(read the book free online –  read the Reddit AMA)

10. After the bungled Glasgow International Airport attack, one of the terrorists was apprehended by a Scottish cabby who kicked a burning terrorist in the balls so hard he tore a tendon in his foot.

9. The Times Square Bomber, Faisal Shazhad, locked the keys to both his get-away car and his house inside the car-bomb he rigged.  The car bomb consisted of a bunch of fireworks stuck in a bucket, and a bunch of fertilizer.  Inert, non-explosive fertilizer that only served to muffle the blast.

8. While terrorist “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was hiding out in the Philippines, he kept a low profile by renting a freaking helicopter and making fly-overs of the building where the “cultural dancers” he wanted to date worked. They were impressed enough to allow him to take them on a date. He chose the local Wendy’s.

7. Terrorists in the cell caught by an FBI-NYPD sting in the Bronx were called “intellectually challenged” by their lawyer, said they were high when they were arrested, and claimed that the FBI entrapped them with fried chicken.

6. On 9/11, the terrorists who flew out of Logan – after having spent years preparing, months training, and tens of thousands of dollars on the attack – made it onto their flight with just six-minutes to spare.

5. Part of this close-call may have been due to being up late the night before.  Hotel records show the night before they carried out what they saw as a sanctified assault against the forces of Evil – they rented a porno together.

4. The aforementioned Glasgow International Airport attack was originally thwarted by another unusual hero.  The height of the airport’s doorway – the terrorists never bothered to check if it would allow clearance for the jeep they were driving, so they got stuck. Their bomb detonated anyways, lighting one of them on fire – the attack’s only serious injury (unless you count the cabby as well).

3. The terrorist in charge of the 1993 van-bombing of the World Trade Center waited until the night before the scheduled attack to find a Ryder van they could use, and someone willing to drive it beneath the Towers.  They were ultimately all tracked down after one of them returned to the rental agency to noisily insist that he should get their deposit back – three separate times.  The FBI was waiting for him the third time.

2. This 1993 World Trade Center cell was finally caught in Manila, where a policewoman – a grandmother wearing a flowered muumuu, hoop earrings, and rubber slippers – ran Abdul Murad down in the street, bound his hands with clothesline, and hailed a taxi to get him back to the station. Police were tipped off to his presence after he managed to light his apartment on fire.

1. A cell plotting a car-bombing in Southeast Asia were foiled when an issue arose with the guy they’d spent months recruiting and training to drive their car-bomb.  When he got into the vehicle the morning of the attack he explained there was a problem: he didn’t know how to drive stick.

Political Terrorism is a gyre that’s only set into motion when fear and panic cause the target to overreact with disproportionate violence, which draws sympathizers into the terrorist fold and creates justification for further attacks. If we don’t lose our shit – the terrorists lose.

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The major international media coverage created by these copycat hijackings inspired Black September, members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to take 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Their assault further delineated the divergence of symbolic and tactical terrorist attacks as the events during what become known as Black September marked a further enhancement of Symbolic Terror.

It began just before five in the morning, when eight members of Black September broke into the Israeli athletic dormitory – killing two of their targets on the way in and managing to take nine hostages alive. The dorm was quickly cordoned off by police as the terrorists issued their demands, threatening to kill an Israeli hostage every two hours their demands were left unmet.

It was during this time that the black ski-mask would become synonymous with the terrorist, as one of the members of Black September was made forever a symbol of terrorism – preening in his mask on the balcony of the Israeli dormitory in front of the rolling television cameras. Finally, after fifteen-hours of terse negotiations and the bating of much of the world’s breath, German negotiators brokered a deal that met Black September’s demand for safe passage to an Arab country.

The terrorists, as per their demands, were moved to the airfield of the nearby German airbase of Furstenfeldbruck via helicopter. As two members of Black September moved to inspect the airplane meant to carry them to Cairo, sniper bullets raced in and took down three of their targets. In the ensuing pandemonium all nine remaining athletes lost their lives and all but three of the terrorists were killed.

Again, it’s not that there was no element of Tactical Terror – the alleged goal of the attack was to secure the release of 236 Palestinian prisoners and five German terrorists. However the attack laid heavier on the balance as Symbolic Terror, as the purpose of the operation, “according to Fuad al-Shamali, one of its architects, was to capture the world’s attention by striking at a target of inestimable [symbolic] value (a country’s star athletes), in a setting calculated to provide the terrorists with unparalleled exposure and publicity (the top global sporting event).”³ Granted the word “symbolic” has been added to Shamali’s explanation, but it’s about impossible to argue that the value any star athlete brings to a country is at all tactical.

Even though the attack ended with none of the PLO’s demands being met, it “provided the first clear evidence that even terrorist attacks which fail to achieve their ostensible objectives can nonetheless still be counted successful provided that the operation is sufficiently dramatic to capture the media’s attention.”⁴ And capture it did, as the events of the Munich Olympic games were covered by over 4,000 print or radio journalists and 2,000 television reporters – resulting in an estimated 900 million people in 100 different countries being spellbound and waiting with a collectively held breath for the events to unfold on their television sets.

The potency of this event was not imbued only because the Olympics are the world’s grandest stage, but because in the early ’70s the mini-cam, the battery-powered video recorder, and the time-base corrector were invented. These portable devices first allowed reporters to broadcast live transmissions from any point on the globe. And the first of those points for many of them was Munich, from where they sent live transmissions into the homes of the world’s television viewers.

For hundreds of millions the attack at the Olympic Games was not happening thousands of miles away, on an entirely different continent. It was happening in their very own living rooms.

Somewhere around a quarter of the world’s population is estimated to have at least been aware of Black September’s Munich attack, with most of them made aware by the television blaring in their living rooms. Along with the Holocaust it is the only real event to be turned into a big-screen movie by Steven Spielberg. The PLO’s intelligence chief explained well that a landmark act of Symbolic Terror had been achieved, “world opinion was forced to take note of the Palestinian drama, and the Palestinian people imposed their presence on an international gathering that had sought to exclude them.”⁵

Following this act of Symbolic Terror came the thud of international opinion, which was “virtually unanimous of its condemnation of the terrorists’ operation.” Many thought that the PLO had “irredeemably tarnished the righteousness of their cause in the eyes of the world,” and so at first Munich was seen as “a stunning failure and a grave miscalculation, generating revulsion rather than sympathy and condemnation instead of support.”⁶ But the terrorists of the PLO weren’t too worried.

Time, as it so often is, was on their side.

Just a week after Black September hijacked the Munich Olympic Games, the PLO released a communiqué to a Beirut newspaper gloating that nothing, not “a bomb in the White House, a mine in the Vatican, the death of Mao tse-Tung, an earthquake in Paris” could’ve “echoed through the consciousness of every man in the world like the operation in Munich.” The PLO understood the potency of the Symbolic Terror, going on to write that Black September’s assault had been “from a purely propagandistic view-point, 100-percent successful” since it had been “seen from the four corners of the earth.”

And in the coming weeks the potency of Symbolic Terror was driven home even further, as thousands of formerly apathetic Palestinians rushed to join the terrorist organization. This procession of countervailing events was later paralleled following al-Qaeda’s bombing of the US Embassies in Africa. Revulsion often can’t but help to beget fame.

Eighteen-months after Black September took not even a dozen Israeli lives came Yasir Arafat and the PLO’s proudest moment. In one of the more surreal gatherings of the UN General Assembly, at least until Hugo Chavez came along, Yasir Arafat was invited as a guest speaker. He became the first guest speaker in United Nations history to show up at the General Assembly looking like a mangy hungover ferret brandishing a semi-automatic pistol. After his gesticulating address the PLO was granted special observer status, and by the end of the decade the PLO would have diplomatic relations with fourteen more countries than Israel. All of this with the death of only eleven men.

In the following years the PLO would begin a rash of tactical suicide bombings against the Israeli state that’s still ongoing – exemplifying that once a persecuted minority terrorist group gains legitimacy and followers through Symbolic Terror it will switch to Tactical Terror to attempt to start turning the wheel of Political Terrorism. Which began to turn in Palestine and is still grinding haltingly away today, as each act of violence leads to reprisals by the Israeli government that draws more Palestinians to the extremist cause. Although it continues now under different names, they all owe their heritage to the PLO.

(read the book free online – get a copy for your Kindle – read the Reddit AMA)

In one of The Dark Knight‘s pivotal scenes, Alfred descends into a strictly ordered and starkly lit Batcave as Bruce Wayne is doggedly patching himself up. After helping his employer with some stitching, Alfred realizes that Master Bruce doesn’t fully comprehend the dystopian miasma of violence that the Joker has brought upon Gotham City:

Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the the Joker as a rubric for terrorism.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

Continue reading »

The Washington Post reported in a poll in May of 2007 that African-American Muslims were three-times as likely as immigrant Muslims to have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and are only about half as likely to dislike the group.  On top of that, African-Americans are much more likely to feel like they have nothing to lose, the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and a black child is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent in prison.  In many cities the foreclosure rate for black families is three times as high as the white rate, and nationwide unemployment is about twice as high.

An almost unfathomable number of African-Americans have passed through our penal system, coming out on the other side much more racist and disposed to violence than they were when they went in.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And although although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is three-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.²³

And when the shootings begin, it won’t take much for the establishment to begin reprisals. The level of trust between the police presence in innercity America and it’s African-American inhabitants typically falls somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

Widespread arrests will be made to try and find the terrorists responsible for the violence, and when some of the men – most of them innocent – getting arrested resist and the police respond with force, the flames will be stoked further still.  Based on past precedent, the police probably won’t be the initial targets – Jewish community centers and American military installations likely will be – but once law enforcement officers begin their investigations and raids, inner-city ire will be shifted against their presence.

Especially when such incidents are recorded on camera, as Rodney King and others have already demonstrated.

Rodney King was just one man being smacked around by a few cops, and yet his arrest set inner-city Los Angeles ablaze. Imagine what will happen when dozens of such arrests are recorded and played back not only on the Evening News, but available for free download on YouTube and other internet sites. Another preview of the unrest this will stir was provided when the unarmed Oscar J. Grant III was shot in the back on New Years Day 2009, and the entire incident was recorded on a camera phone and downloaded online.

It’s not hard to imagine what the response will be when some of them inevitably result in the suspects’ deaths – an inevitable result when the police fear for their own lives because they think they’re arresting a devious and sinister terrorist who has already tasted blood.

It won’t take much.  In every major modern insurgency, only about 10% of the fighters have been hardcore ideologues who believe in whatever cause is being championed, while the other 90% of the fighting is done by locals who are simply protecting their own turf against an invasive outside power.  Utilizing martial language like “insurgency” may seem like a bit of a stretch when describing our inner-cities, but it shouldn’t:

The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to police presence in black communities as “The Occupation.”  In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically “assume the position” when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what.

And yet when you dig deeper you’ll find that the D.C. Sniper’s blueprint in and of itself wasn’t really novel, as the attacks it was modeled off go back further still – to the first time an imperial Western power attempted what was perceived as colonization of the Middle East…

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –

Iran, on the other hand, soon proved itself a master of irregular warfare. The furnace of the Revolution burnt away any element of Iranian society which might have weakened the new regime, and allowed it to sharpen Iran’s military into a formidable and deft weapon.  In 1983 the Iranian military masterminded the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks outside Beirut, one of the most devastating surprise attacks in American military history. And then throughout the 1980’s Iranian sponsored terror took lives in Jerusalem, Rome, and countless other Western cities – soon becoming classified by the United States as the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist attacks.

But what is state-sponsored terrorism really?

On a purely analytical level, it’s simply another term for irregular warfare. Whether or not an act of violence breaks the Geneva Conventions shouldn’t be the judge of whether or not it’s considered “terrorism.” Certainly not whether it’s considered an act of Political Terrorism, a phenomenon that has clearly defined boundaries.

Because terrorism, as a means, has such a broad nature you have to categorize terrorist violence within a framework before you make any sort of analysis if it’s going to mean anything at all.

The most potent form of terrorist violence to beset the West in the modern era is Political Terrorism, classically considered to be carried out by insurgent guerrillas and nationalist revolutionaries of all shades and stripes. It’s the outcome of violence used with precise timing and targeting in the right set of social circumstances. Political Terrorism follows a three-step chain-reaction that can only be catalyzed within a society laced with the proper concentration of conflicting social currents.

The first step is Symbolic Terror, dramatic violence, the more enrapturing and menacing the better. This leads to the second step, which will always occur if an act of Symbolic Terror is effective: capturing the media’s attention. With the media enraptured and disseminating the fear created by seemingly indiscriminate violence throughout society, the third and final step of provoking the establishment to commit its own acts of violence begins. The third step’s retribution marks the start of Political Terrorism.

It, in turn, both gives the terrorist group credit and marginalizes the retaliating authorities by pushing them off the moral high-ground that allows them to exercise violent means of coercion.

And it is this third step that is the most important point of the cycle of Political Terrorism. Triggering the ouroboros of vengeance is a political terrorist’s real aim – all of the violence and death would be meaningless if he can’t goad the established authority into striking back.

It is this retribution that validates his ideology and makes others aware of his cause, and which truly weakens the authority.

And in just the last year, a new term has been coined to describe what happens when the cycle of Political Terrorism is triggered within an international context of warfare that allows travel between nations and cultures, and the instantaneous transmission of events from anywhere in the world to everywhere in the world.

Before coining the term “accidental guerrilla,” David Killcullen fought as a member of the Australian military in theatres of war on multiple continents, and served as a counterterrorism adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and General David Petraeus, as well as serving as the chief counterterrorism strategist for the U.S. State Department. The term accidental guerrilla has its origins in the native resistance to the War on Terror that began after 9/11.

As Killcullen traveled to areas where there was ongoing military action against declared “terrorists,” he noticed an odd phenomenon.

Many, in fact most, of the men fighting against American forces didn’t actually ascribe to the violent jihadi ideology that led al-Qaida to perpetrate 9/11. They were just average locals who found outsiders engaged in a shooting war on their turf, and felt compelled to join in. In the words of one Afghani villager who spontaneously joined in with the Taliban in an ambush against American troops, “when the battle was right there in front of them, how could they not join in? …This was the most exciting thing that had happened in their valley in years. It would have shamed them to stand by and wait it out.”¹

As outlined in his ground-breaking book The Accidental Guerrilla, the phenomena follows a four step cycle that’s nearly identical to Political Terrorism, and that can be simply understood as Political Terrorism within a specific framework. Kilcullen describes accidental guerrillas as the result of a syndrome, and illustrates it using biological analogies and four stages:

1. infecting an area where the State has a waning influence
2. reaching a virulent potential for widespread media dissemination by carrying out acts of captivating violence
3. drawing in outside intervention to deal with this new virulent threat
4. a rejection of the heavyhanded outside intervention by the local population, which wins the infectious agents sympathizers and followers

And so accidental guerrillas are born when they become infected by the virulent influence of al-Qaida or any other radical ideology, and fight back against any outside intervention that follows. Not necessarily because they agree with the radicals, but because they feel compelled to reject what they’ve come to see as an unjust and illegitimate outside power.  At most, they make up about 10% of an insurgency at any given time.