[Senate Hearing 114-438]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-438
JIHAD 2.0: SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF TERRORIST RECRUITMENT
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HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 7, 2015
__________
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
RAND PAUL, Kentucky JON TESTER, Montana
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey
JONI ERNST, Iowa GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
BEN SASSE, Nebraska
Keith B. Ashdown, Staff Director
Mark K. Harris, U.S. Coast Guard Detailee
David S. Luckey, Director of Homeland Security
Cory P. Wilson, U.S. Secret Service Detailee
Gabrielle A. Batkin. Minority Staff Director
John P. Kilvington, Minority Deputy Staff Director
Harlan C. Geer, Minority Senior Professional Staff Member
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Lauren M. Corcoran, Hearing Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Johnson.............................................. 1
Senator Carper............................................... 3
Senator Sasse................................................ 21
Senator Peters............................................... 23
Senator Booker............................................... 25
Senator Ayotte............................................... 28
Senator Portman.............................................. 30
Prepared statements:
Senator Johnson.............................................. 43
Senator Carper............................................... 44
WITNESSES
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Peter Bergen, Director, International Security Program, New
America, and Professor of Practice, Arizona State University... 4
J.M. Berger, Non-resident Fellow, Project on U.S. Relations with
the Islamic World, The Brookings Institution................... 6
Mubin Shaikh, Author, ``Undercover Jihadi''...................... 9
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of
Democracies.................................................... 12
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Bergen, Peter:
Testimony.................................................... 4
Prepared statement........................................... 45
Berger, J.M.:
Testimony.................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 65
Gartenstein-Ross, Daveed:
Testimony.................................................... 12
Prepared statement........................................... 89
Shaikh, Mubin:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 71
APPENDIX
Information submitted by Mr. Shaikh.............................. 85
Chart referenced by Senator Johnson.............................. 100
Information submitted by Senator Booker.......................... 101
Response to post-hearing questions submitted by Mr. Gartenstein-
Ross........................................................... 104
JIHAD 2.0: SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF TERRORIST RECRUITMENT
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THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2015
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Ron Johnson,
Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Johnson, Portman, Ayotte, Ernst, Sasse,
Carper, Booker, and Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON
Chairman Johnson. This hearing is called to order.
I am looking at the title of the hearing, ``Jihad 2.0:
Social Media in the Next Evolution of Terrorist Recruitment.''
Unfortunately, I think that is a wrong title. It is really the
current evolution of terrorist recruitment. We have got a panel
of, I think, some excellent witnesses to lay out the reality,
which is what we are always trying to do in this Committee. If
you are going to solve a problem, you have to first recognize
and acknowledge that reality. And so I think we have a good
panel.
I would ask consent to enter my written prepared statement
into the record,\1\ and it is always granted because our
Ranking Member is such a kind gentleman.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Johnson appears in the
Appendix on page 43.
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What I would like to do is talk a little bit about an the
Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) message that warns of
71 trained soldiers in 15 U.S. States, 23 signed up for
missions. I am just going to read some excerpts here because--
first of all, let me say we have no knowledge whether this is
true or not. I think some of our witnesses will probably say it
is bluster. Let us hope so. But this is a perfect example of
what ISIS is trying to do and how they are trying to use social
media.
And, of course, this is claiming credit for the terrorist
attacks in Texas. Excerpts read:
``The attack by the Islamic State (IS) in America is only
the beginning of our efforts to establish a province in the
heart of our enemy.''
``We knew that the target was protected. Our intention was
to show how easy we give our lives for the sake of Allah.''
``Out of the 71 trained soldiers, 23 have signed up for
missions like Sunday. We are increasing in number.''
``Of the 15 States, 5 we will name: Virginia, Maryland,
Illinois, California, and Michigan.''
``The disbelievers who shot our brothers think that you
killed someone untrained. Nay. They gave their bodies in plain
view because we were watching.''
They go on to say: ``The next 6 months will be
interesting.'' Let us hope not.
As I am being briefed for this hearing--and, by the way,
the reason we always call these hearings is I have questions. I
need to understand what these problems are. So I am always
learning a lot, and I am going to learn a lot more through the
testimony. But I like timelines, and so I had my staff prepare
just for 2015 the timeline of potential terrorist plots that
have been foiled, the arrests that have been made of
individuals who have been inspired by ISIS and other Islamic
terrorists.
If you go through the list, we had Christopher Lee from
Cincinnati, Ohio, who was planning to come to the U.S. Capitol
to bomb and then, with two semiautomatic weapons, open fire on
people fleeing the Capitol. That was on January 14.
February 25, three Brooklyn men were arrested.
March 17, a former U.S. Air Force veteran was arrested
after a failed attempt to cross the border into Syria.
March 25, an Army National Guard specialist was arrested
after planning to travel to Syria.
April 2, two women were arrested in Queens, New York.
April 3, a Philadelphia woman was arrested before she could
travel to Syria.
April 8, this one hits a little bit closer to home because
this is a gentleman from Madison, Joshua Ray Van Haften, was
arrested in Chicago O'Hare Airport after his flight landed from
Turkey.
April 10, John T. Booker was arrested in Topeka after it
was discovered he was preparing a car bomb for use against
nearby Fort Riley Army post.
April 16, another indictment.
April 19, six men arrested on terrorism charges.
May 3, the Texas terrorist attempt.
We have a chart\1\ that I think is also somewhat
surprising. So, again, the point of that timeline is these
arrests, the revelations of these things are growing, and they
are increasing in frequency.
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\1\ The chart referenced by Senator Johnson appears in the Appendix
on page 100.
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Another I thought relatively shocking as I was being
briefed by my staff, I was asking, ``Is this true?'', that the
number of terrorist attacks in 2012 around the world was 6,771,
and in 2013, 9,700. And one of my staff members went, ``Wow,''
which was exactly my reaction. In 2012, 11,000 individuals
killed in terrorist attacks. It grew by 61 percent to almost
18,000 in 2013.
Now, in this chart we have also broken that out between
terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan. I
guess I would consider those war zones. But that still leaves
almost 3,000 terrorist attacks in 2012 outside of those war
zones; almost 4,000 in 2013, an increase of about 33.8 percent.
So the point of this hearing is to show that the danger is
real. In many respects, the threat is growing, and we are going
to have testimony here that there have actually been some
setbacks for ISIS. They are maybe not as strong as they purport
to be. But they are using social media to show that they are
actually stronger than they are to inspire the kind of action--
and they do not need a whole lot of territory. They do not need
too many computers. They do not need too many people spewing
that hate and providing that kind of inspiration.
So this is a real threat. I really want to thank and
welcome the witnesses for your thoughtful testimony and coming
here. With that, I will turn it over to our Ranking Member for
his opening comments.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
To each of you, welcome. This is an excellent panel, and we
look forward to hearing from you and having a chance to ask
questions of you this morning.
As this Committee has discussed at a number of hearings
over the years, the threats that our country faces--and the
Chairman has just given us sort of a quick look at what is
going on this year, but the nature of the threat has evolved
significantly since September 11, 2001, when I was a new Member
of this Committee.
After 9/11, the most acute terrorist threats came from
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, which had orchestrated, as we know,
large, complex attacks from remote caves in Afghanistan. Today,
Bin Laden is dead. The core of al-Qaeda as we knew it has been
largely dismantled.
Unfortunately, al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, Africa, and
Syria have filled the void. At the same time, new terror groups
like ISIS present an immediate and different kind of threat to
the United States and others both here and abroad.
While the threat of major aviation attacks still remains a
top concern for American counterterrorism officials, the
tactics employed by these groups who are targeting us have
broadened and are not as focused on this particular type of
attack method.
Groups like ISIS, Al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula have used social media and online propaganda to
spread their call to extremists here in America and around the
world to carry out their own attacks against us.
Moreover, ISIS has seemingly perfected the ability to use
social media to lure Western recruits to Syria for training.
These new tactics mean that we can no longer rely solely on our
ability to use military force to eliminate a terrorist threat.
We must, in partnership with our allies abroad, start examining
more closely the root causes of why Westerners join the ranks
and act in the name of ISIS or al-Qaeda. We must continue to
evolve our own counterterrorism tactics to address these root
causes.
Today we will begin to examine the narratives put forward
by these terrorist groups over social media and also how those
narratives are being used to influence vulnerable individuals
here and in other Western countries. And we will look for
common-sense solutions that our government, along with other
governments with whom we are allied, can employ to counter
these groups' narratives and to eliminate this tool from the
terrorists' toolbox.
With that, I look forward to a good conversation, and thank
you again for joining us.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper.
It is the tradition of this Committee to swear in
witnesses, so if you would all stand and raise your right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you will give before this
Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Bergen. I do.
Mr. Berger. I do.
Mr. Shaikh. I do.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I do.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you. Please be seated.
Our first witness is Peter Bergen. Mr. Bergen is the
Director of the National Security Studies Program at the New
America Foundation, Cable News Network (CNN's) national
security analyst, and the author of ``Manhunt: The Ten-Year
Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad,'' and ``The
Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al-
Qaeda.''
Mr. Bergen.
TESTIMONY OF PETER BERGEN,\1\ DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
PROGRAM, NEW AMERICA, AND PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE, ARIZONA STATE
UNIVERSITY
Mr. Bergen. Thank you, Senator Johnson, Senator Carper, and
other Members of the Committee and the excellent staff that put
this hearing together. My task today is to kind of try and
outline the threat from Americans inspired by the Syrian
conflict, which is the newest wave and cohort of domestic
jihadism in the United States. And we at the New America
Foundation, where I work, have identified 62 individuals from
news reports or public records who have tried to join ISIS,
have joined ISIS, or Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliated, or
supported others doing so, and here are the sort of big
takeaways:
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Bergen appears in the Appendix on
page 45.
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They come from across the United States. We found cases in
19 States. As you know, the Federal Bureau of Investigations
(FBI) Director James Comey has said there are ongoing
investigations in 50 States. Some of these are obviously not
public yet.
They do not fit any ethnic profile. They are whites or
African Americans; they are Arab Americans; they are Pakistani
Americans; they are Bosnian Americans. And this, of course,
produces problems for law enforcement in the sense that, unlike
in the case of Al-Shabaab, which attracted overwhelmingly
Somali Americans, mostly from Minnesota--where Senator Johnson
went to university, I believe--that was a very focused group
who were going. This is across the United States.
We also found an unprecedented number of American females.
Obviously these are a group of highly misogynistic individuals
whose goal in life is to preclude women from having any role
outside the home, and yet we found about a fifth of the 62 are
females. A number of them are teenagers, and this is really a
very new phenomenon.
We also found that this is a relatively young group. The
average age is 25, but there are teenagers, including teenage
girls as young as 15.
The only profile that this group really share is that 53 of
the 62 individuals were very active on social media,
downloading and sharing jihadist propaganda, and in some cases,
as Elton Simpson was doing, directly communicating with members
of ISIS in Syria.
This is a new development in the way jihadist terrorists
are recruiting in the United States. The kind of conventional
view or perhaps the cartoonish view is an al-Qaeda recruiter
comes here and recruits somebody and creates a cell. In fact,
that is very rare. That did happen in Lackawanna. You may
remember the Lackawanna Six case where there was an al-Qaeda
recruiter who recruited six Yemeni Americans from Buffalo, New
York, to go to a training camp in Afghanistan.
We also saw that in Minnesota in 2007 when veterans of the
Somali war went to Minneapolis to recruit Americans physically
and bring them to Somalia. But we are no longer seeing that
model at all. In fact, of the 62 individuals, we found that
none of them were physically recruited by a militant operative,
radical cleric, returning foreign fighter, or while radicalized
while in prison. Instead, they self-recruited online or were
sometimes in touch via Twitter with members of ISIS in Syria.
Why would Americans abandon what is, after all, usually a
very comfortable life? A lot of these come from comfortable
backgrounds and are intelligent individuals. Why would they be
attracted to ISIS? And I think there are sort of perhaps three
reasons:
First of all, of course, the terrible nature of Assad's
brutal war against his own people is an attraction.
Second, the claim that ISIS has created the caliphate,
which I think is a powerful attraction for idealistic
fundamentalist Muslims.
Third, ISIS is presenting itself as the vanguard of the
sort of Muslim army that is signaling the end of times and that
is basically the vanguard of a group that will usher in the
perfect true Islam when the Mahdi, the savior of Islam,
returns.
Now, I this morning I just saw that a very large number of
Americans, something like 4 in 10, believe that we are in the
end times, so this is not such an uncommon view that we are in
the end times. So ISIS is presenting itself as ushering in the
end times, which is another powerful kind of attraction.
It also presents itself as a real State with social
services, and that claim is not completely false, although it
is certainly probably less true than they present it. And for
some of the Western recruits, this is a heroic and glamorous
thing. We have seen people tweet on ISIS--we have seen ISIS
fighters say that it is like playing ``Call of Duty but in 3-
D,'' and so there is a heroic, exciting aspect to this that is
attracting people.
And, finally, what is the true level of threat? I would say
the true level of threat in the West is not as much--something
like 80 percent of Americans believe that ISIS is a serious or
fairly serious threat to the United States. Well, it is clearly
a big threat to American interests in the Middle East,
potentially, but so far only one Syrian foreign fighter has
carried out a successful attack in the West, which was the
Frenchman who attacked the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24,
2014, killing four people.
That, of course, does not mean that the threat does not
exist. It is worrisome, but not existential. And related to
that point, of the 19 individuals we found who went to Syria, 8
of them were killed over there. So Syria is proving as much of
a graveyard as a launchpad for attacks.
It is a very dangerous war, as you know. In fact, about
half of the men who have gone over there have been killed and a
larger sample of about 600 foreign fighters that we have
examined, and about 5 percent of the females, so even for the
women it is very dangerous.
So if the returning foreign fighters are not the issue,
what is the issue? And the issue is really what we saw on
Sunday, which is people inspired by ISIS taking up weapons,
obviously it is easy to acquire weapons in this country and
doing something with them. And, luckily, Sunday's attack did
not mature in the way that the attackers wanted it to. But I
think that is a harbinger of what we will see in the future. So
the real issue is not Syrian foreign fighters coming back to
the United States. Law enforcement has done a very good job of
tracking these folks. If they come back, there is only one case
where law enforcement did not recognize that a particular
person had gone to Syria, which is the Floridian, Moner Abu
Salha. But the returnee problem is really, I think, much less
of an issue than the homegrown ISIS-inspired that we saw on
Sunday, and there is very little as a practical matter that we
can prevent lone wolves who are truly lone wolves from doing
these kinds of attacks.
The good news is there is a natural ceiling to what a lone
wolf can do. For instance, in Boston, the two Tsarnaev brothers
were lone wolves. They killed four people. Those were
individually tragedies, and it was a terrible day for the
United States and Boston. But it was not a national catastrophe
like 9/11 was. So we have to frame the threat effectively,
which is it is worrisome but not existential and nothing on the
scale of 9/11.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Bergen.
Our next witness is J.M. Berger. Mr. Berger is a non-
resident fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the
Islamic World at the Brookings Institution and the author of
``Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam'' and
``ISIS: The State of Terror.''
Mr. Berger.
TESTIMONY OF J.M. BERGER,\1\ NON-RESIDENT FELLOW, PROJECT ON
U.S. RELATIONS WITH THE ISLAMIC WORLD, THE BROOKINGS
INSTITUTION
Mr. Berger. Thank you for having me. I think that I would
like to start by talking about the lone wolf threat, because
that is obviously on everyone's minds after the events of this
weekend.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Berger appears in the Appendix on
page 65.
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ISIS in many ways appears to be the first jihadist group to
really kind of crack the lone wolf formula. The idea of
leaderless resistance and individual attacks goes back to the
1980s, originated in the American white supremacist movement,
and people have been trying to make it work ever since. And the
problem with lone wolves is that it is too easy to stay at
home, generally. People are not going to get adequately
motivated to carry out an attack without having social
reinforcement, and that defeats the purpose of being a lone
wolf, is to escape detention by not talking to anyone.
ISIS has mixed up this formula, and there are a couple of
reasons for this. The first thing that they have done that is
different from what al-Qaeda did is they have become the
populist movement. So they have a very low threshold for entry,
and they are pretty undiscriminating about who they include in
their group relative to al-Qaeda. It was very difficult to join
al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda was a vanguard and an elitist movement. So
that affords them access to more people.
Second, their propaganda is extremely violent, and it is
also very focused on presenting the group as dynamic and
action-oriented relative--again, when you look at a comparison
to al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda's propaganda, in recent years especially,
tends more toward discourse: ``We are trying to convince people
that we have the right idea, that reasonable people would agree
with us that this is the correct thing to do.'' And ISIS does
not care about that so much, and they are willing to just get
people agitated and cut them loose.
The third element of change is that ISIS has changed sort
of the fundamental underlying assumption that we see in the
jihadist argument. al-Qaeda proceeded from an assumption of
weakness. Its argument was based on the proposition that
Muslims are weak and that they were unable to stand up to
apostate regimes in the region, and the reason that they could
not stand up to them was because the West was behind them. So
the idea behind al-Qaeda and the idea behind using terrorism as
a tactic was that, ``This is the tool of the weak. We have to
degrade popular support in the United States for apostate
regimes in the Middle East, and then the United States will
withdraw its support, and then we will be able to fight these
guys directly.''
ISIS has skipped ahead to fighting directly. Their
propaganda emphasizes this. They are taking the fight to the
local regimes, and they are attacking the United States in a
secondary way. Their message is that, ``We are winners, and you
should join us because we are strong.''
All of this is part of a very complex set of problems. We
are in a period of very broad social change. People have been
talking about social media for a number of years and often in
very effusive terms about how it is changing the world, and
this is the first manifestation of how that really is going to
work. What we are seeing is that social media allows people to
self-select the beliefs and information that they receive, so
if you have an interest in jihadism, you can find other people
who are interested in that very easily, very quickly, and you
can establish relationships with them. This is very different
from, say, the 1950s. If you were a radical jihadist in the
1950s living in Peoria, you might go your whole life without
meeting anybody who shared your views. Today it takes you 10
minutes to start talking to people who share your views. And
that is a key part of what ISIS does in its recommendation
process, it provides a social context. It is reinforcement, and
it is personal validation of your beliefs. If you are going to
act out as a lone wolf, they are offering you a degree of fame
that you would not be able to achieve as a mass shooter, for
instance. And it is very reciprocal.
There is a sense of remote intimacy on social media that
can be hard to appreciate if you do not use it a lot. When you
talk to somebody on a social media platform and you talk to
them every day, you feel like you know them. You feel like they
are somebody who is in your life. And so somebody tweeting from
Syria who is a member of ISIS can develop a very emotionally
powerful relationship with somebody who is sitting in the
United States. And that is part of the reason that we have seen
people are more willing to mobilize in the name of ISIS than
they were in the name of al-Qaeda.
ISIS' radicalization and recruitment practices take place
over a spectrum. There is no one thing that they do to try and
recruit Westerners or try and recruit locally. They attack this
from every channel in every direction using a variety of styles
and using a very large number of people, because ISIS is a
large organization and can afford to have 2,000 people who
tweet 150 times every day. It can afford to have a ratio of,
two or three recruiters to every one potential recruit who
might carry out a lone wolf attack. If there is an area in
which we are trailing ISIS in this struggle, I think it is
probably a question of resources. And, of course, the problem
that we face with that is that nobody can really agree how to
use those resources. Our efforts at countering violent
extremism in a preventive way have a lot of problems that are
inherent to them, and we also have a problem from a law
enforcement perspective. If you are monitoring 60 or 100
people, it takes 500 people to do that, to monitor these people
even on a partial basis, let alone 24 hours a day. So if these
guys jump in a car and drive to Texas, there is not a lot you
can do to interdict that.
I will save most of the rest of my thoughts for the Q&A. I
did want to just talk about the prospect of an ISIS
organizational terrorist attack. ISIS has money and manpower to
spare. We have not seen that they have an intent to carry out a
9/11-style attack, and there is reason to think they might not
be as skilled or competent in such an attempt as al-Qaeda was
because of the training cycles that they use. I think we should
not assume that that is something that could not happen,
though, that they could not make an attempt. And I think we are
much better prepared to prevent something like that today.
I do not think ISIS is an existential threat, but I do
think that we have to have realistic expectations about what
they might do so that, when something happens, we do not
overreact in fear.
Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Berger.
Our next witness is Mubin Shaikh. Mr. Shaikh is a former
Muslim extremist and an expert on radicalization, terrorism,
and countering violent extremism. He has consulted on the topic
of ISIS with the U.S. State Department, U.S. National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), U.S. Special Operations Command
(SOCOM), Central Command, NATO, Interpol, and other agencies.
First of all, Mr. Shaikh, I certainly appreciate and thank
you for having a change of heart after 9/11 and for all the
help and support you have given this government in terms of
trying to counteract this and also trying to help other young
people who might be inspired to not be inspired. But I am
looking forward to your testimony. Mr. Shaikh.
TESTIMONY OF MUBIN SHAIKH,\1\ AUTHOR, ``UNDERCOVER JIHADI''
Mr. Shaikh. Thank you, sir. Shalom Alaichem, As-salamu
alaykum, the greeting of Jesus Christ, peace be unto you.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Shaikh appears in the Appendix on
page 71.
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To the esteemed Members of the Senate Committee, on
September 11, 2001, I was driving to work when I first heard a
plane had struck one of the two towers of the World Trade
Center buildings. Immediately, I exclaimed aloud,
``AllahuAkbar''--``God is Great.'' My celebratory moment was
quickly muted when I asked myself: What if the very office
building I was working in was similarly struck by a plane? I
would have perished along with everyone else just as those
innocent people perished on that day. For me and many others,
September 11, 2001, was, for all intents and purposes, the
beginning of the end of my commitment to the extremist mindset.
Allow me to explain how this began for me.
I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, to Indian
immigrants. As a child, I grew up attending a very conservative
brand of ``Madressah''--a Quran school--an imported version of
what you would find in India and Pakistan: rows of boys,
separated from the girls, sitting at wooden benches, rocking
back and forth, reciting the Quran in Arabic but not
understanding a word of what was being read.
Contrast that with my daily life of attending public
school, which was the complete opposite of the rigid,
fundamentalist manner of education of the Madressah. Here, I
could actually talk to girls and have a normal, functional
relationship with them. When I left the Quran school at age 12
and moved into middle school and high school, I was not
discriminated against, bullied, picked on, or anything of the
like. I was actually one of the cool kids.
But when I was 17, I had a house party while my parents
were away, which my hyper-conservative uncle walked in on.
Normal as it may be to the Western experience, my uncle and
other family members were incensed that I would have brought
non-Muslim friends to my home, and they spent the next few days
berating me over what I had done. Due to the sustained guilt
trip I received, the only way I thought I could make amends
with my family was to ``get religious.'' Hence, the born-again
type seeking to right the wrongs of their past.
I would then travel to India and Pakistan and, in the
latter, ended up in a place called Quetta, which, unbeknownst
to me at the time, was the center of the Taliban Shura and of
the group known as al-Qaeda. As I walked around the area, I
chanced upon 10 heavily armed men dressed in black turbans,
flowing robes, and sandals. One of them said to me that, ``If
you truly wish to bring about political change, it can only be
done by using this,'' and he held aloft his AK47. I was
completely enamored by them as jihadi heroes--a consistent
theme in Jihadist literature and media today.
In the years following, I absorbed myself in proclaiming
the jihad was the only way to change things. And when Osama bin
Laden gave his fatwa in 1998, I was on board.
Then 9/11 happened and I thought: Wait a second. I get
attacking combatants, but this? Office buildings in which
regular people worked--Muslims included? I realized I needed to
study the religion of Islam properly to make sense of what I
had just witnessed. I sold my belongings and moved to Syria in
early 2002 when there was still some semblance of normality in
the country. I attended the class of a Syrian Islamic scholar
who challenged me on my views regarding jihad and subsequently,
spent a year and a half with him studying the verses of the
Quran and the traditions of the Prophet--Peace Be Upon Him--
that the jihadists used to justify their hate and destruction.
I came to relinquish my views completely and returned to Canada
in 2004 with a new-found appreciation for rights for Muslims in
the West.
That year, some individuals had been arrested in the United
Kingdom with the London fertilizer bomb plot. One of those
individuals was none other than my classmate from the Madressah
that I attended as a child. I thought this to be a mistake and
contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to give a
character reference for the family, but it was too late for
him. As for me, I was recruited by the service as an undercover
operative because I felt this was my religious duty.
I can say that I conducted several infiltration operations
both online and on the ground involving religious extremists.
One of those cases moved on to become a criminal investigation,
and I traversed from Intelligence Service to the Mounted
Police, Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, in what
came to be known as the Toronto 18 terrorism prosecution. I
gave fact witness testimony in five hearings over 4 years at
the Superior Court where 11 individuals were eventually
convicted.
I have since worked with various mechanisms of the U.S.
Government, as you noted the National Counter Terrorism Center,
Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties,
and the U.S. Department of State, Center for Strategic
Counterterrorism Communications--three main outfits that are
engaged in the study and practice of countering violent
extremism programming.
In addition, I have spent the past few years on Twitter
having watched the very start of the foreign fighter phenomenon
and directly observed recruitment and propaganda by ISIS types
online, and I reference Appendix A here that the members should
have. I have directly engaged with many of them, male and
female--Appendix B--as well as some of their victims that they
have tried to recruit. My approach is to show how wrong they
are and to criticize and delegitimize them from the very
Islamic sources that they misquote and mutilate. Thusly, the
correct term to describe these Terrorists in Islamic Costume
(TICs) is ``Khawarij.'' It is a technical Islamic term.
I have personally intervened in cases of an America girl
that these predators were trying to lure away and put a stop to
it by engaging her online as someone who can show her the real
interpretation of Islam. Due to this, I believe I have a good
understanding of what is happening in terms of recruitment and
what needs to be done in terms of countermessaging, both from
the civic service and non-governmental organization (NGO) side
as well as the military side of psychological operations, which
I conveyed at a recent SOCOM conference held in New York in
which the Commanding General himself was present.
Finally, there remains a massive gap in all of the areas
that I have mentioned and that a sustainable, meaningful, and
effective countermessaging approach needs to be created. I
submit to you that it is not as hard as some may suggest, that
we already have the talent but just need the direction and
guidance in order to get it going.
Just three quick points on--there was some question on
terrorist recruitment in prisons.
No. 1, terrorist recruitment in prisons is happening all
over the world, not just in the United States. But as for the
United States, the numbers are actually very low.
No. 2, in the Western context, much of this recruiting
remains unseen to the untrained eye--and also due to its covert
nature--and usually does not manifest openly in the prison
institution but afterwards, when the individual has left the
facility.
And, No. 3, greater vetting of the types of imams that
offer counseling is needed to ensure that pro-social messaging
is delivered in the context of prison rehabilitation programs.
By framing this under ``pro-social'' messaging, the State
avoids having to declare which version of Islam they
``approve'' of since we all approve of anything that promotes
healthy, productive, and rehabilitative components of
counseling.
I thank the Committee and my colleagues here with me and
hope this is the start of a solid discussion in dealing with
the challenges and opportunities now before us. Thank you and
God bless.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Shaikh.
Our next witness is Daveed Gartenstein-Ross. Am I
pronouncing that even close?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. That is correct.
Chairman Johnson. Oh, wow. That is very unusual, by the
way. Mr. Gartenstein-Ross is a senior fellow at the Foundation
for Defense of democracies, an adjunct assistant professor in
Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, a lecturer at
Catholic University of America, and author of the report,
``Homegrown Terrorists in the United States and the United
Kingdom.''
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
TESTIMONY OF DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS,\1\ SENIOR FELLOW,
FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Senator Johnson, Senator Carper,
distinguished Members, it is an honor to appear before you
today. What I am going to focus on in this testimony is the
question of: What has the United States done? What can the
United States role be in countering this violent messaging?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Gartenstein-Ross appears in the
Appendix on page 89.
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With respect to ISIS, which I think right now is rightly at
the center of our concerns, we have seen the most dramatic
brand rise of any jihadist organization, in large part because
of the reasons that J.M. Berger lays out, that they are
excellent at messaging. Technically they go far beyond what al-
Qaeda and others have done, and they take advantage of Web 2.0,
the interactivity of the Internet, which suddenly makes someone
who is alone a part of a group. They also are vulnerable,
though it is not inevitable, to the most dramatic brand
reversal of any jihadist organization we have seen.
You might have noticed that at times IS' messaging and the
United States' countermessaging have been exactly the same.
Often the United States will show the Islamic State's
brutality, people that they are killing, people that they have
tortured; and the Islamic State proudly proclaims the same
thing. The reason why is what they have fundamentally is a
winner's messaging.
To them, it is not bad to show that they are brutal because
the brutality shows that they are stronger than other groups,
that they can impose their will. They are actually very
recently--as the Islamic State has increasing pressure on it,
particularly being concerned about the pressure being put on
Mosul, a statement by a supporter named Abu Sulayman al-
Jahbadhi, which was very insightful, asked people in Islamic
State-held cities not to show the brutality of the Islamic
State's enemies, not to show, for example, bombing that killed
civilians, not to show the impact of a siege upon the cities.
His argument was that the Islamic State in its messaging will
show the brutality of its foes, but that brutality is always
connected to punishment. In other words, they want to show that
they can deal with their problems. That is what a winner's
messaging is. They emphasize their strength. They do not want
to emphasize weakness.
Now, the reason why we know that they are vulnerable to a
brand reversal is because we have seen that before with the
exact same organization. Back in 2005 to 2006, you had a very
similar dynamic, not identical but very similar, with al-Qaeda
in Iraq (AQI), which is, of course, ISIS' predecessor. al-Qaeda
in Iraq was known for its brutality. It shocked people with
videos where it beheaded its victims. And it was thought of as
a very romantic organization. People wondered during this
period if the emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
had surpassed Osama bin Laden as the leading figure of the
jihadist world.
But what happened then? We remember, of course, from Iraq
in the 2007-09 period that they had overplayed their hand,
particularly in Anbar Province, where right now ISIS is in the
process of inflicting similar although greater brutality upon
the population. You saw a grassroots uprising known as ``The
Awakening'' or the ``Sahwa movement,'' combined with two other
factors: a surge of U.S. troops in Iraq and also U.S.
counterinsurgency tactics. This ended up defeating al-Qaeda in
Iraq at the time. Their brand went from being sky high to
suddenly the entire al-Qaeda organization wondering what they
could do to undo the brand damage that had been done by their
losses in Iraq. This was a brand reversal because what had once
been a symbol of strength, their brutality, was reversed into a
symbol of having overplayed their hand and turned the
population against them.
Now, with respect to ISIS, it is experiencing a trajectory
of losses. It has been in somewhat of a decline phase since
October of last year. It has lost territory rather than gaining
it, and as a result, ISIS has started to emphasize other ways
in which they are strong. One particular way has been their
expansion into Africa, which very clearly is at the center of
their current strategy.
At times, they have exaggerated their gains, and they have
gotten the media to report on this. I think the best example is
their claim to control the city of Derna in northern Libya.
This is not true, and it has never been true, but they have
gotten the media to report it through multiple outlets,
including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and CNN.
The reason why is they were able to show a photo of an Islamic
State flag on a government building in Derna, and they were
able to also show a video of a parade through Derna with
Islamic State supporters.
Now, this is a city that is controlled by multiple
factions, so the fact that they could have a show of force or a
flag on a government building is not determinative. It does not
mean that they control the city. But this was reported, and you
have this cycle in which the Islamic State pushes out its
message; its message goes to the media, and it goes to it
supporters. And, unfortunately, sometimes the media pushes the
same message to the supporters. So rather than cognitive
dissonance and them having to convince themselves that the
Islamic State's message is true and the objective media is
wrong, instead both are reporting on these exaggerations. And
ISIS is able to do this in areas where social media's
penetration is low, so it seems that the facts they are putting
forward are the only relevant facts.
Now, what can the United States do? How can the United
States reverse this messaging of strength?
One thing that we have to fundamentally be able to do is to
compete at the speed of social media. You are all in
government. You understand that our bureaucratic processes
would often be hard pressed to compete at the speed of the
Gutenberg Bible, let alone at the speed of social media. We
need to de-bureaucratize the process of competing with them.
I think in this particular case, dealing with the Islamic
State is very different than dealing with jihadist messaging as
a whole because, as I have outlined, it has a particular
vulnerability that other jihadist groups do not necessarily
have.
But in this case, what would be very effective is a small
cell that is able to operate, that fuses intelligence analysts,
those who are able to see what is the Islamic State's
messaging, what are they hoping to gain, and where does it not
map with reality, with strategic communications professionals.
The U.S. Government is not always the best voice. Often the
best voice may be to push information out to media--fact
sheets, selectively declassifying information, and giving them
information where they can serve as the objective voice if you
get them reliable information.
Right now, I know from interactions with media that this is
often not being done. When I point to an exaggeration of the
Islamic State's, often journalists, whether print or broadcast,
are hearing it from me for the first time, as opposed to
hearing it from the U.S. Government. Given that media and the
battle of perception is so central to what the Islamic State is
trying to do, the U.S. Government has to be more quick to react
and to understand the strength of its messaging, and to be able
to respond at the same kind of speed, focusing in on the key
message of the Islamic State at the same speed at which they
can push out their own message.
Overall, defeating the Islamic State's messaging does not
defeat jihadism, but this is an important point for a variety
of reasons. And, furthermore, I can say, to end on an
optimistic note, that I do see some promising signs within
government that we are starting to shift toward a paradigm of
trying to defuse the perception of the Islamic State's
strength, but it is worth following up to make sure that we are
taking the appropriate steps, and there the Senate I think can
play a major role.
Thank you all.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. We may
not have that rapid communication response capability in the
Federal Government, but I can tell you, I think most elected
officials who have gone through a campaign, particularly
Presidential campaigns, have that within the political world,
that rapid response. Maybe that would be a good little piece of
legislation we could propose a rapid response communication
team that we can pull from campaigns. Trust me, we have those
capable individuals within our knowledge base.
I would like to talk about the online process. I would like
to ask a question. ISIS is using social media to connect and to
talk--and, by the way, I would like to enter into the record,
without objection, the Web pages provided by Mr. Shaikh.\1\ If
you have not read them, read them. It is pretty powerful in
terms of the examples of how ISIS is using social media.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The information submitted by Mr. Shaikh appears in the Appendix
on page 85.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chairman Johnson. But what is the next step after that? Mr.
Berger, who is an expert on this; so they recruit, they talk,
they talk online, and then what happens?
Mr. Berger. So there is a series of stages that you go
through with this. Typically somebody is exposed to their
propaganda that is being broadcast out, and they take an
interest in this. And this is not just ISIS. This is how social
media works generally. You find a subject, you take an interest
in it, and when you start following it online, you see that
there are other people talking about the same subject, and you
start conversing with them.
So what we will typically see is that there will be a
period where somebody is consuming this stuff in the public,
and if somebody is seriously interested and willing to take a
step further or consider a step further, they will take it to a
private format. So that can be a direct message on Twitter,
which cannot be read in the open source, or on Facebook. More
often, they will go through an encrypted app, such as WhatsApp
or Kik, which it is basically text messaging with an element of
encryption.
Chairman Johnson. So, again, our authorities can follow the
open-source social media, but the minute those individuals who
are really serious about it go offline, we go dark. We lose our
capability to follow, and we really have no idea. Isn't that
basically correct?
Mr. Berger. Well, you can approach it with subpoena and
other authorities, so, I mean, it is possible to get there.
Chairman Johnson. If we can decrypt.
Mr. Berger. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. I mean, that is part of the problem.
Mr. Berger. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. And, obviously, Silicon Valley is
resistant to allowing us to decrypt, and even if they were to
allow it, there would be other sites offshore that will also
encrypt. So we are losing our capability of being able to
follow this, correct?
Mr. Berger. Yes. I would also just add, though, that the
ability of government to follow it on open social media is
often murky.
Chairman Johnson. Very limited.
Mr. Berger. People in different agencies have different
understandings of what they are legally allowed to do when it
comes to monitoring communications of Americans, even on open
social media platforms, and that is somewhere where a
governmentwide initiative to clarify authorities would be very
helpful.
Chairman Johnson. It was not in your testimony, but in my
prep, apparently you have a publication where your best guess
was there were 46,000--I think these were your words--``overt
ISIS supporter accounts'' on Twitter, maybe a high number of
90,000. Can you describe what you are talking about by an
``overt ISIS supporter account''?
Mr. Berger. Sure. That figure was from late last year, so
it is much smaller now, significantly smaller.
Chairman Johnson. Now, why is that?
Mr. Berger. Because Twitter has started aggressively
suspending accounts. So an overt ISIS supporter, for the
criteria we used for the paper, was we had a series of steps.
So, first, if you are just tweeting ISIS propaganda and ``I
love ISIS'' all day long, then you are an ISIS supporter. If
you are not doing that in an obvious way, then we looked at who
you followed and then who followed you and sort of analyzed the
network to try and see if there was a clear case. So it was a
very conservative approach to coding somebody as a supporter.
Fundamentally, it is somebody who is not actively trying to
conceal their interest in ISIS.
Chairman Johnson. So, Mr. Shaikh, as somebody who is trying
to prevent young girls, for example, or other people that are
making those connections, where are they going now then? Is
there an alternative?
Mr. Shaikh. Well, they will remain in the orbit of their
particular networks. What I try to do is engage them openly and
directly online. I have seen others try to do that as well. In
fact, you are seeing people even on the al-Qaeda side,
strangely, arguing against ISIS types, making theological
arguments, which is kind of strange, considering they are al-
Qaeda.
But they will continue to orbit their networks. Those that
do go off into the WhatsApp and Kik, I do not follow them
offline into that, but that is what they do.
Chairman Johnson. There are officials of the U.S.
Government going into Muslim communities, talking, and one of
the reports we got back--and I was very surprised to hear this
because of the revelations of Edward Snowden, there seems to be
a perception in America that the Federal Government knows all
and we have perfect knowledge and we know exactly who is online
and we know exactly who is on these sites and is becoming
radicalized. And the members of those communities were actually
very surprised that we had no idea.
Can you kind of speak to that, Mr. Shaikh, in terms of, the
necessity of members of different communities to be policing
themselves and reporting that? From the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), it is, ``If you see something, say something.''
Mr. Shaikh. I think Hollywood has kind of done this as
well, that is, given the idea that the intelligence services
are omnipresent and all-knowing. Maybe in some cases, that is a
good thing that people think that we can see everything. Of
course, on the other hand, this is something that the
government agencies are trying to achieve, get into the
communities and give them something by which they can actually
convince their own communities outside of law enforcement, and,
look, these are things that you need to watch for. These are
your kids being lured over by these individuals. These are your
parents that are going to end up in front of, TV cameras as
they attend court or whatever it is. These are your mosques
that are going to see press and retaliatory attacks and things
like that.
So it is an ongoing challenge with the communities. There
is a level of mistrust, and there are professional naysayers,
community organizations that are trying to obstruct and are
very obstructionist in the way they approach this. But this is
an issue that is continuing, continues to play out.
Chairman Johnson. My final question really springs from a
very interesting article written by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic
and really I think amplified by your testimony, the
significance of the territory held and the caliphate
established and how that is driving the process, driving the
narrative. Perhaps you would like to speak to that, Mr. Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. I think the short answer is that is completely
true. Without the territory, the claim to be the caliphate, if
you do not control a population--they control about 8 to 9
million people. That is the population of Switzerland. If you
do not control territory--it is the size of the United Kingdom
roughly--your claim to be the caliphate disappears, which has,
an important strategic implication, which is we need to keep
chipping away or demolishing this caliphate.
Chairman Johnson. But, again, what does that inspire in the
minds and hearts of followers? What is the call? What is
required once the caliphate is established?
Mr. Bergen. Well, I think the call--and this is where it
gets complicated, and it goes a little bit to what Mubin was
talking about. For some highly observant, ultra-fundamentalist
Muslims, they may feel, ``Hey, I want to go and just be
supportive. That does not necessarily mean I want to go and
become a fighter for ISIS.''
And so I think as a matter for the law enforcement
community and the Congress to think about, if somebody is not
actually indicted for a potential act of terrorism but merely
for trying to go to Syria, we should be thinking about off
ramps that are not 15 years in prison, because right now the
problem that Muslim families have is if they see a son or
daughter radicalizing and then they say, ``Well, should we call
the FBI?'' well, then, that son or daughter may get 15 years in
prison.
So I think we should think about--oh, and in Minneapolis,
as you know, sir, there is a case where something other than a
very long term prison term for a 19-year-old young man is now
in process, and I think it is a model we should be thinking
about going forward.
Chairman Johnson. Before I turn it over to the Ranking
Member, anybody else want to respond to that?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I think that this also speaks to what
Mubin had mentioned, which is the debate between al-Qaeda and
ISIS supporters online. The reason why al-Qaeda had never
declared a caliphate is because they did not think that they
could create something that would have staying power. So if the
caliphate gets chipped away geographically, you will see many
more people within jihadist circles attacking the decision to
declare the caliphate in the first place, which is one reason
why, as I said, they are susceptible to a brand reversal,
because jihadists themselves would turn on them if they start
to lose the territorial advantage.
As to your question about what is required, for someone who
believes that the caliphate has been legitimately declared, if
they do not accept the caliphate's authority, then they die in
a state of sin. This also gets to one of the intra-jihadist
debates as to whether it is a legitimate caliphate. But for
people who support it, as was outlined, it can be anything from
going over there and living in the caliphate--and that
certainly is a pull--to, for those who are not able to do so or
those who are more well situated to carry out attacks, doing so
on the homefront. That is also one reason they have been so
successful compared to other organizations in having a prompt
to action. They have a lot of things going for them right now
that make them acting essentially from a position of strength,
and within their very small target audience, from a position of
religious legitimacy.
Chairman Johnson. So one of the goals of U.S. policy should
be to deny them that territory, deny them that caliphate.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I think so, yes, and also to make
sure that those losses are being broadcast, because it has a
magnifying effect, and being broadcast from multiple actors,
including civil society activists. Essentially as we improve
our communications capabilities, one thing it does is allows
those who are opposed to ISIS to have a better vehicle to
attack ISIS with.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you. I apologize to the Committee
Members for going over time. I thought that was important.
Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Again, thank you. Thank you all for your
testimony and for your responses to our questions.
Mr. Berger, I think you used the word ``murky'' in your
comments to describe, I think, the authority with which our
officials have to do certain actions. Go back and just mention
this again. Let us revisit this for a moment.
Mr. Berger. Well, fundamentally, I do not think there is a
consensus in government that you can do large-scale monitoring
of social media, open social media, of American citizens
without a probable cause to investigate. So the role that we
see in social media, in a lot of cases we have seen some plots
and people intending to travel who were detected on social
media. More often what we see is social media provides an
evidence trail to go after an arrest after you have identified
a suspect.
Fundamentally, for instance, there are questions about how
we collect and archive this data and who we collect and archive
on it. Do we need to have a reason to go after it, or can we
sweep up thousands and thousands of accounts?
In the case of Garland, for instance, if we had been
sweeping up those accounts, we would have a much clearer idea
of the track of radicalization for the suspect on open source.
You can go after the stuff with subpoenas. You can try and
retrieve the data in various ways. But when Twitter suspends an
account and when other platforms suspend an account, that
information is no longer available. So this user had previous
accounts, seven previous accounts, and we do not have that
available to us in the open source to talk about that. And I do
not know if law enforcement has that available, if they have
been archiving it, if they have access to it via subpoena. I am
not entirely sure Twitter saves the data. I am pretty sure they
do, but I am not entirely sure.
So these are the kind of questions--I think the appetite in
the country probably is not very friendly to the idea that the
FBI should be vacuuming up thousands and thousands and
thousands of social media accountable. So these are the kinds
of things I think that are in play.
And then when you go from agency to agency, there are
different kinds of boundary issues that we have run into over
the course of some years. I mean, several years ago, there were
issues in terms of like military investigating Americans who
were in al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, military
intelligence sometimes had to take names out of documents
because the privileges that we afford American citizens in
different contexts are sometimes not totally clear how you
reconcile that with a pragmatic approach.
Senator Carper. OK. Thank you.
A related question, and this would really be, I think, for
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross and, again, for Mr. Berger. Is it more
advantageous, do you think, for us and our government to work
with companies to shut down social media accounts that promote
ISIS or like-minded messaging or to keep those accounts open
for intelligence purposes? Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Well, J.M. has actually done some
very good work on the----
Senator Carper. J.M. Berger.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Yes, J.M. here. J.M. Berger has done
some very good work on showing the disruptive impact that it
has. There is a very big debate amongst analysts as to whether
you shut these accounts down because, on the one hand, you have
their ability to radicalize people to action. On the other
hand, you have the ability to gather information on them.
I think increasingly that debate is actually becoming
settled because we can see with ISIS the massive impact that
these accounts have had. The amount of people who have been
drawn to the Syria-Iraq theater is greater already than it was
during the Afghan-Soviet war in terms of the number of foreign
fighters who have come. Social media plays a very big part in
that.
So I think, in general, it is advantageous to shut these
accounts down, and this is something that should absolutely be
a company's decision. The U.S. Government has no authority to
do that--with one exception, which is that if jihadists get
frustrated with having their accounts suspended on Twitter,
Facebook, et cetera, they may create their own website, their
own version of Twitter or Facebook, at which point our
superiority in terms of technological capabilities plays a
role. That is the kind of site that we could shut down
wholesale, I think, without any sort of free speech or
constitutional problems.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Mr. Berger, again, very briefly on this question. Then I
have one more.
Mr. Berger. I do think there is utility in shutting them
down. The intelligence argument is important, but ultimately
the goal of intelligence is to stop terrorists from doing
whatever they want to us, and so, you take that into the
context of an attack, obviously you get a lot of intelligence
if the terrorist successfully carries out an attack. In the
same way in a lower scale I think that, we should not give them
carte blanche to do whatever they want because it allows us to
make nice charts and spread sheets.
Senator Carper. OK, thanks. And this would be a question
for all of our panelists. I like to focus, as my colleague
said, on root causes, not just on addressing symptoms but
addressing the underlying root causes. What are the root causes
or underlying causes that compel Americans to engage in
violence in the name of jihad? And what common factors, if any,
do these individuals share? Mr. Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. That is a tough one. I have looked at hundreds
of cases of Americans who have been drawn to jihadi activity
and, there is no ethnic profile, there is no--some of these
people are--on average, they tend to be slightly better
educated than most Americans. They tend to not--but then, on
the other hand, you have people from criminal backgrounds. It
is very hard to make a one-size-fits-all description. In
another era, in the 1970s, perhaps these people might have been
drawn to the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers or some
other revolutionary utopian movement, the promise to remake
society through violence, and we have seen that throughout
history.
But there is no really good answer to that question. It is
a form of the question of what draws people to crime. The
answer is too complicated to say in a very quick and sound-bite
kind of way.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you. Mr. Berger.
Mr. Berger. I would agree with that. I think that what we
see here, there are clusters of causality. So you can see, for
instance, in the Al-Shabaab's recruiting in Minnesota, you can
sort of quantify why that happened, why there were so many from
Minnesota. You can look at towns, for instance, Derna, where an
organization has a long history that, gives you some insight
into why that group of people goes. But when you look to sort
of generalize, it is very difficult. Who you know is probably
the most important thing, and that is where the social media
comes in. If you can know somebody in ISIS very easily online,
then that presents a greater risk.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Mubin Shaikh and then Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, and then I will
yield my time. Thanks.
Mr. Shaikh. Of course, I share the same caveats of the
complexity, but I will give a sound-bite version. Without
grievances, ideology does not resonate. And without ideology,
grievances are not acted on. I think the intersect between
ideology and grievances do play a significant role in this.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I think Mubin articulated it very
well, and let me focus on one thing related to this question,
which is, What can the United States do?
Senator Carper. That is always a good question.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. We are in the world right now where
ideas catch on much faster, whether they are good ideas or bad
ideas. It is easier to achieve a critical mass, and that can
play off of, as Mubin says, grievances and ideology that
intersect together.
The question is: What are we doing to ameliorate
grievances? To some extent, that is hard. We live in a world
that does not have perfect justice at all, and we live in a
world of finite resources, and we live in a world of
competition. But if you look at what companies are doing--that
is, corporations in the United States--those who are prospering
are increasingly transparent in terms of their decisionmaking,
in terms of what they are doing. The companies that are much
more legacy industry-type companies and floundering are less
transparent, much more top heavy. In many ways, the U.S.
Government looks like a legacy industry.
I think one thing we need to be able to do--there are many
representatives who are good at this--is be much more
transparent in terms of the U.S.' decisionmaking. There are a
lot of hard choices to make.
J.M. Berger outlined before the hard decision in terms of
monitoring Americans' use of social media. On the one hand, we
understand that people who are on Twitter and radicalizing can
pose a danger; but, on the other hand, when we think of the FBI
sweeping up thousands and thousands of accounts and archiving
them forever, that in many ways feels like ``1984'' by George
Orwell.
So thinking these through publicly, explaining decisions,
explaining what we are doing I think can also help to defuse
part of that grievance, because moving forward, we are in a
world where grievances, whether real or imagined, can catch on
very quickly, and the United States should think of what it can
do in this evolving structure of communication to minimize the
United States being a target.
Senator Carper. Good. Thank you all.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper.
By the way, I was handed a note, our vote that was
scheduled at 10:30 has been moved to 2, so we will not have any
interruptions. Senator Sasse.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SASSE
Senator Sasse. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
all of you for being here.
After reading your testimony, my main line of questioning
was going to be about how you create strategic brand damage to
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to future
jihadi groups. But before we go there, I would like to have a
detour and follow, Dr. Gartenstein-Ross, your comments about
the interplay between traditional and social media, and
obviously the media cycles of people wanting to make news today
on social media to be picked up by producers on traditional
media. Could you unpack a little bit more your Derna comments,
please?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Yes, absolutely. Derna was a case in
which you did not have much social media penetration, so right
away, when you look at what is being broadcast out of Derna,
ISIS essentially started out with information dominance. That
is because reporters really could not get into Derna to fact
check. We actually have had two different sets of reporters who
ventured into Derna late last year. Both of these sets of
reporters, Tunisians and Libyans, have gotten executed within
the past couple of weeks. Not a good place to do fact checking.
And so when they have this information about what is
happening and they are pushing it out, and others are not
pushing out on social media, the way the news cycle works now,
here is information, and there is no competing information, and
maybe you will check with a few sources. But media moves much
quicker than it did. It has much less fact checking, and so it
is easier to get an invented fact out there and then to have it
widely repeated, which I think is exactly what happened in
Derna.
Senator Sasse. Dr. Bergen, this is not to put you on the
spot because I do not know how CNN covered the issue, but could
you walk us through how decisions in a circumstance like that
are made?
Mr. Bergen. Yes, I am not familiar enough with CNN's
reporting on that. As a general matter, CNN has a very careful
fact-checking process.
Senator Sasse. But you do not know if you all reported that
ISIS had taken Derna?
Mr. Bergen. I am not here to comment on CNN's reporting on
that.
Senator Sasse. OK. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross, one of the things
that is unique about ISIL versus al-Qaeda in Iraq previously is
obviously a more decentralized network structure as opposed to
a more top-down structure. Obviously, that creates unique
opportunities for them to capture entrepreneurial activity on
social media. At the same time, it seems harder for them to
control their brand. So they have a deficit in terms of trying
to have a territorial claim with the caliphate, but to the
degree that they have a more decentralized structure and can
exploit social media over time, do you think that means that
their brand becomes defuse? Or if they can suffer losses
because they will eventually suffer territorial losses, what
does that do to their larger social media strategy?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. So I would conceptualize them as
having both a centralized and also decentralized structure. On
the one hand, they have a bureaucratic system. They have
systems of governance. They have official accounts. Then you
have the vast number of people who are fighters who are
tweeting from the battlefield, and they have put directives in
place--it is actually very clear--to try to rein some of these
guys in. But at the end of the day, when you have a large
number of people who are on Twitter, it is difficult to fully
control your message. That is something that the U.S. military
also grapples with as well, and just like ISIS, we have
directives, although we have an easier job of reining our guys
in, obviously.
With respect to ISIS' brand, I think that it has a
trajectory of its brand overall that is being affected by
people at multiple layers, those who are at the center of its
communications apparatus and those who are on the fringes. And
so the answer is yes, it absolutely has more difficulty
controlling its brand, and especially because--I referenced
before the statement by al-Jahbadhi, the supporter of ISIS who
is trying to say, OK, do not broadcast the enemy's atrocities,
do not broadcast how hard life is in cities that are under
siege; only broadcast strength. If you look at my argument that
theirs is a winner's message, that is a very hard message to
enforce when that is not actually what is going on, because you
do not just have ISIS fighters; you also have people who are
living in these cities, and you can see that some resistance
movements have sprung up. They are going to have a hard time
keeping their message the same. Just like we have trouble
controlling them on social media, they are increasingly--as
they are entrenched as a governing force and a failing
governing force, they are having the same trouble. Suddenly,
they are the counterinsurgents, and they are experiencing
something like insurgent activity. Now, I do not want to
overstate the dissension within the ranks, but you clearly have
it. And they have had this for a while. It is just that it is
increasing now.
Senator Sasse. Mr. Shaikh, I would be interested in your
thoughts on that question.
Mr. Shaikh. Thank you, sir. Yes, of course, I agree very
much, with what Daveed was saying. I think we need to continue
to amplify the mistakes they make, the weakness in the ranks,
the dissension in the ranks, especially when it comes to
educating potential recruits, individuals, teenagers who may
want to travel. In the beginning, when a lot of this began,
there was a concept called ``five-star jihad'' where they were
putting out--they had taken over some guy's villa, and they
were swimming in a nice pool in the back, and they were saying,
``Hey, come on down.'' And for a while I actually took a lot of
screen grabs of food pictures that they had posted. We had
Swedish Gummi Bears from Swedish jihadis. We had guys posting
kebabs, ``Yes, we got that,'' or a mango milk shake and saying,
``How could I not take a picture of that?'' Or, the epitome of
an identity crisis where you have a Pakistani ethnicity U.K.
resident living in Syria, referring to pizza as ``home-cooked
food.''
So I think to educate people just by using their own
mistakes, their own failings, this is another way in which we
can achieve our objective.
Senator Sasse. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Sasse.
Senator Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS
Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
the panelists for your testimony today.
I wanted to explore a little bit more in depth about some
of the countermessaging that we need to do, particularly with
the broader Muslim community here in the United States. I think
it is important to remember when we are talking about folks who
are engaged in these activities with extremism, it is just a
tiny sliver of the Muslim community here in the United States.
I have a very large Middle Eastern population in Michigan, one
of the largest Middle Eastern populations outside the Middle
East, as you know, in my community. And it certainly is an
opportunity for us to harness that community, which is strongly
opposed to ISIS and other extremist groups. In fact, there are
regular protests against the activities of ISIS as a perversion
of Islam and not reflective of the broader Muslim community.
Folks want to be engaged in that countermessaging, which I
think ultimately is the way you try to de-legitimize the
ideology associated with it.
I know the White House has made this type of outreach a
priority with their ``Empowering Local Partners to Prevent
Violent Extremism'' efforts. It was also part of the summit on
Countering Violent Extremism this year at the White House
Summit. But a 2013 RAND Corporation report highlights
challenges to countering violent extremism online, including
alienation and lack of trust in the United States approach to
counterterrorism among American Muslims as well as the
oversecuritized approach to government engagement with the
Muslim community.
I have heard from some of my constituents who are concerned
about pushing back sometimes against this violent extremism and
these lies online because they think it might draw some undue
attention to them personally as they engage, even though these
are anti-messaging that they are doing. Some of them have also
experienced racial profiling, other activities at airports
because of their Muslim heritage, and so have certainly some
level of distrust when it comes to the law enforcement
activities, and yet this is an incredible opportunity for us to
use patriotic Americans, Muslim Americans, who live here in our
country.
If the panel could address a little bit, how can we engage
this community? What would you suggest? What are the messages
that will be important? Perhaps, Mr. Shaikh, you have dealt
with this, and we can start with you. But others who would like
to weigh in, I would certainly like to have other comments as
well.
Mr. Shaikh. Thank you very much. I am actually doing my
Ph.D. in psychology, and I am looking at community interveners
and what works in intervention programs. And there is this, I
call them, ``professional obstructionists,'' community
organizations who--I mean, they are hyper-defensive. They
really mistrust the government, and have portrayed any kind of
even meaningful, sincere interactions between law enforcement
and the community as just an excuse to intelligence-gather. So
given that level of mistrust how can we do it? And I think
there is a way to do it.
First and foremost, the Muslim community understands--as
you have observed, the Muslim community does not want anything
to do with ISIS, and really, if you look at the tens of
millions of Muslims that are living in Europe and North America
in total, we have a maximum amount of 5,000 Western foreign
fighters. That is a very small number of people.
So I think first and foremost, the Muslim community needs
to understand that it affects us first and foremost, I think. I
mean, ISIS kills more Muslims than non-Muslims. And when they
do what they do, it is the Muslim community that feels the
retaliation, the discrimination, the marginalization. So it is
a responsibility I think it is on behalf of the religion. I
mean, we have a duty to speak up and give the correct
understanding of the religion, lead by example.
And there is a way to still work with law enforcement, but
at the same time keep them at arm's length, and that is, to use
programming that is developed in-house, in the communities,
where the law enforcement agencies understand what the
communities are using so that they can back up and say, yes, we
understand that they have this, identifying vulnerable persons
guide, let us say, and we understand that they have a mechanism
in place where they can give rehabilitative programming without
it necessarily being a top-down approach.
And, just last, I mean, of course, people have their views,
free speech, of course, but we have to be very careful not to
perpetuate the ISIS ideology, which is Islam is to blame,
because if we do that and we say that, yes, Muslims are
terrorists and Islam is all about terrorism, that is exactly
what ISIS says. In fact, I have seen that you have people who
are very anti-Muslim, they even use the exact same verses of
the Quran that ISIS uses. And if you did not see the name, you
would swear that it was an ISIS account doing the promoting.
So I think there are multiple layers to this, and it can be
done, but it needs solid direction, I think, and community
leadership.
Senator Peters. And direction from within the community.
Mr. Shaikh. Within the community, yes.
Senator Peters. It is an organic process.
Mr. Shaikh. Yes.
Senator Peters. But also in that process, law enforcement
here in the United States understands to let the community lead
and back it up and to back off, if I am rephrasing what you
said accurately.
Mr. Shaikh. Yes, just a closing point on this. Local police
I think are best suited for this because the local police are
the ones who will respond if somebody throws a rock through the
mosque or if there is a crime that happens in the community.
They are not seen as investigating terrorism like the FBI might
be. The FBI will have big problems in dealing with them at that
level.
So there is a way to develop those relationships, and it
needs to be done.
Senator Peters. Thank you.
Does anybody else want to add to that?
Mr. Bergen. Just to give a couple of specific examples
about some of the things Mubin is talking about. We cannot take
down all bad speech, even though that is desirable, but we can
also help reinforce better speech. So two examples:
Rabia Chaudry is a Maryland-based Muslim American lawyer
who goes around the country training Muslim American leaders
and imams, many of whom do not really understand how the
Internet works, about how to use it themselves, Google rankings
and these kinds of things. So that is one very concrete thing.
It is very hard to measure countering violent extremism. The
success is where nothing happens. But this I think is an
example of something that is concrete and working.
Another is a woman called Nadia Oweidat, who is a D.Phil.
from Oxford, who is aggregating all satirical content about
ISIS in Arabic online, because satire is a very powerful weapon
against this kind of group.
And, finally, for the U.S. Government, the U.S. Government
cannot engage in any kind of theological debate for all sorts
of obvious reasons, but the message that U.S. Government
officials should constantly say is, ``This group positions
itself as the defender of Islam, but its victims are
overwhelmingly Muslim.'' It is a factually correct statement
that requires no special knowledge of Islam, and I think it is
a powerfully undercutting message for what this group is trying
to say about themselves to the Muslim world.
Senator Peters. Thank you. I am out of time.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Peters. Senator
Booker.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BOOKER
Senator Booker. I want to jump right in. I have to say, in
preparing for this hearing, I was surprised if not stunned at
how we are approaching our messaging and our countermessaging,
frankly. I find that there are about 2.9 million Muslims living
in the United States, and half of them are under 30. We are
talking about a very young population.
Now, I agree with Senator Peters, the overwhelming 99-
point-whatever percent are good young people that reflect the
rest of the population. But we are dealing with a population of
young people that are online and engaged in an extraordinary
manner. And in the Middle East, you have an even greater
percentage of people that are under 30 years old, and the new
form of communication is social media. Ninety percent of
Americans aged 18 to 29 use social media. Nine in 10 18- to 29-
year-olds watch online video, and almost half of them, that is
where they get their news.
And I know a little bit about social media, I have to say,
and when I started going around to the sites that we have in
our various agencies--DHS, National Counterterrorism Center,
State Department--I was shocked at our countermessaging.
I want to pass this iPad around to my colleagues, and
support two things to take note of. There are two tabs at the
top, and you can toggle between them. One is a YouTube video,
and there are hundreds of hours going up every minute on
YouTube. The videos that ISIS is producing are incredibly
slick, fancy, and attractive. Here on this video are terrorists
giving out things to kids and sharing and the like.\1\
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\1\ The information submitted by Senator Booker appears in the
Appendix on page 101.
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If you toggle back over, here is the ``Think Again Turn
Away'' website by the Department of State. If you know anything
about social media, one of the things you should look at is the
engagement of people on our social media feeds, the engagement
here is laughable--three retweets, two retweets.
Now, if you think about this, last year, or fiscal year
(FY) 2013 we spent $196 million on Voice of America. This is
old-school media. It is radio and the like. And, Mr.
Gartenstein-Ross, maybe you know, how much money are we
investing and appropriating for social media countermessaging?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. They do not specifically budget out
social media separately, but it is clear that it is a small
percentage of what is being done. And, further, as you point
out, a lot of times what we push out via social media is very
crude.
Senator Booker. I mean ``crude'' is a generous statement.
You said a wonderful phrase. You said, ``We need to compete at
the speed of social media. Mr. Bergen, you said in your written
testimony that the one thing that unifies these folks is their
age and that they are online. And you would think that if this
is one of the threats, and we have asked counterterrorism
experts from the United States, what is their biggest concern,
it is domestic lone wolf individuals. Online in social media is
where the majority of them are getting radicalized. If we have
an inadequate response to that, it is very frustrating.
Now, Mr. Shaikh your work is incredible. I see you online
trying to push back on this. There are easy tactics--I know
them, as you said, from politics--for how to get more voice and
virality to messaging. We are not using these tactics as
government to get countermessages out there. The data that you
are presenting regarding Muslims killing Muslims, and ISIS is a
group that is killing more Muslims, shows they get their memes
to go more viral. Look at their fancy memes and our lack of
compelling contact.
And so I just want to start with Mr. Shaikh. It looks like
to me that you are trying to do countermessaging, but we have a
government that is spending millions and millions of dollars on
old-school forms of media, and as you said, Mr. Gartenstein-
Ross, very crude social media efforts. What do you imagine
could be done if we were to do an effective social media online
countermessaging effort?
Mr. Shaikh. Thank you very much. In some kind of defense to
the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, they
have a very small group of people. They are trying to contest
this space, and they are trying to do something. And I get
that. And yes, ``crude'' is a very polite statement.
Look, at the end of the day, if you want to fight back
against recruitment of 15-year-old kids, you need to work with
15-year-old kids. When I see my own kids showing examples of
what affects them and what motivates them and what resonates
with them, it tells me that this is exactly what you need to
do. Talk to the kids. They can do a really good job.
With respect to producing material, one of the comments
that I said was, I mean, really I feel that it is unacceptable,
especially given--I mean, you have Hollywood in the United
States. I mean, yes, you do not even need to go at that level.
Maybe this is something that should be done to go at that
level, I mean, to blow the production capabilities out of the
water.
But even college levels, high school kids, to be given
projects for them to do, just as part of a school project, as
part of a civic engagement process, even Muslim organizations.
I mean, maybe you have NGO's who could fund projects within the
community to come up with these sorts of things.
The government is really not well placed other than if you
were to take it to the covert level of psychological operations
and then you do have individuals who know influence activities,
who know to generate stuff which they can deploy but in a more
covert manner. So, again, multiple layers, there is a way to do
it, but----
Senator Booker. And, Mr. Bergen, I have very little time
left, but when I was mayor of Newark, we saw that the mentions
of our city were incredibly negative, and we set out on social
media to change that. We used a simple sentiment analysis to
see that engagement in social media began to change the brand
of our city. You talk a little bit in your testimony about
crowding out the negative messages, and I have seen people do
this in many different forms. There are lots of different
strategies. How do you characterize what we are doing to crowd
out the negative messages, to arm many of the people within the
American Muslim community and others to compete within this
space to begin to push other messages? How would you describe
our attempts? And is there a better way to centralize and
coordinate across numerous agencies a better push from the
United States?
Mr. Bergen. ``Nascent'' is how I would characterize what we
are doing. NCTC has been doing some of this work and trying to
work with some of the tech companies and the Muslim American
Community. But, there is a kiss of death problem with the U.S.
Government being involved. So it has to be hands-off. And it is
beginning. It is not all doom and gloom. There are people out
there doing the kind of work that is necessary.
Senator Booker. OK. Chairman, thank you very much.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Booker.
There is an obvious piece of legislation that we need to
start working on. I have already directed the staff. But let us
face it. We invented the Internet. We invented these social
network sites. We have Hollywood. We have the capabilities, as
Mr. Shaikh was saying, to blow these guys out of the water from
the standpoint of communications. So we need to work on that,
and we need to work on that quickly. So I hope you will engage
in that effort. Senator Ayotte.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AYOTTE
Senator Ayotte. I want to thank the Chairman, and I
appreciate Senator Booker's comments as well. It strikes me,
though, in hearing your answers, it makes sense that this is
not going to just be a government function, because government
is not particularly good at some of these updated uses of
technology. So I think engaging the private sector, engaging
NGO's and others to help us do that, and we can provide the
support for that, but I think that would be great to establish
those partnerships to be able to make that happen.
I was very interested in reading, in your testimony
especially, Mr. Bergen, about women, that there seems to be an
attraction for young women that they are recruiting with more
than, I think, a historical basis to ISIS. Can you talk to me
about that? And it seems to me that as I look at some of these
uses on social media, they almost romanticize what is happening
over in Iraq and Syria and what these women who might want to
either join or, I guess, connect themselves in the United
States or in some other Western country with ISIS. So it
strikes me that the more we can get the truth out also, whether
it is embedding reporters or what are really the conditions--I
know it is very dangerous so that is challenging. But however
we can get the truth out about what is really happening on the
ground in the caliphate, that this is not some kind of romantic
endeavor that you are probably traveling to or asking to engage
in. So I wanted to get thoughts on how we address this with
women.
Mr. Bergen. Well, that is right, Senator. So 20 percent of
the sample we looked at from the United States are women and
about 10 percent overall from the West are women, which is
unprecedented. And why are they going there? They have been
told it is a perfect society. They may want to meet their
perfect marriage partner. All of these are very young. The
average age is 19. But how do we contest that? I think you are
exactly right. People like Mubin Shaikh and, disillusioned
former militants who can actually speak the truth about what is
happening and amplifying their voices, that is by far the most
effective thing we can do. So it is finding those people, and
there are already people coming back who--we saw this in the
Minnesota case, Senator Johnson, when people started saying,
well, wait a minute, Shabaab is not the Promised Land.
But it took 2 or 3 years before the message--and I am sure
J.M. Berger can amplify on this. But we are at the point where
there are enough bad stories coming out that I think that is a
reasonable kind of idea, which is amplifying the voices of
disillusioned militants.
Mr. Berger. Yes, I think when we are looking at trying to
undermine ISIS' messaging, one problem we have is that the
information we have that does undermine their projection of
strength, of this utopian society, is mostly eyewitness
testimony from defectors. That is not as compelling as
photographs, video, and audio. And so, one of the things that I
proposed is that inasmuch as we can deploy intelligence assets
to get pictures of what is going on in these area, intercepted
communications, things that are much more gripping and much
more compelling, instead of just one person's story, which is
easy for a radical to dismiss because radicals are already
convinced that they have the right idea anyway.
Mr. Bergen. If I could jump in, on the flip side of this,
there is a wonderful site called ``Silently Slaughtering
Raqqa,'' which is a Twitter feed of what is really going on in
Iraq. There are pictures of bread lines. They are saying, hey,
the electricity is only on for 3 hours a day. So the point is
that there is an alternative universe on social media that is
portraying what is really happening that exists and we should
understand and know about.
Senator Ayotte. Absolutely, and we should promote it and
encourage people to see what really is happening, because I
think there is sort of a romanticized view being pushed out
there that is attractive to people.
I wanted to get your thoughts, all of you, on the leader of
ISIS, Al-Baghdadi. They are using social media, using
information to put out a certain image of him that does not
line up with the truth. What is your thought on the leader? I
understand we take out a leader and another leader can follow,
but he seems to have portrayed himself in a certain way. What
thoughts do you have for us to try to undermine the leadership
to show that they are not really who they purport to be?
Mr. Berger. So I think Baghdadi is kind of an interesting
figure in this context. In some ways, he is kind of an empty
suit or a Rorschach test. He has a basic biography which is
carefully calculated to support the legitimacy of naming him
caliph. We know a little bit more about him through independent
reporting, but the image that he projects is really somebody
who appears rarely, who speaks in jihadist platitudes, and as
such, he is somewhat replaceable. You can bring your
expectations to who he is and understand him in the context
that you want. He does not have the same powerful personality
that somebody like Osama bin Laden did. He is replaceable. I
would assume that ISIS has a plan for his succession because
they do have to meet certain criteria to replace a caliph. It
is not like al-Qaeda where you can just give the guy who has
the most seniority the job. And he may be an important
strategic thinker in the group. I mean, there are some reasons
to think that. So replacing him may undercut their ability to
operate, but it may not.
Senator Ayotte. I think we touched on this earlier, but how
important in all this context is it that we--thinking about
what ISIS is doing actually on the ground and trying to
establish this caliphate in Iraq and Syria--I serve on the
Armed Services Committee as well--that we continue to work with
our partners there to actually diminish their capacity. Because
I think I heard one of you say that the fact that they control
territory gives them a greater ability to recruit because it
shows their legitimacy. So it is almost like we have to be
addressing this on all fronts, it seems.
Mr. Bergen. I think the short answer is yes to that.
Mr. Berger. One element of this that I would just bring up,
because we have talked a lot about how their loss of territory
would undermine their recruiting, and it would. But ISIS is
also an apocalyptic millenarian group, and traditionally what
happens with groups like this is when the prophecies that they
are fulfilling turn out not to be correct, they will often
double down on violence. So ISIS could lose its territory. We
could undercut its recruiting. But we could see very disastrous
secondary effects to that.
Senator Ayotte. We have seen that with al-Qaeda as well.
Mr. Berger. We see it with Al-Shabaab, and Al-Shabaab does
not have the same platform or prophecy that ISIS has built
itself on, so yes.
Senator Ayotte. Great. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Ayotte. Senator
Portman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN
Senator Portman. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for having
the hearing. This has been fascinating, and I really appreciate
the experts coming and talking to us about this.
Let me just give you an interesting case study from Ohio,
the middle of the country. Like every other State here, we are
concerned about radicalization, and there were recently two
cases. One is Christopher Lee Cornell, as some of you know, a
20-year-old in Cincinnati, Ohio, my home town, wanted to come
here and bomb the Capitol. That happened earlier this year. He
is now under arrest.
Just last month, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud of Columbus was
indicted on Federal charges. He actually became the first
American, as I understand it, accused of training in Syria and
then returning to try to conduct a terrorist attack here in the
United States.
So one is a classic lone wolf, right? So he is on the
Internet, gets radicalized, a loner. The second is a member of
a community in central Ohio, as I understand it, the Somali
community. I know a number of members of that community. They
are very concerned about the radicalization. They are engaged
and involved in it. The leaders are working hard to have a
productive dialogue about it. Some of the things you all talked
about they are doing. And it is two very different challenges,
and we have talked more about the community one, and I would
like to hear more about that if you have thoughts, but also
about the lone wolf. And maybe this goes to more of what
Senator Booker was talking about. I looked at your appendices,
Mr. Shaikh, and unbelievable, the kinds of stuff that they are
doing. And we certainly have the capability to do more with
more resources.
So I guess my first question would be: Do you view these as
two distinct challenges, two very different strategies, and
just assessing the two strategies? And a subpart of that would
be a specific question I have always had. You have three
groups--DHS, NCTC, and FBI--all working together to try to
support these community outreach programs, understanding that,
as Mr. Shaikh said, local police are the face of it, but to get
these best practices and the expertise, frankly, our local
communities are not going to have the access to that. Are they
doing a good job coordinating? Or should there be one agency
that has more responsibility and, therefore, accountability?
And I will really open it up. I would like to hear from all of
you.
Mr. Bergen. Training overseas makes you more dangerous. We
saw in Paris that the fact that one of the perpetrators had
trained with al-Qaeda in Yemen made it a much more effective
attack. So, yes, they are very different, and lone wolves have
a natural ceiling to what they can do because they are
operating alone and they do not have an organization and they
usually do not have training. So they are two separate issues.
I am glad you mentioned, Senator Portman, Mr. Mohamud from
Cincinnati, Ohio, because he is the only returnee who has come
back to the United States who is alleged to have plotted an
attack.
Senator Portman. Columbus.
Mr. Bergen. Columbus. Pardon me, sir. Crucially, he was
trained by Nusra, which we have not really talked about today,
which is the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. So, the focus is a
lot on ISIS, but the two cases of Americans coming back to the
United States, one of whom did not plot anything here, one who
is alleged to, were both Nusra. So we need to keep that in
mind.
Senator Portman. This is particularly troubling and
interesting because it was not Al-Shabaab, even though, as I
understand it, he came from the Somali community, and you would
have thought it would have been Al-Shabaab.
Mr. Berger. I think in that particular case it was not
clear in the court documents exactly who he had trained with.
He had started with Nusra, and then he went to an unspecified
training camp and talked to unspecified clerics while he was
posting about the Islamic State.
In terms of the problems, these are two different problems.
We could see ISIS try and bridge the two to coordinate loosely
lone wolf-type activity with organized-type terrorist activity.
In the case of this returnee, this may be a dry run to see what
happens when you send somebody back.
We have seen that ISIS has had returned fighters who have
been active in Europe. We have seen at least one case of what
was described by investigators as an ISIS operational cell in
Belgium. There is not much reason to think that they will not
try this kind of thing. So, we need to sort of keep an eye on
this as it develops.
The lone wolf piece of it is easy for them. It is easy, it
is something they have proven that they are pretty good at
relative to other groups. And it is going to capture a lot of
headlines for them without a big investment. So the question is
how much they want to invest in attacks here, and I think that
is pretty unclear right now. We do not have a clear bead on
that.
Senator Portman. Mr. Shaikh, could you talk a little about
the coordination between DHS and the FBI and the NCTC?
Mr. Shaikh. Yes, there is a DHS coordinator on countering
violent extremism (CVE): David Gersten. He comes from a civil
liberties background, which I was pleasantly surprised to see
that DHS is putting that kind of resource in that area. The
Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is also looking at
how to avoid the securitization aspect of it. The
securitization aspect of it is really poisonous to the CVE
branding, I think, as communities, if they perceive especially
at the behest of what I call these obstructionist community
groups who are really giving a false narrative of what the
government is trying to do, it will continue to be a problem.
If I could just quickly make a point on the lone wolf, what
kind of lone wolves are we talking about? I call them ``ISIS
zombies.'' These are the self-activating, might have mental
health issues, really low level of competency. But then you
could have, directed attackers who, let us say, are Syria
returnees and do have a level of competency where just one
person can pull off a quite effective attack.
In Paris, of course, only two guys did what they did, so
you could easily have a cell of, six people, three two-man
teams, to go and do simultaneous attacks, and it would really
cause some great disruption. So there are, again, a number of
threats in that spectrum.
Senator Portman. Just back to the community for a second,
you were making the point that we need to do a better job of
providing best practices community by community. It would be a
local face you said was important, getting the community
engaged and involved, and, again, I said the Somali community
in central Ohio has been very involved, and I think in a
productive dialogue. Is the Federal Government where, we have
responsibility, doing an effective job of coordinating between
the three agencies I mentioned, and perhaps even some other
agencies that are more on the intelligence side? Is that
working? Or should there be more accountability that comes from
more definitive responsibility?
Mr. Shaikh. It is working. I am positive, optimistic on
that side. First and foremost is because there was no
coordinator before, and so now that there is a coordinator and
that is happening, it is a positive step. It is running into
these issues of critics saying, this is just an excuse to
intelligence-gather, but I think DHS and their particular
mechanisms that are working on CVE are trying to navigate this
space as best as possible.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Portman. We will start
another round.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Johnson. I started my opening statement with a
description of that posting with the claim that there are 71
trained fighters, 23 have accepted assignments. Again, nobody
knows whether that is bluster or whether it is real. I will ask
the question: Is that an unprecedented posting? Have we seen
similar things like that, similar threats that just simply have
not panned out? Anybody?
Mr. Bergen. I think we have multiple times, and I will give
you an example. Do you remember the blackout on the east coast?
I think it was in 2005. Some jihadi group claimed credit. So, I
mean, merely because they say something does not mean it is
true.
Chairman Johnson. What about from ISIS, though, I mean
recently? Or is that kind of unprecedented from ISIS?
Mr. Berger. No, it is pretty precedented. The volume of
material they put out is just truly extensive, and it comes in
a lot of different formats. So they have made a variety of
threats with more or less specificity over time. One of the
reasons that it was surprising about the Garland event was that
it was something that they had actually specifically talked
about, but then it turned into an attack, and that is pretty
unusual because they create so much noise that that needle in
the haystack can be very difficult to detect.
Chairman Johnson. So you really take that posting with a
great deal of skepticism?
Mr. Berger. Yes, I----
Chairman Johnson. The attempt at a winning message.
Mr. Berger. Yes. I think that, certainly they have dozens
to low hundreds of passive supporters in this country, and some
of those people may be prepared to act, but I do not think
there is anything remotely as organized as what that post
described.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, certainly in your
testimony, both written and oral, you were talking about the
rise of the brand of ISIS. But they are also very vulnerable to
a reversal of that. I certainly hope that is true. I also
understand strategically they have made a lot of enemies, and
they are being attacked on a number of different fronts.
The stated goal of this administration of America right now
is to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIS. I have asked the
administration officials in the past, What does defeat look
like? Define it. I would like to have you gentlemen take a
crack at what does defeat look like to you and how achievable
is that. I will start with you, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I think there is actually a very
clear thing that defeat means in this context, which is not
true of other jihadist groups. They have staked their
legitimacy to the caliphate's continuing viability, and if the
caliphate is no longer viable, then they can lose legitimacy
pretty quickly. So I think that if you are able to make the
caliphate no longer a viable entity and no longer perceived as
a viable entity, then at that point they have in effect lost.
Now, their narrative will not be completely dead. If you
understand the nuances of their narrative and the end times
argument, they have certain outs. For example, they believe
that at some point there will be a grand battle and they
actually will be crushed. But what essentially it means is that
you make this already marginal movement much more marginal.
Let me actually add one final thing, because this ties to
the way we are conceptualizing community and lone wolves.
Sometimes we talk about what can the community do to
delegitimize the message. The way I would think of it is: What
can the community do to continue to delegitimize the message?
Because for the United States, if we had a 5-percent approval
rating, we would think that was an awful thing. For ISIS, they
can have a 5-percent approval rating and that is a great thing
for them, because they are dealing with those who are very much
on the margins. They are not even dealing with the whole
jihadist movement. There are many within the jihadist movement
who argue against ISIS.
So the question really is not how do we change an entire
community, but how do we stop this fringe group from spurring
people to action? And that is why undermining the legitimacy of
the caliphate actually will, in my view, have a
disproportionate impact on their ability to remain viable as a
movement.
Chairman Johnson. Does anyone else have a different
definition of ``defeat''?
Mr. Berger. I think that we are best served by strategies
that encourage ISIS to fail on its own terms. Cutting it off
economically--an internal collapse or a major schism inside the
group I think would be better for us than a forcible ejection
from their territory, especially if that ejection was done
primarily through American military----
Chairman Johnson. But that is the method, the defeat, I
mean, how it looks like is the denial of that territory, the
end of the caliphate, correct?
Mr. Berger. Oh, yes, well, it is the end of their
territory, but it is not the end of the story. I mean, they
already have branches in--a robust presence in Nigeria, in
Libya.
Chairman Johnson. An important point. I am glad you pointed
that out. Again, does anybody else have a different definition
of ``defeat''?
[No response.]
So then my next question is--I am no military expert, and I
do not think we have one on the panel. You have expertise that
has been very valuable here. How far away are we from that
definition of ``defeat''?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. As you said, I do not think anyone on
this panel can say, but I can point to a few things we should
look to.
No. 1, looking to internal resistance movements is very
important. I agree with J.M. Berger that, at the end of the
day, if the defeat comes from within, that is going to be a
much more resounding defeat.
Chairman Johnson. But how possible is that?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. We already see resistance movements
in some areas. Now, the question is how--there are two things
to this. No. 1 is how robust are they. In the past we saw very
robust resistance movements to AQI, but the United States also
played a role in helping to ensure that they were not
destroyed.
The second thing I should warn is I think a lot of these
resistance movements are also people we do not like. You have,
on the one hand, probably Ba'athist resistance movements, and I
would say almost certainly you have al-Qaeda resistance
movements, which plays into the broader struggle within
jihadism.
But that being said, looking to internal dissent, looking
to, No. 2, internal squabbles--there was a question before
about Baghdadi, and while I think that Baghdadi is replaceable,
once you have a succession, especially within an organization
like this, which has a cult of personality internally, that
might cause some greater fragmentation within ISIS, which could
be a good thing in terms of the defeat of ISIS specifically.
The final thing we could look to is, given that they are a
bit overstretched militarily, you could possibly see rapid
reversals, just like when the United States engaged in its
campaigns early in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, and
also even in Libya, there were very rapid reversals of the
enemy that was trying to hold territory. It is hard to hold
territory, particularly when your population is not
particularly happy with what you are doing.
Chairman Johnson. I do have a remaining second, so I just
have to ask this question: Mr. Shaikh, talk about engagement
with communities; understanding local police better, how to
have a coordinated effort, and how do we find more Mubin
Shaikhs? How do we find more people like you that have had a
change of heart and that have your capacity and your capability
and your willingness to really appeal and try and turn people
away from this?
Mr. Shaikh. I wish we could clone me. [Laughter.]
Chairman Johnson. I think we all do as well.
Mr. Shaikh. I tried to do the right thing. I got here
because I believe I did make the right decisions. And it came
at a lot of personal cost, I will be honest, and I think a lot
of people may not be ready to do that.
I think, when we say empowerment, I think it needs to be
made clear for a lot of these individuals who are back and
really the intelligence community knows who these people are
after they have been vetted and maybe they need to have
continual monitoring, but to have them step up, go to Muslim
conferences, let them be seen on media, mainstream media, where
people hear the message. I do not want to be the only person. A
lot of times I feel frustrated. I see, I am the only guy doing
it. Everyone is talking about countermessaging. Nobody is
really doing enough of it. But there are others like me out
there. They just do not know how to come forward, and so they
will need some direction to do that.
Chairman Johnson. I think I speak for all of us when I say
God bless you for what you are doing. Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. I am Tom Carper, and I approve that
message. God bless you.
This is one for all of you, please, and I just want to say,
Mr. Shaikh, do you pronounce your name ``Mu-BEAN'' or ``MOO-
bin.''
Mr. Shaikh. It is ``Mu-BEAN.''
Senator Carper. Mubin, all right. Have you ever been called
``MOO-bin''?
Mr. Shaikh. Yes, I have. In high school it was ``MOO-bin,''
and then it became ``Bin,'' and then the joke was, ``1A`Bin,'
'' like bin Laden? '' Then it stopped being funny. [Laughter.]
Senator Carper. We have a ``Bin,'' not like bin Laden, in
our family.
Several of my colleagues have said that in order for the
United States. to have a success against al-Qaeda and against
ISIS, we must adequately define the problem and our enemy, and
they suggest that we should unequivocally announce that the
United States is at war with Islamic extremism or radical
Islam. In your opinions, is it necessary or beneficial for the
United States to define ISIS and al-Qaeda in this manner? I
will ask you, Daveed, to go first, please.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. The question really is: What is the
benefit of doing so? I am not sure that there is a benefit in
explicitly emphasizing that we are at war with radical Islam.
There is the question embedded in that: What is radical Islam?
In Libya, for example, one of the problems with one of the
warring factions in that civil war, that being the Dignity
faction, is that Khalifa Haftar, who is very high--he is their
commander in chief--defines radical Islam, defines the enemy as
including both Islamists who work in the political process and
also jihadist organizations, which makes it, if one were to,
say, support his organization, would make it a civil war that
is much bloodier and much more broadly defined than it should
be.
Second, the administration has moved away from using
religious rhetoric. It has tried to avoid terms like ``Islam''
and ``jihad'' in its own rhetoric. And I think that is a
reasonable thing to do in terms of public messaging. The area
where I sometimes disagree is that I think that if we as
analysts are not able to process the ideological dimension, we
are at a disadvantage. But in terms of public messaging, I do
not think it is advantageous for the United States to make its
enemy radical Islam, writ large.
Senator Carper. Thanks. Mubin.
Mr. Shaikh. Thank you, sir. Terrorists in Islamic Costume.
It uses the adjective Islamic in a correct way, because I
believe Islamic terrorism is an oxymoron. But because they are
appealing to the Islamic sources and not the Bhagavad Gita, I
mean, we need to see something Islam. So Terrorists in Islamic
Costume, and if I could impose the Muslim term for these
people, it is ``Khawarij,'' as I have in the--K-H-A-W-A-R-I-J.
And I have given scriptural references from the Prophet--Peace
Be Upon Him--who referred to Khawarij in the most vile terms.
They are the dogs of hell. In fact, we believe in the Islamic
tradition that these people subscribe to that the anti-Christ
himself emerges from the last remnants of the Khawarij. So
those are the two terms that I encourage using.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks. J.M.?
Mr. Berger. So I do agree with Daveed that we need to
understand the religious dimension of this as people studying
the problem. However, in terms of public dialogue and in terms
of the motivation of this, we must name the enemy kind of
motif, the thing that I think about when I think about this is
that, in 2013, I did a study of white supremacists' use of
Twitter and found that the people who were following white
supremacists on Twitter talked continually about and primarily
about mainstream conservative Republican politics. And we do
not insist that neo-Nazis be referred to as ``conservative
radicals'' or ``Republican radicals,'' and I think that there
is a double standard. It is easier to insist when it is a
minority.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks for that. Mr. Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. I totally endorse what has already been said.
As a public messaging matter for the U.S. Government, it should
be very careful about using these terms. As an analytical
question, certainly this has something to do with Islam,
difficult as that is to maybe say. But those are two different
aspects of the problem.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you all for those
responses.
As you know, in religion in this country--I will not speak
about other countries, but in the Protestant faith we have many
flavors, Protestants. We have Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists,
Presbyterians, and the list goes on and on and on. And when we
think of the Muslim faith, as I understand it, it is not just
one or two but many. But we oftentimes think of Shia and we
think of Sunni, but I realize it is not that simple.
But when you look at those--what is it, ISIS, al-Qaeda, if
you look at the folks that are the jihadists and they are bent
on--what is it, caliphate or just domination, destruction? I do
not notice as much Shia involvement. Is that my imagination or
not? Could you speak to that for me, one of you or both of you?
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. Certainly with respect to ISIS and
al-Qaeda, you do not have Shia involvement. Both of them are
Sunni movements. ISIS in particular is vehemently anti-Shia.
al-Qaeda is quite anti-Shia, although has tried to constrain
that a bit.
When you think of Shia movements, Hezbollah is the primary
one that is a non-state actor with state sponsorship. You also
have Shia movements who are kind of part of our coalition in
Iraq, these non-state Shia militias, but they pose their own
set of problems. A lot of them are quite radical. If you look
at what they are actually doing, they are brutalizing the Sunni
population there, and that could make this a longer-term
problem.
So, yes, in terms of ISIS, al-Qaeda, absolutely. But I
certainly would not factor out the importance of some of these
Shia militant non-state groups. And one person who has done
very good work on this is Phillip Smyth at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, releasing a major monograph on
this earlier this year, which I think is really essential
reading for understanding that particular aspect of this
conflict.
Senator Carper. All right. Thanks.
Last question, if I could. Mr. Berger, could you share with
us the story of Omar Shafik Hammami, please, and your
experiences with him, please?
Mr. Berger. So Omar Hammami was an Alabama native. He was
born in a family to a Syrian father and an Irish Catholic
mother, and he became radicalized and joined Al-Shabaab. And
where I came into the story was after he joined Al-Shabaab, he
got there and discovered that things were not to his liking. So
foreign fighters were not being treated well. Al-Shabaab had a
nasty habit of assassinating al-Qaeda emissaries who had been
sent to try and rein the group in. There was corruption and
inconsistencies ideologically, and so he took to the Internet
and put out a video saying, ``Look, I have all these problems
with Al-Shabaab, and I expressed my opinions, and now they are
trying to kill me, and I need help.'' And this plea was
directed to al-Qaeda central. He imagined that somebody from
al-Qaeda would come riding in to save him, which did not
happen.
In many ways, he was kind of a vanguard of the emergence of
this movement on social media, and not the only one by any
stretch, but prior to about 2012, 2013, jihadists' use of
social media was much lower. And because of Omar but also
because of other dissenters from the lockstep jihadi movement,
people started getting online. They started coming online to
argue with Omar. So Al-Shabaab dispatched people to come out
and say, ``This guy is a liar.'' And then people popped up to
push back on that, and it sort of escalated out from there. And
the same thing was happening in the al-Qaeda in Iraq context on
the jihadist forums.
I had an extended correspondence with Hammami on social
media, which was an unusual experience. Some of my comments
about the remote intimacy and sort of the feeling of knowing
somebody over social media are informed by that because, when
you talk to somebody briefly every day or every couple of days,
you can get a sense of them as a person, which may be
artificial and inflated in your head. But they become much more
real to you than somebody you are reading about or somebody you
correspond with via post.
Senator Carper. Very interesting. A very interesting
hearing, and I think very informative. Thank you. Thank you
all.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper. Senator
Booker.
Senator Booker. Again, I want to thank the panel so much
for being here today, and your written testimony was so strong
and enabled my staff to begin thinking about these issues and
its many layers, and I am grateful for that.
In the final minutes of this hearing, I would just like to
ask you all, if you were a Senator--and I know that is a scary
prospect. If you all were Senators or even in a high-level
executive position and were looking at this issue of
countercommunications, in light of our ``nascent'' and
``rudimentary'' before, communications what would be the ideal
effort? If you could push for 2 years--and the Chairperson said
this should make us think about legislation--what specifically
in terms of strategy and tactics would you want to see being
implemented on a broader scale by 2016, 2017? Anybody can pick
that up, and maybe we can go down the line. Daveed.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I think we often look at this problem
in a way that is very inefficient and is not getting to the
solution, and you in your previous question, Senator, spoke to
this. I referenced the U.S. Government as a legacy industry,
and I do not say that lightly. A lot of established companies
have actually seen it as beneficial to essentially create a
startup within the company, and that has been a very successful
thing for a number of companies to do. I would point to Intuit,
the tax company, as one that did a very good job of creating a
very interesting tax app where people through their cell phone
could get all tax documents. They did this, very much like a
startup would do, by creating a unit which was a startup within
a broader company.
With respect to this specific issue, social media, I would
want to see a startup within the U.S. Government, something
where you can get the best people on board, and there are a few
layers of that. One is: Are we able to work with the right
people? Yesterday, I spent the morning with a Lebanese
businessman, an owner of a media company who had these
remarkable anti-extremism ads on his computer that his company
had put together. He knows the region well, and he was looking
to shop them around. But the production value was
extraordinarily high. Are we getting the right production
value? Do we have the right people in place? Often multiple
things make it hard to have the right people in place.
So one of the things I would look at is not just starting a
startup but looking at the broader rules that prevent us as a
government from having the best people in place to tackle these
very thorny problems.
Senator Booker. I want to interrupt just because I want to
get through the whole panel, but anything that you would like
to provide in the days after this hearing of that idea you just
mentioned, I would love to pounce on, because I think you are
speaking not only a truth but you are speaking an urgent truth.
But just to move to Mubin. Mr. Shaikh.
Mr. Shaikh. Very quickly, subject matter experts to guide
and train government agencies, whether it is law enforcement,
whether it is military, psychological operations, whatever it
is, and ultimately autonomy of efforts on the ground to move at
the speed of social media. If I can quote Bruce Lee, you know,
``Be like water,'' formlessness, autonomy.
Senator Booker. And I think that is a really important
point, because somebody else mentioned that, that often you
delegitimize the organic voices when you put a U.S. Government
stamp on that. And I think it is really important to have
strategies that create an atmosphere in which those organic
voices can emerge without being delegitimized by the U.S.
Government. Mr. Berger.
Mr. Berger. So, yes, we are getting creamed on social
media, not just by ISIS but also by Russia, Iran, and Syria.
This is a difficult thing. We do not do propaganda well because
we have principles that we adhere to that these adversaries do
not, in terms of truthfulness, in terms of fairness.
What we can match them on is volume. We talk about CSEC as
an effort to counterprogram against these guys. They are
working with a handful of Twitter accounts. What would have an
impact and would get around some of the logjams of government
in terms of content would be to have hundreds or thousands of
accounts that are putting out even very innocuous messaging
just to get us into the space and holding a presence, and we
can refine the messaging as we go. I think there is risk
aversion in government that prevents us from doing things that
are experimental and daring in that space. But I think if we
are out there in the space first, then we can figure out where
to take the ship after that.
Mr. Bergen. Two ideas about what to do, which are not to do
with messaging, but have not been discussed so far. One is
there is sort of a good-news story going on with Turkey. If you
look at ISIS' English language propaganda, they are now saying,
Turkish intelligence is not your friend. So this Committee
overseas the Customs and Border Protection (CBP). We should be
giving every technical assistance possible to Turkey and
reinforcing and congratulating them for basically changing what
had been a very lackadaisical approach to being a more
proactive approach.
The other thing we should be doing as a government is to be
building a database of every foreign fighter from the West,
because we know from previous jihads that one in nine foreign
fighters returning to the West will engage in an act of
terrorism. If that continues to be the case in this jihad, we
need to know that a group of visa waiver countries, who exactly
these people are, to the best of our ability.
Senator Booker. Gentlemen, thank you very much for a really
great panel and for your work on these issues. I am grateful. I
have learned a lot. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Booker.
Again, I am very serious. We need to work on this, and I
certainly want to engage the members of the panel and other
experts you can put us in touch with in terms of how do we do
this. How do we set up a Center of Excellence? Is it inside
government? Outside of government? Do you fund it? We need to
work on this.
Senator Booker. I suspect it is both.
Chairman Johnson. I agree. But, again, it is urgent, as we
have said.
One thing I do like to do is provide the witnesses a final
bite at the apple here if there is something that you want to
get off your chest, a final statement. I would start with Mr.
Bergen.
Mr. Bergen. Looking forward, we have a chance to not have a
hearing like this 5 years from now about Afghanistan if we
change, the idea that we are going to turn off the lights of
our presence there on December 31, 2016, merely because the
Obama Administration is going to be shortly out of office is
crazy. The Afghans want us to stay, and we were attacked from
there, obviously, on 9/11. It is in our interest to stay, and I
think it is in the interest of both parties to say that we plan
to stay. We have an agreement with the Afghans until 2024, a
strategic partnership agreement. The work has already been laid
out. So I would, looking forward, this is a proactive measure
to prevent having the same kind of hearing about Afghanistan
several years from now.
Chairman Johnson. I hope we have learned that failed States
are not good for our security.
Mr. Bergen. Indeed.
Chairman Johnson. Mr. Berger.
Mr. Berger. I think that ISIS is kind of the harbinger of
radical social change ahead of us and that we need to sort of
be prepared to see what happens when people can communicate in
these daily routine ways with people of similar interests
around the world and you can travel to join somebody in a
relatively easy way. I think we are going to see social
networks and societies that are going to be sorting themselves
out into groups that are clustered around specific interests,
and, unfortunately, we are seeing, what I would hope would be
the worst example of that is the first, but I think there is
potential for a lot of interesting evolution of how we deal
with each other as human beings that is ahead.
Chairman Johnson. I fear that is the future reality. Mr.
Shaikh.
Mr. Shaikh. Thank you, sir. Very quickly on, I guess, the
Muslim side of things, just given the things that have
happened, we really need to pay attention to the
marginalization narrative. I think Muslims are your best
partners in this. I think Muslims understand that we cannot do
it without each other. It is a common enemy. They are not going
to think twice, if I am there with my family, I will be killed
just along with everyone else. So we are in this together. Let
us move together.
Chairman Johnson. Again, help us make those connections.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.
Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I agree with what J.M. Berger said,
that we are in for an era of radical social change due to the
unprecedented ability for a variety of movements to organize.
And the question for us is: Are we up for this new era? I think
we have grown content with a system in which a lot of things do
not work, where we try to address problems and it gets lost
somewhere in the bureaucracy, and there is an interagency
process, and everyone is waiting for someone else to do
something, and what we are getting in terms of outputs is so
suboptimal that, if the U.S. Government were a corporation,
people would lose their jobs.
I think the questions are: Can we move fast enough? Are
there too many bureaucratic obstacles? If so, what can we do to
smash those obstacles? And are we transparent enough both
internally, in terms of getting by within the government, and
also externally, getting by publicly and in the broader world
community?
We have talked a number of times about how the United
States has a bad brand. That is absolutely true. There is no
question about that. But I also think that, looking at the big
picture, we should not be content with this. The United States
is a great country. We should not be content with the United
States just having a bad brand and there is nothing we can do
about it. I think that is also one of those very big issues
that we should try to change, and we should make sure we can
have the right people in place who can bring the right ideas.
And right now, even having the right people in place is
something that is hard for the government to do. That should
change.
Chairman Johnson. Well, again, having come from a
manufacturing background and solved a lot of problems, there is
a process. It starts with laying out the reality, understanding
exactly what it is, then set yourself achievable goals. I think
today's hearing has certainly laid out a reality here that I
wish were not true. I wish we did not have to face it, but we
cannot keep our head buried in the sand.
So, again, I just want to thank the witnesses for your
thoughtful testimony and your thoughtful answers to questions.
Mr. Shaikh, again, thank you for doing what you are doing.
Thank you all for doing what you are doing.
This hearing record will remain open for 15 days until May
22 at 5 p.m. for the submission of statements and questions for
the record.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:34 a.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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