Sarah Palin on the SPLC. Liberal columnists and bloggers had blamed Palin-"blood is on [her] 

hands," wrote one-for the near-fatal shooting of former Arizona representative Gabrielle 

Giffords near Tucson in 2011 because Palin had earlier placed Giffords on a "target list" of 

House Democrats to be defeated for reelection. (The Tucson gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, who 

killed six people in the crowd at Giffords's event, turned out to be a schizophrenic whose 

politics, insofar as they could be determined, leaned left.) "The Southern Poverty Law Center is 

dangerous," Perkins declared on his nightly radio show on February 6. "They are inciting hatred, 

and in this case a clear connection to violence. They need to be held accountable, and they 

need to be stopped before people are killed because of their reckless labeling and advocacy for 

homosexuality and their anti-Christian stance." 

Of course, it was as ridiculous to blame the SPLC for Corkins's rampage as it had been to blame 

Palin for Loughner's. Still, there was a delicious irony to savor: The "anti-hate" SPLC had 

unwittingly revved up someone who carried out an act that was unequivocally a hate crime: a 

potentially murderous vendetta against a group of people predicated solely on the religious and 

political views that they happened to hold. 

Irony turns out to be what the SPLC is all about. Thanks to the generosity of four decades' worth 

of donors, many of whom-as SPLC president Richard Cohen himself noted in a telephone 

interview with me-are aging Northern-state "1960s liberals" who continue to associate 

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"Southern" and "poverty" w1th lynchings, white-hooded Klansmen, and Sitting at the back of the 

bus, and thanks also to what can only be described as the sheer genius at direct-mail marketing 

of Dees, the SPLC's 76-year-old lawyer-founder, who was already a multimillionaire by the late 

1960s from the direct-mail sales of everything from doormats to cookbooks, the SPLC is 

probably the richest poverty organization in the history of the world. From its very beginning the 

SPLC, thanks to Dees's talent for crafting multi-page alarmist fundraising letters, has not only 

continuously operated in the black, but has steadily accumulated a mountain of surpluses 

augmented by a shrewdly managed investment portfolio. Today the SPLC's net assets total 

more than $256 million (that figure appears on the SPLC's 2011 tax return, the latest posted 

on the organization's website). That represented a more-than-doubling of the $120 million in 

net assets that the SPLC reported in 2000, which was itself more than a doubling of the $52 

million in net assets that the SPLC reported during the mid-1990s. 

So impressed was the Direct Marketing Association in 1998 with Dees's superb fundraising 

talents that it inducted him into its Hall of Fame, where he shares honors with Benjamin 

Franklin, first postmaster general, and catalogue retailer L. L. Bean. The SPLC's sprawling twostory concrete-and-glass headquarters in downtown Montgomery bore the nickname "Poverty 

Palace" among locals-until the mid-2000s, when the center, whose staff had grown to more 

than 200 (including 34 lawyers), moved into a fortress-like six-story office building that it had 

commissioned. The new SPLC building, a postmodernist parallelepiped faced in steel and black 

glass, has been variously described by its critics as a "small-scale Death Star" and a "highrise 

trailer." 

The SPLC turned the original Poverty Palace into a museum that complements another of its 

Montgomery monuments, the Civil Rights Memorial, where an imposing granite circle designed 

by Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, records the names of 

such iconic martyrs to the civil rights cause as Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., neither 

of whom was ever a client of the SPLC. In 2010 the l"v1ontgo;nery Advertiser published a 60-

photo online slideshow of Morris Dees's lavishly appointed nee-Mediterranean home, whose 

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Hackney's swimming-pool paintings, the Etsy home page, and a 1970s shag-rug revival. In one 

slide Dees's fourth wife, artist and weaver Susan Starr, modeled a floor-length evening coat that 

she had stitched out of transparent vinyl sheeting and fake fur. 

This leads to yet another SPLC irony: Its severest critics aren't on the conservative right 

(although the Federation for American Immigration Reform, another "hate group" on the SPLC's 

list, has done its fair share of complaining), but on the progressive left. It may come as a 

surprise to learn that one of the most vituperative of all the critics was the recently deceased 

Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and the leftist webzine CounterPunch. In a 2009 

article for CounterPunch titled "King of the Hate Business," Cockburn castigated Dees and the 

SPLC for using the 2008 election of Barack Obama as America's first black president as yet 

another wringer for squeezing out direct-mail donations from "trembling liberals" by painting an 

apocalyptic picture of "millions of [anti-Obama] extremists primed to march down Main Street 

draped in Klan robes, a copy of Me in Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the 

other." Cockburn continued: "Ever since 1971 U.S. Postal Service mailbags have bulged with 

Dees' fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his 

lurid depictions of hate-sodden America, in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC." 

Cockburn was following on the heels of Ken Silverstein, who in 2000 wrote an article for the 

reliably liberal Harper's magazine titled "The Church of Morris Dees." Silverstein accused the 

SPLC of manufacturing connections between the "hate groups" that it highlighted in its 

numerous mailings-back then the groups on the SPLC list tended to be mostly fringe militia 

organizations-and the Columbine-style school shootings and a wave of black-church arsons 

during the 1990s that were a staple of the SPLC's direct-mail panic pleas. "Horrifying as such 

incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence," Silverstein wrote. "More than 95 

percent of all 'hate crimes,' including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church 

burnings, school shootings}, are perpetrated by 'lone wolves.' Even Timothy McVeigh 

[perpetrator of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that f;illed 168 people], 

subiect of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's historv-and one of the most 

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extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia 

organization." 

Silverstein followed up with more of the same in a 2007 blog post for Harper's: "What [the 

SPLC] does best ... is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of 

[right-wing fringe] groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation's richest 'civil rights' 

organization." In 2001 JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in the Nation: "Why the [SPLC] continues to keep 

'Poverty' (or even 'Law') in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding 

of the marketing possibilities in class guilt." Silverstein had already noted in his 2000 Harper's 

article that "most SPLC donors are white." 

What has infuriated the SPLC's liberal critics is their suspicion that Morris Dees has used the 

SPLC primarily as a fundraising machine fueled by his direct-mail talents that generates a nice 

living for himself (the SPLC's 2010 tax filing lists a compensation package of $345,000 for him 

as the organization's chief trial counsel and highest-paid employee) and a handful of other high 

ranking SPLC officials plus luxurious offices and perks, but that does relatively little in the way of 

providing the legal services to poor people that its name implies. 

CharityWatch (formerly the American Institute of Philanthropy), an independent organization 

that monitors and rates leading non profits for their fundraising efficiency, has consistently given 

the SPLC its lowest grade of "F" (i.e., "poor") for its stockpiling of assets far beyond what 

CharityWatch deems a reasonable reserve (three years' worth of operating expenses) to tide it 

over during donation-lean years. But even if the SPLC weren't sitting on an unspent $256 

million, according to CharityWatch, it would still be a mediocre ("C+") performer among 

non profits. The SPLC's 2011 tax filing reveals that the organization raised a total of $38.5 

million from its donors that year but spent only $24.9 million on "program services," with the 

rest going to salaries, overhead, and fundraisfng. And even that 67 percent figure is somewhat 

inflated, according to Char.ityWatch, which notes that the SPLC takes advantage of an 

accounting rule that permits non profits to count some of their fundraising expenses as "public 

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education" if, for example, a mailer contains an informational component. CharityWatch, 

ignoring that accounting rule, maintains that only 60 percent-about $19 million-went to 

program services during the year in question. The SPLC's 2011 tax return reveals that the 

organization spent $1.6 million (aside from salaries) on litigation-related costs that year, in 

contrast to the $7.8 million it spent on "professional fundraising services," "postage and 

shipping cost," "printing & lettershop," and "other development cost." 

Furthermore, the SPLC spends a relatively high $26 on fund raising (according to CharityWatch, 

$18 according to the SPLC) for every $100 that it manages to raise. Compare that with the "B+" 

rated American Civil Uberties Union {ACLU), where 78 percent of the budget goes to program 

services and $20 is spent for every $100 raised or to the "A-" rated ACLU Foundation {79 

percent going to program services and only $11 spent to raise $100). True, the ACLU has net 

assets comparable to those of the SPLC, $254 million according to a fiscal 2012 financial 

statement, but it spends a full $111 million a year on program services. People who want to 

support a litigation-minded liberal organization and see a higher percentage of their donations 

actually spent on the causes they support might be better off giving to the ACLU-or to some 

shoestring civil rights nonprofit that actually needs the donor's money. 

In 1995, when the SPLC had amassed $52 million in net assets, the Montgomery Advertiser 

published a Pulitzer-nominated investigative series about the organization, titled "Charity of 

Riches." At that time the Advertiser concluded that the SPLC was spending only 31 percent of 

its revenue on program services and was essentially under the control of and subject to the 

fundraising whims of Dees. During the 1970s the SPLC had pursued several significant lawsuits 

enforcing the civil rights of African Americans. One suit had resulted in the racial integration of 

Alabama's state police troopers, and another had led to a state redistricting that allowed black 

candidates to win seats in the state legislature for the first time in generations. But during the 

mid-1980s Dees decided to focus instead on suing the ~~u Klux ~~Jan and similar whitesupremacist organizations:· By then the Klan was moribund, with a membership that had 

declined from a peak of 4 million during the 1920s to about 5,000 members in 1980. But few 

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of the Northern liberals who formed the bulk of Dees's donor base seemed to know that. (Dees 

had used his letter-writing skills to raise $24 million as a volunteer for George McGovern's 

Democratic presidential race in 1971-72, and he had received McGovern's campaign mailing 

list as a reward. He had also worked briefly on Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign and 

on Ted Kennedy's run for president in 1980.) The Klan made for hair-raising copy in Dees's 

mailings. One of his fundraising letters, quoted by the Advertiser, alluded to "armed Klan 

paramilitary forces [that] freely roam our wooded hills from Texas to North Carolina practicing 

with military-like weapons to 'kill niggers and Jews in a race war they are planning.'" 

Letters such as this one generated tens of millions of dollars for the SPLC-but they also 

generated resentment among the lawyers who worked with Dees and complained that his 

fixation on donor money had crowded out the SPLC's traditional civil rights work. Early on, for 

example, the SPLC stopped handling death-penalty cases, even though opposition to capital 

punishment had been one of its early causes. (In 1975 Dees was one of the lawyers-and a 

major fundraiser-for Joan Little, a black inmate in North Carolina who had fatally stabbed a 

white jailer she said had been trying to rape her. Little's case became a progressive cause 

celebre, and she was eventually acquitted of murder charges. During the trial Dees was 

removed from the courtroom and briefly charged with suborning the perjury of one of the 

witnesses; although the charges were dropped, the trial judge refused to allow Dees back on 

the case.) In 1977, however, Dees abruptly pulled the SPLC out of another high-profile capital 

case, that of the "Dawson Five," black men accused of murdering a store customer during a 

robbery in rural Georgia. Millard Farmer, a veteran death penalty lawyer in Atlanta who got the 

charges dropped, said in a telephone interview that Dees had told him that fighting the death 

penalty wasn't making any money for the SPLC. "He said, 'We're going to cut the money off,'" 

Farmer recalled. "He said, 'We'll give the case to a public defender.'" By Farmer's account, 

when he balked, Dees promptly sued him in federal court for improperly spending SPLC funds. 

Dees backed off after Farmer mounted an aggressive defense detaiiing where the SPLC funds 

had gone, and Dees eventually paid Farmer approximately $50,000 in a settlement. (The SPLC 

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declined to make Dees available for an interview with me, but in a 1988 interview with the 

Progressive's John Egerton, Dees called Farmer a "fool.") 

Dees further alienated opponents of the death penalty-and Southern liberals in general-by 

successfully lobbying the Senate in 1992 to confirm George H. W. Bush's nomination of Edward 

Carnes, head of the capital-punishment unit of the Alabama attorney general's office and a 

leading death-penalty advocate, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. "He was up 

in Washington staying at the Four Seasons Hotel [in Georgetown] and lobbying Congress every 

day," recalls Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based 

Southern Center for Human Rights, a criminal-justice public-interest law firm that opposed the 

Carnes nomination. "He was the great Morris Dees, so he gave cover to the Democrats in 

Congress to vote to confirm Carnes," said Bright in a telephone interview. Bright's Southern 

Center has a $2 million annual budget, with nine staff lawyers pulling down relatively modest 

salaries. "Their annual budget is $30 million," said Bright of the SPLC, "and we accomplish 

more than they do with a lot less." Bright called Dees "a shyster if there ever was one-Morris is 

a con man." 

Bright's words to me were nearly identical to those he had written in a 2007 letter to Kenneth C. 

Randall, dean of the University of Alabama's law school, Dees's alma mater, turning down an 

invitation to a presentation of the school's annual "Morris Dees Justice Award," jointly 

sponsored by Dees and the prestigious law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. In that 

letter Bright called Dees "a con man and fraud." He wrote of Dees: "He has taken advantage of 

na"ive, well-meaning people-some of moderate or low incomes-who believe his pitches and 

give to his [then] $175 million operation. He has spent most of what they have sent him to raise 

still more millions, pay high salaries, and promote himself." (The Morris Dees Justice Award is 

currently defunct, and both Randall and Skadden Arps turned down my requests for interviews.) 

During the 1970s and 1980s Dees is said to have briefly flirted with other liberal causes for the 

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:Or'LLr-aoomon ngms ana gun comrot, ror examp1e-oerore snumng mem aown. tlUl ne nil me 

jackpot with the Ku Klux Klan, helped along by Klansmen's regular denunciations of him as a 

Communist, an attempted firebombing of the SPLC office in 1983, and the occasional threat to 

his life. In 1981 Dees formed Klanwatch as an educational and publications unit of the SPLC. It 

was the beginning of the SPLC's focus on "hate groups." Fundraising letters flew out from 

Montgomery signed by such liberal celebrities as McGovern, Ethel Kennedy, and novelist Toni 

Morrison. A 1985 letter bearing the signature of a Montgomery rabbi "asked for funds to protect 

the Center and its staff, 'who are suffering under a siege of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi terrorism 

unparalleled in this decade,' " Egerton reported in the Progressive. The letter with its hints of 

anti-Semitism run amok, reportedly mailed to zip codes on the East and West Coasts populated 

by wealthy Jews, referred to Dees as "Morris Seligman Dees." Dees was raised Baptist but 

received a rarely used Jewish-sounding middle name from his father, who had himself been 

named in honor of a "prominent Jewish Alabamian," Egerton noted in his article. At one point in 

1986 the SPLC's entire cadre of staff attorneys quit en masse, dismayed by Dees's obsession 

with the Klan at the expense of what they perceived to be more pressing civil rights issues such 

as employment and housing discrimination. 

Nonetheless the Klan and its white-supremacist spin-offs proved to be ideal litigation targets for 

the civil damage suits that the SPLC routinely filed on behalf of victims and their families: 

scattered, underfunded, and wounded by decades of infighting. The economically and socially 

marginal Klansmen, whose units typically consisted of a handful of down-market youths 

clustered around a kitchen table, could seldom afford either decent lawyers or the cost of 

mounting an effective defense (in civil cases, in contrast to criminal cases, the government is 

not obliged to supply defendants with free lawyers). Besides, what the groups were charged with 

having done-assaults and homicides-was appalling. The SPLC has won a handful of 

multimillion-dollar judgments against supremacist organizations, the latest one in 2008 against 

the Imperial Klans of America over the beating of a Panamanian-American. Nonetheless the 

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few if any assets that can be sold to satisfy a judgment. 

The SPLC's most striking legal victory in the South was a $7 million judgment in 1987 against 

the United Klans of America, notorious for the violent acts committed by its members during the 

civil rights struggles of the 1960s. The SPLC had filed the suit on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, 

a black woman whose son Michael was lynched by two Klansmen in Mobile, Alabama, in 1981. 

Donald received only a tiny fraction of that amount, however, since the United Klans' sole asset 

by then was its national headquarters, a rundown warehouse in Tuscaloosa whose forced sale 

netted only $51,875. Meanwhile, according to the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC's 

fund raising mailings highlighting the case, one of which featured a photo of Michael Donald's 

corpse, brought the center $9 million in donations. The SPLC continues to this day to tout the 

$7 million judgment in its promotional materials and to take credit for putting the United Klans 

out of business, although some of its members simply joined other Klan groups after the United 

Klans dissolved. 

Similarly, a $12.5 million judgment that the SPLC won in Oregon in 1990 against Tom Metzger, 

a former Ku Klux Klan grand dragon who later led a group called the White Aryan Resistance, 

over the beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant by three skinheads in 1988, remains largely a 

paper victory. Furthermore, even some civil libertarians were troubled by the SPLC's legal 

strategy, which was predicated on the theory that Metzger and his son were responsible for the 

homicide because they had made incendiary racist statements that inspired the skinheads to 

commit the crime. The ACLU, for example, filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the 

Metzgers' statements were protected by the First Amendment's free-speech guarantees and 

that the father and son should have been held liable only if it could be proved that they had 

intentionally provoked the skinheads' violence. 

During the 1990s, when Timothy McVeigh became another name with which to launch a 

thousand direct-mail pitches, the SPLC branched out and began tracking, besides hate groups, 

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a category it calls "patriot groups." Patriot groups can be full-fledged paramilitary militias-or 

they can simply be loose organizations of people who believe. say, that the Obama 

administration will soon be confiscating citizens' guns (actually a not-unfounded belief, given 

the recent disclosure of a Justice Department memo arguing that gun regulation is meaningless 

without mandatory federal weapons buybacks), or that the Federal Emergency Management 

Agency is building secret concentration camps in anticipation of a declaration of martial law. 

One group on the SPLC's latest patriot list, for example, calls itself the Granny Warriors: grayhaired ladies in North Carolina who trade canning tips and other food-stockpiling advice on a 

survivalist website of vintage 1990s design. Without entirely jettisoning its cash-generating 

Klan-centrism (an SPLC web page features a Birth of a Nation-style black-and-white photo of 

hooded men making a sinister circle around a flaming three-story cross), the SPLC changed the 

name of its quarterly magazine Klanwatch to Intelligence Report. The Report features alarmed 

articles, often written by Mark Potok, a former reporter for USA Today who now serves as the 

SPLC's press spokesman and also as the editor of Intelligence Report and the organization's 

Hatewatch blog. The articles in Intelligence Report and Hatewatch bear such scary-sounding 

titles as "Rage on the Right," "The 'Patriot Movement' Explodes," "For the Radical Right, Obama 

Victory Brings Fury and Fear," and "Strange Bedfellows Snuggle Under White Sheets." A 2010 

post on Hatewatch didn't quite go so far as to characterize the Tea Party as a hate group, but it 

came close, citing the grassroots movement's attraction for "antigovernment extremists." On a 

web page titled "Misogyny: The Sites," the SPLC skirts self-parody, branding the "manosphere" 

blogs of pickup artists and other dispensers of seduction techniques as hate-promoting 

because their posts bear such titles as "Even Nice Girls Are Sluts" and "More Proof That 

Feminism is a Social Cancer." The SPLC is currently spotlighting the prison gang Aryan 

Brotherhood of Texas as a hate group because of its rumored, although as yet unproven, 

connection to the murders of two prosecutors in Kaufman County, Texas. 

One of the SPLC's leitmotifs is that there is an ever-spiraling amount of hate in America, and 

sure enough, its state-by-state list of hate and patriot groups has grown steadily over the years, 

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especially during the presidency of Obama, a godsend to the SPLC's fundraisers because of his 

race and his pro-gun control and pro-gay marriage stances. In the SPLC's latest hate report, 

issued on March 5, it counted a record 1,360 patriot groups alone during 2012, up 6. 75 

percent since 2011 and up by almost a factor of 10 from the mere 149 such organizations that 

the SPLC had counted just before Obama was elected in 2008. (The conservative George W. 

Bush years had apparently marked a kind of hate vacation for America's right-wingers, after 

they supposedly went militia-crazy during Bill Clinton's presidency.) Cohen, the SPLC's 

president, promptly shot off a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security chief 

Janet Napolitano urging the pair to establish "an interagency task force to assess the adequacy 

of resources devoted to responding to the growing threat of non-Islamic domestic terrorism." 

(The SPLC ignores Muslim-linked terrorist activity on the theory that it is foreign-based.) 

Critics have charged that the way the SPLC counts hate groups renders its impressive tallies 

essentially meaningless. One of the most vocal critics is Laird Wilcox, a self-described political 

liberal in Olathe, Kansas, who has been tracking radical-fringe organizations on both the left 

and the right for five decades, amassing an enormous documentary archive that is now housed 

at the library of the University of Kansas. According to Wilcox, many of the organizations on the 

SPLC's expansive list "may be two guys and a post-office box," while others might not exist at 

all. "Their lists of hate groups never have addresses that can be checked," Wilcox said in a 

telephone interview. "I've had police departments across the country calling me and saying we 

can't find this group [on the SPLC's list]. All they can find is a post-office box, so I have to tell 

them that I don't know whether they even exist." In a self-published book, The Watchdogs, he 

criticized the SPLC for having "misleadingly padded" its list of white-supremacy organizations. In 

particular, Wilcox faulted the SPLC for maintaining that three men accused of killing a police 

officer in Cortez, Colorado, in 1998 had belonged to a supposedly racist and anti-semitic militia 

group called the Four Corners Patriots for whose existence no evidence ever emerged. "People 

have tried to track down tti"ese groups, but they couldn't find them," Wilcox said. 

Contacted by telephone, SPLC spokesman Potok responded, "We really try to separate out real 

groups from a man and his dog and a computer-and yes, many of the groups are small. The 

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reason we count groups is that it's incredibly hard to count people. Certainly counting groups 

isn't a perfect method, and there's a valid question of whether one group of four people is 

better than two groups of two people." 

A perhaps more serious objection to the SPLC's hate list is the loosey-goosey criteria by which 

the center decides which organizations qualify as hate groups. The Family Research Council 

that was the target of Floyd Corkins's planned rampage is a perfect example. Potok insists that 

the SPLC has a policy of not attaching the hate label to an organization simply because it 

interprets the Bible as forbidding homosexual activity: "We are not going to list groups on the 

basis of what they say Scripture says. But this is a group that is consciously promoting 

falsehoods and demonizing an entire group of people. It's fact-free demonization. The reason 

we listed them was on the basis of their known falsehoods and their baseless, repetitive namecalling. They push the idea that gay men molest children at substantially higher rates than 

heterosexuals. The science is settled that this is not the case." 

A look at an FRC web page titled "Homosexuality and Child Sexual Abuse" reveals, however, that 

the issue of whether gay men are disproportionately represented among child-molesters is more 

a battle of the experts than settled science. The FRC cites two peer-reviewed studies published 

in respectable scholarly journals finding that up to one-third of incidents of child sexual abuse 

are male-on-male, in contrast to the reportedly 3 percent or so of the population who are 

homosexual (nearly all pedophiles are men). For its part the SPLC cites on its website a 

statement by the American Psychological Association (APA) that homosexual men are no more 

likely than heterosexual men to abuse children sexually and a meta-study by Gregory Herek, a 

psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, reaching a similar conclusion. While it 

may be that Herek's findings and the APA's conclusions bear more scholarly weight than those 

of the researchers cited by the FRC, it seems a stretch to accuse the FRC of deliberately 

promoting falsehoods. When I raised this objection with Potok by email, he emailed in reply: 

"The FRC and some of the other anti-LGBT groups portray gay people as sick, evil, perverted, 

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incestuous and a danger to the nation." 

Besides being willing to slap the hate label onto groups that may merely interpret data 

differently from the SPLC, the center routinely tries to link, if only by implication, increases in the 

number of hate and patriot groups it tallies to actual incidents of domestic terrorism and other 

violence. SPLC president Richard Cohen's March 5 warning letter to Holder and Napolitano 

trotted out the Oklahoma City bombing one more time, even though neither McVeigh nor his 

convicted co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had ever belonged to any organization that could 

remotely be called a hate or patriot group. Similarly, after 40-year-old Wade Michael Page fatally 

shot six people at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee last August 5 before turning his gun onto 

himself, Potok and Heidi Beirich, the SPLC's intelligence director, issued a joint statement 

claiming to have been tracking Page since 2000 (when, they said, he had purchased "goods" 

from a now-nearly defunct neo-Nazi organization) and linking him to white-supremacist 

sentiment because he had once been the leader of a "racist white-power band." The band in 

question, End Apathy, had described itself on a MySpace page as "old school," with "punk and 

metal" influences, whose music was supposed to be "a sad commentary on our sick society and 

the problems that prevent true progress." Page's actual motive for his murder spree remains a 

mystery to police and the FBI (he was apparently a loner who had trouble holding jobs and 

keeping girlfriends). 

There is something disconcerting about a private organization spending years monitoring 

someone who had never committed a serious crime, and something equally disconcerting about 

trying to connect a rock band to a murder rampage, no matter how racist or otherwise 

unappetizing the band's lyrics might have been. Furthermore, it is odd that an organization that 

characterizes itself as being devoted to civil rights-a phrase that connotes the struggles of 

individuals to assert their rights against a tyrannical government-devotes its energies to 

tracking the activities of people who are insufficiently respectful of the government: Obamaloathers, opponents of gun control, politically incorrect metal heads, grandmothers who stash 

canned goods in their basements because they are certain that the government is about to 

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short of directly inciting violence, fall under the First Amendment's free-speech protections? 

When I posed this question to Potok, he replied: "When we list these groups, we're not 

predicting that they'll commit violence. We say very explicitly that we're listing them solely on the 

basis of their ideology. We're foursquare behind the First Amendment. We believe these people 

can say all these things, but we're going to call them out. We have never suggested restricting 

any kind of free speech." 

To the SPLC's credit-or perhaps in an effort to distance itself gradually from Dees's muchcriticized fish-in-a-barrel Klan lawsuits-the center's legal department, which now maintains 

offices in four other Southern cities besides Montgomery, has branched out substantially into 

immigrant rights, prison reform, and gay and lesbian issues (although several critics with whom 

I spoke speculated that the last might represent another of Dees's efforts to tap via mailing lists 

into a well-off and easily frightened donor base: gays). The SPLC's online list of its legal actions 

seems thin for a staff of 34 lawyers plus about 36 support-staffers: only 16 new case-filings in 

2012 plus 1 in 2013, although Cohen, the center's president and legal director, said the list 

represents only the tip of a litigation iceberg, and that most of the suits had been preceded by 

months of laborious investigation. 

Some of the legal actions appear to bear the Dees strategical earmarks of cash-strapped 

defendants plus maximum donor-base appeal: a recently filed fraud lawsuit against an obscure 

Jewish nonprofit in New Jersey that offers so-called conversion therapy to gays and lesbians 

hoping to enter traditional heterosexual marriages, and a quick settlement in 2012 of a gaybullying suit against a school district in a Minneapolis suburb that likely had a limited litigation 

budget. Another of the SPLC's lawsuits, against the Thompson Academy, a for-profit juvenile 

facility in Broward County, Florida, whose residents complained about systematic staff 

mistreatment, was filec' in·federal court in 2010, then settled on undisclosed terms about a 

year later. The settlement appeared to accomplish little, however. In 2012, the Broward County 

Public Defender's office stepped in, filing a series of petitions in state court containing nearly 

irl•mtir.AI AIIP.f'Ations to thosP. in thP. SPLC's suit. Anrl thP. st<JtP. of FlorirlA shut rlown Thomnson 

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this past January. 

Nonetheless, even the SPLC's severest critics give the center's lawyers credit for providing highquality legal services that have resulted in tangible legal changes. "Their immigration project 

does some pretty good work, as do some of their other projects," Stephen Bright of the 

Southern Center for Human Rights conceded. (The SPLC's latest immigration case, filed in 

February, challenges an Alabama law that requires the state to maintain an online list of 

immigrants who are arrested and can't prove that they're not "unlawfully present" in the United 

States; the SPLC argues that the law provides no means for people to get off the list if their 

immigration status changes.) Michael McDuff, a private criminal defense lawyer in Jackson, 

Mississippi, worked alongside SPLC staff lawyers on a 2007 lawsuit that resulted in the closing 

of the Columbia Training School, a girls' juvenile facility where a laundry list of horror stories 

included alleged improper shackling, sexual abuse, and a lack of psychiatric care for the 

inmates, many of whom suffered from mental illness. "I'm aware of some of the criticism of the 

Southern Poverty Law Center," said McDuff, "but Sheila Bedi in their Jackson office just did a 

terrific job." (Bedi, now a law professor at Northwestern University, headed the SPLC's legal staff 

in Jackson at the time.) "The SPLC lawyers did a lot of the legal work, and I was pleased to see 

that they weren't in this case just for the publicity," McDuff continued. "''m no fan of Morris 

Dees, but their operation in Mississippi has been terrific." 

Dees may indeed have few fans among liberal Southern lawyers-or among liberal journalists 

who have followed his career closely. Still, just as the SPLC's Northern donors have yet to realize 

that the days of flaming crosses in the South are done, the Northern legal establishment has yet 

to realize that Dees's claim to fame may lie primarily in his indisputable genius at selfpromotion. Dees parlayed hls ~\u ~\lux }\lan foiays into an NBC made-for-TV movie titled Line of 

Fire in 1991 and his lawsutt against Tom Metzger into a PBS special titled Hate on Trial in 

1992. Universities have showered him with more than 20 honorary degrees, and organizations 

ranging from Trial Lawyers for Public Justice to the National Education Association have feted 

him with awards. 

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In 2011 the Gruber Foundation, headquartered at Yale, awarded Dees its coveted Justice Prize, 

citing, yes, one more time, that $7 million verdict the SPLC won in 1987 against the United 

Klans of America. In August 2012 the American Bar Association presented him with the ABA 

Medal, the organization's highest award, "for exceptionally distinguished service by a lawyer or 

lawyers to the cause of American jurisprudence." (Both the Gruber Foundation and the ABA 

declined requests for interviews.) At around the time that Dees picked up his medal from the 

ABA last summer, the Obama Justice Department hosted him as a featured speaker at a 

"diversity training event" for some of its employees in Washington, where a DOJ staffer picked 

him up at the airport and took him out to dinner with his family, according to emails obtained by 

the conservative group Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act request. 

Still, there may soon come a day when the SPLC's donation-generating machine, powered by 

Dees's mastery of the use of "hate" to coax dollars from the highly educated and the highly 

gullible, finally breaks down. That is why, according to Cohen, the SPLC has no intention of soon 

spending down much of that $256 million in stockpiled assets that has earned the center an 

"F" rating from CharityWatch. "We've tried to raise a substantial endowment, because our 

fundraising is on a downward trend," Cohen told me. "Those 1960s liberals-they're getting 

older, and the post office is dying. We're likely to be out of the fundraising business within 10 

years." What the SPLC wants to do is to ensure that "hate" is forever. 

Charlotte Allen, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, last wrote on Attorney General 

Eric Holder. 

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Another Killer Cites the 

Southern Poverty Law Center 

l!ll¥4§4!1 

9:35AM, FEB 11, 2015 I By MARK HEMINGWAY 

The tragic slaying of three Muslims in North Carolina is understandably dominating the 

headlines this morning. According to his face book page, the killer was a devout atheist and 

political liberal. I think it's very rarely helpful or fair to connect political beliefs to the acts of 

possibly deranged or mentally ill individuals, and thankfully some of the smarter liberal 

commmentators such as Steve Benen agree with me on this point. And Benen was also correct 

to point out that some on the right have been too quick to blame politics as a motive for 

individual killings, such as when some conservatives engaged in overheated finger-pointing at 

New York's liberal mayor Bill deBiasio after two NYPD officers were killed in December. 

However, I do think it's fair to say that attributing political motives to individual killings is much 

more of a phenomenon on the left. In recent years, liberal organizations and commentators 

have gone out of their way to connect mainstream conservative political beliefs to violence, and 

more often than not, such connections are dubious or nonexistant. Back in 2011, I addressed 

this unseemly tendency of the left in the wake of the Anders Brevik killings with "Debunking the 

Left-Wing Mvths About 'Right-Wing. Extremist Christians."' 

One of the prime perpetrators of these political smears is the Southern Poverty Law Center, 

which has devolved from an organization that once combatted real hate groups such as the 

KKK to a pathetic racket thst trades on its former reputation to smear people such as Ben 

Carson as"~." The SPLC, has among other things, blamed Sarah Palin's political rhetoric 

for providing a "a facilitating context" for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords by a 

man who is quite clearly mentally ill and barely registered discernible political opinons. Of 

course, when another killer shot a security guard and was intent of starting a killing spree at the 

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mainstream Christian organization Family Research Council he told the FBI that he found the 

organization listed on a "hate map" on the SPLC's website. What was SPLC's response to this 

awkward revelation they were associated with this terrible crime?: 

"Well, first of all, having a group on our hate map doesn't cause anybody to attack them 

any more than they attacked us for one thing or another," Oees told CNSNews.com on 

August 6. It takes quite a bit of hubris for Oees to defensively equate rhetorical attacks on 

his own organization with actual gun violence against an organization whose politics he 

dislikes. It a/so seems more than a little convenient that Oees now denies a connection 

between rhetoric and violence. In 2011, an SPLC blog post, "Expert: Political Rhetoric 

Likely a Factor in Arizona Shooting," concluded that Sarah Palin's rhetoric "could have 

provided a facilitating context" for the Giffords shooting, though, again, there is no 

evidence Loughner was exposed to it. 

By the loose standard of "facilitating context," the unjust inclusion of the Family Research 

Council headquarters on a "hate map" otherwise filled with violent white nationalist 

organizations is a much more serious transgression-particularly when Corkins admits he 

used the map to learn about his target. And while Leo Johnson's defining characteristics 

are his courage and character, as long as we're talking about context, it's worth 

pondering why the founder of a celebrated civil rights organization is obdurately 

unreflective about the role his SPLC played in the shooting of a black man. 

Which brings us to the Facebook page of the North Carolina killer, which suggests he wasn't 

remotely neutral when it comes to his atheist and liberal political opinions: 

His Facebook Likes included the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty 

Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye "The Science Guy," Neil deGrasse 

Tyson, Gay Marriage groups and similar progressive pages. 

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Somehow it he had liked Sean Hannity and the Southern Baptist Convention instead ot Rachel 

Maddow and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, I don't think we would see the media 

restraint we're seeing when it comes to connecting this killer's politics to his terrible deeds. 

And again, I would note the irony of his fondness for the Southern Poverty Law Center. By the 

SPLC's own logic, the SPLC shares responsibility for another hate crime. Now that the SPLC has 

been hoisted by its own petard twice in a few years, I hope the SPLC and other liberal groups act 

more responsibly the next time they want to blame a tragic crime on someone's personal 

politics. 

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