Dr. Marc Sageman (August 15, 2006)

Dr. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, and former CIA case officer discussing jihadi networks. https://portals.jhuapl.edu/media/RethinkingSeminars/081506/Sageman.mp3

Note from Joe:

My recollection was this was at military war college, but the url is from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. File path is "RethinkingSeminars/081506/Sageman.mp3"--I infer a date of August 15, 2006.

I remember listening to this a number of times over the years. I appreciate the logic of medical inquiry to understanding the sociology of people committing terroist acts. Here in 2024 I think a lot about radicalization and the shortcuts taken by those who wish to upend the status quo and how so much of it is social in origin. The "tabouli" theory of terrorism I remember well. As was his observations about engineering mindset ignoring prior scholarship and just going for it.

- Joe Crawford, January 14, 2025

🚨 Machine-generated transcript may contain errors.

Thank you to Internet Archive for having the source file archived. The url contained the keyword "Sageman" so I found it in my email archives.

Introducer: And now it gives me great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker. Dr. Marc Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist. He is currently associated with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and with the Foreign Policy Research Institute as a senior fellow at their Center on Terrorism, counterterrorism, and the Homeland Security. Dr. Sageman was a CIA case officer in Afghanistan between 1987 and '89, where he worked closely with Afghanistan's Mujahideen. He has advised various branches of the US government, including testifying before the 9/11 Commission in July of 2003. As an international authority on the social psychology of terrorist groups, Dr. Sageman has examined the psychological profiles of 172 known terrorists to understand the specific social circumstances that lead to individuals to enter terror networks. His findings are recorded in Understanding Terror Networks, a book which published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004. Please join me in giving me, Dr. Sageman, a warm welcome. Thank you.
Marc Sageman: Thank you. Okay, it sounds good. It reminds me that I really have to send Duncan an update of my bibliography. I'm still affiliated with the student institution, but I'm familiar with many more since, and I live locally as opposed to Philadelphia. All right. And thanks for reminding me that this was a videotape because I have to clean up my act. All right, so this is the cleaned-up version. How did I get into this gig? Basically, several reasons. One is that I felt a a tank of guilt when 9/11 happened because I heard all the talking heads on TV saying all kinds of nonsense about the terrorists and saying that they were Afghans. The first thing that came to my mind was Were those my guys? It turns out they weren't. Actually, there's no Afghan in Al Qaeda. Then I was wondering, Well, who were those guys then? And why did they do this? It turns out nobody had any real answer because nobody had any data. There was no data on terrorism when I started. Most of the data was called incidents-based database. It wasn't terrorist-based database. So they knew what incident happened around the world, but nothing about the terrorists.
Marc Sageman: But if you want to understand how they became mobilized or radicalized or all the interesting interesting questions that people ask even now, you've got to study the terrorists. So why weren't they in no database about terrorists themselves? Well, people told me, "gee they're a clandestine organization, it's very hard to interview them." Okay. How about the argument? How about the guys in prison? "No, no, no. National Security matter-- can't interview them." All right. But they tell me --but it doesn't really matter because they're terrorists. They lie. So what's the point of having a database? Well, I come from medicine. Medicine is all about data. It does not matter what an authority tells you. It's about what are the facts. And so I decided to actually build a database, and with the tools now available, especially on the internet, that you can search things, you can actually build a database. So what was I interested in? I'm interested in the specific threat to the United States. I was interested in the guys who did 9/11, and all the guys affiliated with them, like the guys, for instance, in London. I wanted to build a database so it could apply the scientific method to terrorism research.
Marc Sageman: But the first thing is that, how do you start? Most people start with a definition. I I think it's pointless. It's absolutely pointless. You can argue about who's a terrorist till now, till doomsday. It's not going to amount to anything because it depends on your point of view. I'm not really interested in that. What I'm interested is the threat. I took the 19 guys who did 911 as my index sample and grew my sample according to who was operationally related to those 19 guys. After a while, after 172, I understood what they had in common. Now I grew my sample. This is based on about 400 of them, but actually I have data about 800 to a 1000 and really hasn't changed much. You have to build a database, and I think that you need to build a database that could be challenged. It has to go through the scientific process of being challenged by your colleagues. Through this competition among scientists, you actually may come to some valid conclusion. So it has to be open. I know there's a lot of classified data, now I have my clearances back and I look at the data.
Marc Sageman: It just isn't as good as the open source data. It just isn't. Why? Because nobody goes back and corrects erroneous data in the classified world. But journalists do that. They go out and it depends how the investigation unfolds. But they are actually one good source of data, and that's trial transcripts. I've collected trial transcript from all over the world. Why? Because it's, again, some narrative that's challenged. I mean, the government makes a lot of claims, and that's fine. That show business, it's politics. But you actually go down to the details, you realize that it's not as compelling as they claim to be. For instance, a Detroit case completely unraveled, and the prosecutor is now facing jail time. The Miami 7, those are clowns. Now, the Toronto case is a serious case, but you have to look at the details. Again, remove politics from science. People make a lot of claims. So trial transcripts are very good because the government's version is challenged by the defense, and you may be able to get to the truth. Phibis is actually pretty good, but you need two independent sources of information. Just treat it like any other questionable piece of data.
Marc Sageman: Academic publication, they're worthless. They're worthless because it depends on your data. But most people claim for more than they do, and then they can say, Oh, yeah, I have a background in intelligence, and therefore I'm right. No, that's not science. We already said All that in medicine. The old professors of a thousand cases, it might have been wrong a thousand times. It just depends on what the data shows. The internet, that has to be corroborated with the press accounts to independent sources, and it has to be independent sources. So after a while, I realized what I had. It was really basically a violent, born-again, Islamist social movement. Basically, those were romantic young people chasing a dream. You got to understand it from the enemy's point of view. It's so easy to either infantilize the enemy, try to vilify the enemy. That gets you nowhere. You got to understand the enemy in order to defeat that enemy. And once you understand the romantic young people trying to build a better world, that gives you some idea on how to really deal with them. Like a lot of young people, they're in a hurry. Building a better world, they're going to take shortcuts.
Marc Sageman: One shortcut they take is violence. It's the same idea from the anarchist of the 19th century to the anticolonist, to the leftist of the '70s, Now we have a religious phase, but we may well have an environmental phase after this. It's basically the same dynamic. These guys think that in In a sea of injustice and unfairness, the best way to deal with this crisis of value is to build this utopia. Their version of the utopia is the community that supposedly exists around the time of the Prophet, the Salaf. So Salaf is trying to rebuild this community because they think that it's the only time in world history that you had a community that was fair and just. Look, it's the same thing as the They wanted to build a communist utopia, the anarchist, the state. It's the same thing. Why did it only go back to the 19th century? Because that's really the start of modern terrorism. Modern terrorism starts with the invention of dynamite, because dynamite made possible for a few people to terrorize so many. We are still in that era. We have not crossed yet to the next phase, which is weapons of mass destruction, thankfully, but that's maybe on the horizon.
Marc Sageman: Okay, so these guys, basically, four phases. One, they tried to change the world peacefully. They were repressed by the Nasser regime. This is, by the way, an Egyptian story. Then they decided to overthrow the government violently. That didn't really work out. Many of these guys went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet. They met each other, developed this global vision. Then at some point, they're very honest, and they realized that they had failed. They wanted to understand why they failed. A very small minority, very minute, minute minority, fraction, argued that the reason that they failed to overthrow their own government was that Big Brother, the far enemy, was propping up their own government. And so they were arguing that, first of all, you have to expel the far enemy from the Middle East and then take care of business, overthrow your own government. That's when they strange strategy. And so the guys that I'm looking at, now you want the definition, the guys who use violence against the far enemy, namely the US, non-Muslim government or population, to establish a Salafi States. Okay, so now that you know what I'm talking about, we can then trace back the evolution of this movement that's threatening the United States.
Marc Sageman: Much of my remarks are going to be based on the golden age of Al Qaeda. There were three process of self-selection that led to the creation of Al Qaeda. At first, a few people who went to Afghanistan and could not go home because they'd be arrested, decided to stick around and to create this organization, Al Qaeda. But that Al Qaeda is very different from the Al Qaeda that hit us in 911. That that did not go after the far enemy yet. But it's a press of self-selection that the most militants stuck around. Then when they were kicked out of Pakistan in '91, '92, the most militant went to Khartoum. And so the most militant of the most militant of the... It was in Khartoum that they decided to go after the far enemy. That was really the major discussion after Friday afternoon prayer. When they finally got kicked out of Khartoum from the Sudan, about 150 of them went back to Afghanistan with Bin Laden, and within two months of his return to Afghanistan, he issued his fatwa declaring war in the United United States. So there were only about 150 of them. There's a very small part of this movement.
Marc Sageman: The largest part of the movement was the Gamma Islamia, who is our Ahri, claimed two weeks ago joined Al Qaeda, but that was nonsense, was absolutely refuted by the leadership of Gamma Islamia, who had given up on violence. So you realize these are the guys who can go after us. After the return to Afghanistan between '96 and 2001, that's the golden age of Al Qaeda. Because of his control of resources, Bin Laden was able to create training camp, provide shelter for terrorists and their family, found terrorist organization, have a planning coordinating committee, and basically taking all those national terrorist organization and focusing them on the far enemy us. And that led basically to 9/11. Okay, now that I have my data, I can really test all the theories of terrorism. One is that it comes from poverty, and you can realize in my sample of about 400, most of them are middle class. And indeed, most political parties, most terrorist organization, a solidly middle class organization. They do it on behalf of their poor grandchildren, but they're not poor themselves. If you want poverty, it's vicarious poverty. They're not before. This is a brainwashing as a young person theory.
Marc Sageman: It turns out when I look at their background, most of them are secular. This is a madrasa theory of terrorism. You all heard, they're brainwashed in madrasas, and they go out, and they're like robots, and they blow themselves up. Only 13% of madrasa-educated, and it's specific to Southeast Asia, to the Jama Islamia. That's because Sunga and Barci are the two headmasters of the two Islamic boarding schools, the madrasas, they recruited their best students to form the infrastructure infrastructure of the Jamia Islamia, Jamia Islamia, which is the Al-Qaeda equivalent of Al-Qaeda in Indonesia and Malaysia. It's not Madrasas. Naifty teenagers. This is a distribution at the age at which they join Al Qaeda or a terrorist organization. You can see, those are not naive teenagers, they're 26. Okay, this This is the ignorance theory. They brainwash, they're ignorant, and so on. It turns out, if you look at it, the first column, people who have some high school education, those are high school graduates, the third are college The people who went to college, the fourth column, people who graduated, finished college, people with master's degree doctorate. You see here, 62% went to university. They come from a part of the world where less 10% go to university.
Marc Sageman: Actually, their rate of going to university is higher than the average in the United States. So it's not... They don't do that out of ignorance. People say, Okay, well, they study religion. Wrong. You have to eliminate the first column because those are people who just went to high school or vocational school. We're dealing with the people who went to university here. And you realize that the majority are engineers. I'm sure that in this room, most of you are engineers. This is a problem of engineers. It always was. If you look back at the is they're mostly engineers and physicians. That's because they were in Zurich, it's a Faculty of Medicine and Engineering. Here, it's the same thing. Now, it's a puzzle. Why would the engineer become terrorist? Well, I'll tell you, that's because engineers are arrogant. They're so arrogant, they think they can read. They think they can read the Quran without any help. Now, had they had some religious education, they might have been immunized against a fairly virulent, violent reading of the Quran. But since they weren't, they did not know much about religion. When they turned to religion at the age of 25, because I showed you, they don't have much of a religious education, they fall prey to a very unusual reading of the Quran.
Marc Sageman: It's typical of engineers. It you can erase the board, you go back to principle. That's exactly what Salafi Islam tells you to do. Forget about 14th centuries of interpretation. Go back to the principles of the Quran and Zaha Hadith, and that's the only thing that counts. Anything that comes out after 662 AD doesn't count. That's basically the tenet of Salafi Islam. So if you want to be proactive, you grab all the engineers against the wall, and I'll let your imagination run wild on that one. After all, this is videotaped, right? Now, is it lack of opportunity? Well, it turns out that the majority have some profession. And unfortunately for them, they're underemployed. It's not the lack of talent, but they're really underemployed, and I'll get to that a little bit later. Okay, this is my favorite one. This is the sexual frustration or the 72 virgin version of terrorism. And the argument runs as follows: that those young men are so sexually frustrated that they literally go crazy and blow themselves up and people around them. I'm not making it up. It's in all your newspapers. It's like, Oh, Muhammad is getting close to 72 virgins about to pull.
Marc Sageman: I mean, that's the way the account is written. Okay, I'm a psychiatrist, as Duncan told you. So let me ask you a question. Would you folks here die for sex? Now, this is typical. You see, women laugh, and these women over there, mercifully, laughed. The guys are thinking about it. Women, I think, know that there is no sex to die for. Guys are still hoping. But here, I'm an empiricist, so I can show you how many people were married, and three-fourths were married. But yeah, I know. People, some of the older folks in the audience would tell me, Yeah, you can be married, but you know, sex? Okay. I'm an empiricist. This is people who have children. Look, this is very strong empirical evidence that something was going on nine months before that child was born. To me, it's compelling evidence. As you can see, two-thirds have kids, and they have lots of kids. What my data shows is really the opposite of the conventional wisdom. It turns out that, let's imagine this standard scene, spouse has sex tonight, and usually, it's a husband say, Honey, let me put on my suicide belt and go out and blow myself up instead.
Marc Sageman: Perhaps it's because of too much sex. The whole point here is that this is nonsense, and you can actually refute this so easy easily, even on the internet, people tell you whether the guys are married or not, or whether they have kids. This is simple, give away information, but nobody wants to test it. It's easy to test. It's such a nonsense thing, and people really make such a big deal about sex. Let me tell you a secret. It's not about sex, and let's move on. Okay, are those guys just criminals? Here, I looked at people who had any prison background, and it turns out that a very small percentage did, but many of them are for political activism as opposed to criminals. In terms of criminal background, most of them no crime. If you think about the 19 guys who did 9/11, none of those guys had any criminal background in any country. There's some exception, the French, namely, and some Jemma Islamia, and I'll talk more why the French. But basically, even the crime that the French committed, it was really petty crime. It was white-collar crime. You can't think, Okay, those guys do that because they're sociopaths, they're psychopaths.
Marc Sageman: No. You guys in the military ought to know better. You get rid of those guys really early on in boot camp. Why? Because those guys don't play ball with anybody else. If you're a clandestine organization, they're the first guys to be eliminated. The best thing you can say is that those least likely to do harm individually are most able to do so collectively. And I'll try to convince you of that. Okay, now, are they just crazy? And there's very little evidence of mental illness. About four of my sample of 400 at any hint of psychosis, of thought disorder, that's about 1%. The worldwide base rate is about 3%. So now you get the idea that perhaps those These guys are not only the best and the brightest of the community, but they're also the sanest. There's very little evidence of any personality disorder. People say, Oh, look at that, Bin Laden is a narcissist, or those guys who blow themselves up a narcissist? No. It would be the opposite of a narcissist. A narcissist is having other people doing the sacrifice for you. Those guys are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause or their comrade.
Marc Sageman: There's no biological hatred. There's very little trauma in their childhood. Usually good kids, overprotected kids, if anything. If you remember the picture of Mohamed Atta, at the age of 10, sitting on the knees of his mother they're both looking at each other lovingly. That's exactly what a terrorist looks like at the age of 10. If you want to be proactive, along with the engineers along the wall, grab this little 10-year-old who lovingly look at their mother and you do your stuff. All right. So far, it's been pretty fun for me to poke fun at conventional wisdom. But what accounts for this? In the The first thing that surprised me in my data, when I looked at situational variables, namely where they join a terrorist organization, it turned out that at the time they joined a terrorist organization, about two-thirds of them were expatriates. And if you add the second generation in the diaspora community, you get about 84 %. This is a diaspora phenomenon, and terrorism is very much a diaspora phenomenon. It's been there ever since the anarchists of the 19th century. The anarchists basically got together in Zurich about a few years before they went back to Moscow and started bombing the hell of the tsarist regime.
Marc Sageman: You can see many of the other terrorist organizations, being away from home is an element. Okay. Up to now, I found an interesting finding. It's diaspora phenomena, but I still don't understand why they do this. Those guys had nothing in common. One morning, I woke up and I saw the light. Basically, they had something in common. What they had in common was that they were all terrorists. I want this to sink in because believe me, this is a tremendous, tremendous insight on my part. I know you guys look at me, this guy is nuts. But it depends what you mean by terrorist. The terrorist is a guy who's got some link to a terrorist organization. I realized that instead of really analyzing what was unique about terrorism, I was looking at their background. What was unique about them was a link to an organization. What you needed to do was to analyze the links and not the personal characteristic of the people. So I realized I was barking up the wrong tree, and I had to redo everything and say, who knew whom when? And the first question that should come to your mind is, what's the base rate of this phenomenon?
Marc Sageman: Did those guys know each other prior to becoming terrorists or not? Or were they those disconnected individual? It turns out that two-thirds, 68 %, knew each other prior to joining a terrorist organization, and another 10% were family members, friendship and kinship. The way they joined for friendship was two ways. One is that they were basically a bunch of guys who got together for some other reason, either a soccer team, cricket, or a student club at universities, and collectively became radicalized and collectively decided to join terrorist organization. The Hamburg group, all eight of them went to Afghanistan in the hope of being selected to join Al Qaeda. They went in two waves. The first wave became the bomb, the pilot, the second wave, were the support group, the Montreal cell, same thing, four guys together, the La Cajouana, and so on. You can see that they all collectively decides, collective decision. Or else, it's a diaspora phenomenon. So let's say that together from the old country, some people emigrate at the age of 10. If you're 18 and you emigrate, what are you going to do? You're going to look up your old body from the old country First.
Marc Sageman: If that guy is in a terrorist organization, I bet you anything that you'll join. It's that simple. Kinship, you have father's, brother's, first cousin. I don't mean distant relative, I mean close relative. And then And because of the diaspora community, they marry each other's sisters, and so a family reunion become a cell meeting, basically. Southeast Asia is a little bit different. As I said, Sungar and Basir recruited the best students to form the backbone of the Jamma Islamia. So how do we put it together? Basically, you have two major traject. That's a Lamentine trajectory. Those are the best and the brightest who actually are from the Middle East, good families, and they send Europe and the United States, because that's where the best schools are. And when they go there, they have no inkling or intention of becoming a terrorist. They become radicalized abroad. They become radicalized in the US, they become radicalize in Europe. They're not usually radicalize in their home country. How do they get radicalized? Because they become homesick. So at first, they adopt the Western lifestyle, so they go clubbing and booze and that's not really helping. So they look for other Muslims.
Marc Sageman: Where did those guys hang out? They hang out in mosques. And so they drift to the mosque for companionship, not religion. There they meet, they go for dinner, they become friends, they move in together. This is my halal theory of terrorism. It's very similar to the kosher theory of Judaism. A very valid question is, how did Jews maintain their identity through 20 centuries of diaspora. Most people can blend in. Jews have not. Some people say it's because they're kosher. Well, what do you mean by that? Well, sometimes it's difficult to be kosher, so people get together. One person cooks for the whole group, and they get together. But it's not in the eating. It's in the talking while you eat. Jews are notorious about talking while they eat. It's like Italians, same thing. That's how the Mafia is created. It's really over dinner. While you talk, you talk about what's common to you, you talk about your tradition, and you maintain those traditions, and you They transmit it to the next generation. It's because... That's exactly what happens here. The couscous eaters, hang around couscous eaters, tabulie eaters, tabulie eaters, satay eaters, satay eaters, the chicken ticca eaters, chicken ticca eaters.
Marc Sageman: There's very little crossover. If you look at most terrorist groups, it's either the Moroccans or the Pakistanis, or the guys from Hamburg, the world's a bully eaters. There's no crossover. It just isn't. So one consequence of my finding is that wasps can ever become terrorists. Have you ever gone to dinner with a wasp? Silence. Silence. They never say anything. How can they plot anything if they don't say anything? Does anybody see the movie Annie Hall by Woody Allen? You remember that juxtaposition of those two scenes about Woody Allen's family and Annie Hall's family? It's exactly that. It's exactly that. My point It's a reality that any whole family could never become terrorist. Yeah, you can have single guys who are nuts, but they don't really become terrorist as a group. This is the French, or what I used to call the French, but now, unfortunately, it's all over Europe. It's really second generation, and those are pretty talented young kids, but they know they don't really have the same chance as their peers. They usually go to school with them, so they know. That's a comparison group. Then when they hit the labor market, they realize it's tremendous discrimination against them.
Marc Sageman: They know that from a young age, so they drop out of school, and they turn to petty crime. That's a gang. Second generation is a gang generation. But they're talented enough that after about 10 years of this, they realize there is no future in it. So they turn to religion collectively to really overcome this. It's like turning to AA, or NA, or all those semi religious group to help you overcome some adversity. The point is that they radicalize collectively here, too. So my point that mobilization is spontaneous, self-organized bunches of guys of trusted friends from the bottom up. I think Duncan first heard me about two years ago. That was my line. I haven't changed his slide. It's always been homegrown groups. The difference between now and the golden age of Al Qaeda is that at the golden age of Al Qaeda, all those guys went to Afghanistan in the hope of being selected by Al Qaeda to join the organization. Now, they don't have that luxury. They don't connect with Al Qaeda Central. There's some exceptions. Perhaps the Pakistanis in England, but overall, they don't. You see this homegrown phenomenon. My point is that the dynamic is the same.
Marc Sageman: For about five years, they were able to connect. They can't connect anymore because if they find where Al Qaeda is, so can we, and we'll kill them first. It's very difficult for those kids to connect now. Now, Al Qaeda never had a recruitment program. They never needed to because people wanted to join Al Qaeda. They were all volunteers. It's like Harvard. Harvard does not need to recruit. People want to go to Harvard. People want to join Al Qaeda. Traditionally, of the guys who went to Afghanistan, about 15% were selected to join Al Qaeda. Harvard's acceptance rate is 13%. You see the analogy is very close. It's very close. Selection was always Al Qaeda's problem. It was not recruitment. There's just so many millions, actually, of young kids who want to join. But because they volunteered, there are gaps in the distribution. The US is one. There's no brainwashing here. They simply acquired the belief of their friends, no recruiter. In a way, it's a born-again movement, so they keep on recruiting each other all the time by being born again. It's a total recruiting environment. Social bonds came before ideological commitment. What I'm telling you is that what you read in the newspapers and any analysis, they usually take an individual, take him out of his context, and try to dig in his background or her background to find out whether there's anything that distinguish that person from the rest.
Marc Sageman: That's nonsense. You'll never find anything because it's all in the environment. It's all in who is with that person, who they hang around with, who is that person family, who is that person friends. It's very much that way. In a way, what I'm telling you is what policemen have known all along. This is really the theoretical background for good police work. Who do they hang around with? Motivation is very simple. People get together. If they get together in the vicinity of a militant mosque, the odd is one of eight people. Usually, most of those folks are clustered around a group of eight. One of the eight went to that mosque because he liked that message. And because the environment is radical, that person has a disproportionate influence over his friends, and they all become radical, and they all become born again. They have new values. Now, how do I know that? That's because 12 mosques worldwide generated 50% of my sample. So the distribution of this is not even. It's very spotty. It's spotty according to those radical mosques. And in the process of becoming Salafi, they completely transformed their value in a process called in-group love.
Marc Sageman: My point to you is a dense social network really promote this in a form of terrorism. And this is very similar to boot camp. After a while, you form a unit, and people of that unit are willing to sacrifice themselves for their friends, their camarades, or the cause. This is why soldiers fight. And we've known that since World War II, when we had an army of social psychologists asking people in the trenches, Why do you fight? Do you fight for democracy? Do you fight against nazism? Do you fight... No, I fight for him. I can't let him down. That's why. And it's the same thing here, from individual concern, humanitarian sacrifice. But unfortunately, the other side of Outgroup love is outgroup hate because basically, love is exclusive. You can't love everybody. I can go home to my wife tonight and say, Honey, I'm so full of love. I'm ready to distribute it equally everywhere. She'd kill me, and she'd be right. You can't love everybody. But unfortunately, for the people in Europe and the Middle East, this outgroup hate is based on real facts. Injustice endemic in the Middle East and to the people in the diaspora in Western Europe.
Marc Sageman: This is all grounded in group dynamics. You have this escalation of complaints to the point that after for a while, people really hate the environment. Since most of your information that you trust comes from your friends, you start endorsing conspiracy theory, and even Muslims of your environment are not true Muslims, according to you. Only the people who are born again like you are true believers, true Muslims, a vanguard of this movement. You can do anything to other people in furtherance of your goals. So you become takfiri from the word kufur, infidel, and you declared those guys infidel. So my point is that it's all group dynamics based on loyalty. Just imagine what happened in Madrid. I'm going to talk about Madrid very shortly. You basically had seven people around the table. The other six guys were your best friend. Even though those guys were not suicide bombers, they put bombs on the train three weeks prior. But when the police was closing in on them, if you recall, one guy said, Look, they'll never take us alive. We'll all blow each other when they come in. Let's assume you don't want to do that. Well, you stuck.
Marc Sageman: What can you say? Gee, it's Sunday night. I have a date. You guys go ahead. I'll join you later. You're smiling because you realize the power of the group, your peer power. That's basically This is probably what happened in Madrid. Let me show you a few pictures here. This is the network when I stopped collecting this data, which was in December 2003. You guys are military guys, and follow orders. We always kill or capture the number three guy in Al Qaeda. If you're number four and you're up for promotion, just turn it down. I mean, it's not It's not compatible with a long career as a terrorist. Well, can anybody show me where the number three guy in Al Qaeda is? That's not organized this way. It's not organized. You have very All those points, those nodes, people, and the relationship aligns between the people. You can see you have very dense clusters of people loosely connected. My point is that pre-existing relationship that I have a friendship and kinship that predated joining a terrorist organization formed the backbone of the operational links. Here is your operational links. And interesting enough, one cluster, one operation.
Marc Sageman: Why? Because we're very good at killing and capturing them afterwards, or they blow themselves up. The only exception is the Jama Islamia of Indonesia, where it was a little bit more so they reused the same people. But now that is looking like this nowadays. And I juxtaposed to show you that indeed, this is very much the infrastructure of this network. Like any network, like anything in life, it didn't stop growing. This network evolved. After 9/11, I think they overreached, which triggered a reaction from us. So what did we do? We basically destroyed it. We went to Afghanistan. We eliminated sanctuary. We eliminated shelter. We turned off the funding. We monitored communication. We killed or arrested kill leaders. We basically neutralized Al Qaeda proper. Al Qaeda itself has not really, maybe with the exception of 7/7, but we'll know that at trial in England, whether there was any clear link, command and control link with Al Qaeda Central. Since then, in the last three years, they have not been The people who command control were involved in all the terrorist operations worldwide. So if you have the physical breakup of the network, what happened is remember the dynamic of those spontaneously self-generated groups, it's still there, it's still there, but now it's no longer connected to Al Qaeda Central.
Marc Sageman: And so what you have is a lot of loose Indians and very few chiefs. What you have is very little adult supervision. They do things that are really not as strategically sophisticated as what they did before 9/11. You have mostly local autonomy, self-finance, financing, mostly self-training, with perhaps the exception of the second-generation Pakistan in Britain. But the other guys, Madrid, Hofstad, Casablanca, all self-trained finance advanced and so on. Informal communication because they're all friends. Now, anybody who wants to be a terrorist is a terrorist. In the old days, Al Qaeda selected them, had an initiation ceremony, so only 15%, the real cream of crop became terrorist. Now anybody becomes terrorist. You have stuff like the seven guys who were arrested in Miami. They're basically clowns wanting to become terrorist. But on the other hand, you have some very talented kids who become terrorist as well, like the London 7-7. Those guys were far more talented. And you have new local more aggressive, reckless leadership. Okay. So far, I've been telling who they are. But there's as much nonsense about what they do. You read a lot of things. People, because you're military guys, if somebody makes a decision to do something, you say, Hi, sir, you can go, you can have your 100-volume plan with a very good target analysis, and then you execute.
Marc Sageman: That's not the way terrorists work. You read some stuff like Al Qaeda's patient plans for years, meticulous about detail, nonsense. I'll show you a detail analysis of Madrid. The image of Al Qaeda is that of a chess player. That's exactly the image we had of the Soviets, if you remember. A chess player could see 20 moves ahead, but the guy was so foresight, couldn't really even see that the ground he was on had absolutely no foundation and just fell through because there was no economy to sustain it. All these plans. It's the same thing. We think this Al Qaeda guy is like this, a very strategic thinker, backed up with his general staff who carefully crafts all those plans with a detailed target analysis to defeat the West. Nonsense. This is Madrid. Madrid is a tale of four networks. The network on top here are mostly Syrians. The Syrians guys who basically fled from Syria in 1982, '83, becauseAssad was cracking down. 700 here. By the way, I don't have names because I'm putting this up on a public website for people to do research, it has to be open. But I can't really put names, because if I put names, I'm liable now for all kinds of death automation suit and so on.
Marc Sageman: Let's replace them with numbers. Everybody knows what the numbers are. But I have the key. 700 is Abu Dada, this is Fahad, you'll see, this is Jamal Amidon. Anyway, so these guys as a Syrian, and they basically, during this period, can't formalize their relationship to support the Bosnian struggle around that time. And those guys in blue are basically Moroccans who went to Bosnia. Those guys in orange here don't know each other because in the old country, they have not yet got to Spain yet. Those guys here are in city of Tétuan. They have not yet gotten to Spain. And those guys here are really nine people, but here, I have the two leaders, first cousins, who are Spaniard Catholic from the city of Avalis, and they're going to be miners, demolition miners, so access with dynamite. In the second phase, and here's another five-year slice, you can see that these guys break up. One guy is Mustafa S etmarian Nasser or Abu Musa Balsuri, who was captured last October. He's 703. He went to London to be the editor-in-chief of the GIA newsletter. This guy is Sheik Salah. He went to Jalala to welcome the new recruits.
Marc Sageman: So these guys consolidate around the M30 mosque. Many of those guys don't know each other. As you see, let me go back one slide and just point out. You see, you have six sets of brothers already in the Madrid case. Remember, friendship and kinship. I forgot to mention the brothers. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six It's a mix-up. Here you have this friendship forming. Those guys, the city of Tetuan, is basically two large families, the Amidun family and the Ulad Aksha family, who grew up next door to each other in Tetuan. They went to Madrid to be the biggest drug dealers of Madrid. They deal drugs by being bouncer. When people go to the night clubs, those guys are bouncer. They say, Would you like to have some drugs to go with it? And most people say yes. They sell them hasheesh and ecstasy. They were the main source of ecstasy. And they met this guy, Zuhair, from Casablanca, who was also a bouncer, but he's not part of this because he's not from the city of Tétouan. Those guys grew up together. This guy, even though he's Moroccan, they don't trust. And as you can see, these guys are forming pretty tight here.
Marc Sageman: Nothing really happens until really 2001. Second half of 2001... I'm sorry, let me go back a a little bit. Now, you see this guy here? He no longer is connected. Why? Because he's the leader of this gang, and he gets involved in a turf war and kills his rival in Morocco, so he gets jailed. So that severs the relationship. Okay. Those guys get arrested, and this is a random event. This guy gets arrested He was robbing a jewelry store. Four hundred miles away, these guys get arrested because they were selling hashish. Those are Spaniards. Those two guys were put in the same cell. Got to know each other. That's how they got to know each other. Okay. After 9/11, the original controlling group disappears. Why? Because they jailed. Garzon arrest the whole of them because he thinks that because of that one week meeting between Ramsey bin Al-Shib and Mohamed Atta, he thinks that those guys are involved in the planning of 9/11, so he arrest them, thinks that they were involved in 9/11. Those guys here who are basically students drifting together to this mosque, they start meeting together and say, We have to do something.
Marc Sageman: We have to do something. These guys still sell hashish, and those guys are in jail. But they decide to make a deal with the authority by being informants, and so they're released from jail about three months later. 2002, Jamais Amal Amidon comes back to Madrid to regain his leadership. As you can see, early 2003, what happens? That's when we go to Iraq. There is, first of all, two months later, the bombing in Riyadh and then the bombing Casablanca. Now, the bombing Casablanca is critical here because the Moroccan authority, even though about 50 people might have been involved, if you're really generous, it turns out it's probably closer to 30, but let's give them 50. The Moroccan authority arrested 2,600 people and convicted 2,100. You realize a clean house. They eliminated anybody who was a threat to the king. And since many of them were not in Morocco, they put warrants for the arrest of those guys, and the Spaniards arrested the guys who actually had a history of militantism, namely the guys who were involved in the Bosnian war. What you have is that at the next slide, those guys are arrested. But their friends here are now red hot, and they're meeting and they say, We have to do something here.
Marc Sageman: We really have to do something here. Now, it's no longer the United States, the Spanish government. We know that they talk Jihad, and they met because this guy here was an informant for the police. He was the Imam, actually, it turns out. His name is Farkhousi, code name, Kata Hena, and Spain being Spain. They leaked all 12 contact reports words from the police with this guy to the press, and so it's wonderful reading. But you see here, these guys and these guys are not connected. It turns out that the imam was transferred in March of 2003 to another mosque. He was the imam of the Villa Verde Mosque in Madrid to Granada, and so he lost his access. And Sehan Fahid, This guy was a lay preacher of the mosque. This guy, Mohamed Ulad Aksha, who is a lieutenant of this fellow Jamal Amidon, he came to the mosque about two weeks later and listened to the message, and he liked it, told his friends, and those guys went to the mosque. Now, these guys, as I mentioned before, were police informants. But after about 18 months of it, they got tired and said, enough of this already.
Marc Sageman: We want access to some hashish, and we have some dynamite because remember, they're demolition experts, and sometimes they brought dynamite home to sell. So they're telling everybody they have dynamite. And one guy remember, Oh, yeah, I remember my cellmate in prison. So he called the guy, said, We have some Dynamite. Are you guys interested in dynamite? So this guy is also an informant. He And he also put his police case officer saying, You know, some guys in Northern Spain, they want to sell dynamite. And the police officer said, Look, with the anti-antennacology squad. We don't care about Dynamite. And the guy said, No, it could be dangerous. And say, Look, we'll take care It, case closed. Now, how do I know this? Because the guy tapped it, and that was played in front of the Spanish parliament afterwards. It's very embarrassing, but that's really what happened. What happens next slide of six months, all those guys merge together, and they get access to dynamite, and now they're red hot, and they want to do something. On the 12th of December, the ninth of December, 2003, the Global Islamic Media Front post this now famous document called Iraqi Jihad.
Marc Sageman: They argued that the weak link in the coalition in Spain and two or three bombing attempts right before the Spanish election would have an effect. Those guys now know what to do. They have within eight weeks They have lots of vaccine further rent. They rent a safe house. They conclude a deal. This guy does with this guy, namely 35 kilos of hashish for 200 kilos of dynamite. This guy sent three shipment. It's a 15 kilos each. That's not fast enough. So finally, these guys go to Avilis They go to the mine, they grab 150 kilos of dynamite. They put all the bombs together very quickly. All of this is very quick. And they exploded on three 11, 13 bombs, 10 of which exploded, and about close to 200 people died. This is what happened to them. Afterwards, either people, and I told you, three weeks later, the police finally realized who it was. Those guys were the guys who killed themselves in that apartment in Avilès, and all the other guys were arrested because the police that surveilled them for about two years. The problem, why did this happen? Another random event. The Crown Prince got married, got married in May of 2004.
Marc Sageman: Because he's an important person, he needs security detail. Guess where they got the security detail? The guys who were watching these guys, the anti-terrorist squad in Madrid. Again, there are three random events that I'm talking to you. Those two guys who were cellmate, random event, Mahamul Al-Adha, who went to listen to this guy, and then the police being pulled away from these guys. That, to me, proves beyond any doubt that this is not a top-down operation. This is very much a bottom-up operation. Those guys are looking for each other to do this. But I want to show you the first two slides are five years each, and then it's six months. So there's a long lead time, and then as soon as they all connect, boom, things happen very, very quickly. This is pretty typical of just about any attempt that I've seen. You don't have people thinking of… It's really about acquiring the means of destruction. In Madrid, they acquired the means of destruction because the guys with dynamite were willing to sell them dynamite. So making the bomb is trivial. They sold them the detonators, they sold them the dynamite, they sold them death cord.
Marc Sageman: The only thing they needed to do is just to have the trigger, and that they used cell phone. You know what? The guy who rigged the cell phone was a police officer undercover, but he did not know why. But that's why they were able to find them because they bought 20 cell phones. They They used 13 for the bombs. The other ones, they used to call each other. The police struck them down. That's Madrid. The operation, spontaneous, self-organized, home-grown groups, no sleeper cells. They got thrown out of their mask. They were very vocal, autonomous, locally-funded, trained, no need for command and control. They're not Al Qaeda, but they're acting on behalf of Al-Qaeda, and the importance of the Internet, that put the guidance, those guys, we're able to do it, to get the idea from the Internet. The Internet, in that sense, is really the virtual invisible hand that's organizing a terrorist operation worldwide now. You also had, very strangely here, an explosive merger of the criminal Braun, the drug dealers who had the link to Dynamite with the religious student the brain, who had the organizational skills to organize them. It's actually is almost identical to what happened in 9/11.
Marc Sageman: Remember, you had the brain from Hamburg and you had the muscle from Saudi Arabia, and the mixture of the two was exactly what happened here. Amateurs making mistakes, and I could go on, tell you in detail what happened, but just one mistake after another. It didn't matter because the Spanish authorities made even more mistakes. There were so many chance happenings that it couldn't be a planned operation. You can see those are a little bit different profile than what I described before, a little bit less well-educated more criminal element, fewer people were married. But that also blurs a distinction between suicide and traditional terrorism. As you can see, those guys were not suicide terrorists. But given the The circumstance changed a little bit three weeks later, they blew themselves up. It just depends. In the apartment, they found suicide belts already. They knew that they're going to use suicide terrorism as a tactic later on. People will distinguish, I think they don't know what they're talking about. The burden of proof is on them to show that those guys are different type of terrorism. This is very much like fashion. Right now, the fashion when you're a terrorist is to become a suicide terrorist.
Marc Sageman: That's what glory is. It's about self-clorification. That's a bar. You do anything less, you don't even make the newspapers. Basically, we're moving towards this global, literalized Jihad It's decentralized, loosely connected, it's mobilized and motivated autonomously. This, mind you, is way before London, even last year's London or Madrid. I've been arguing that all the time. The threat comes from the West. You're not going to have any 9/11, that type of sophisticated operation. You're going to have lots of Madrid, London, and so on, Hofstatt. The military role is very much sanctuary denial because a sanctuary in Afghanistan allowed Al Qaeda during the golden age to coordinate this transnational movement. I don't think they have this possibility to coordinate. You can see the arrest in London is exactly what is supposed to happen. If you have a long A operation like that and it involves a lot of people, the odds of them being caught is astronomical. But if you have a small cell of three people, that's a little bit more difficult. The internet is becoming very important. That's how most of them... The Toronto cell is the future. Toronto is connected to Georgia, it's connected to guys in London, it's connected to guys in Bosnia, in Sweden, Denmark.
Marc Sageman: That's the future. All People ask me, and this is my last slide, how do you recognize them? What's the signature? That's the signature. Part of diaspora, the young, mostly men, but women are becoming more common, underemployed, spend a lot of time on the internet. In Europe, they actually pay them not to work, so they spend all their time becoming jihadis. They travel, or they have a new passport to hide the fact that they traveled. The country that they travel to, Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Turkey, and Egypt. Behavioral attribute, they all become Salafi. There's a dramatic change in the friends that they're with. They have their new friends that some of them they had before, but those guys become really much tighter in this press of social implosion, and they stop seeing old friends from the community. They dress apart because that's how they show that they're loyal Salafi. They wear short pants, beard, mark of the forehead, open to a sandal, and they have veiled wives. That's important because that's how the Aspireus 18 case were identified in Belgium. They came from Syria, they're mostly second generation, born in Belgium, but from Morocco, wanted to learn a little bit Arabic, went to Damascus, came back, and by the time they came back, their six wives were burqa.
Marc Sageman: And they scared the kids of the town, small town of Mesa. The kids complained to their parents, their parents complained to the police, the police investigated the women and found the guys. Then they surveilled them until they realized those guys were talking Jihad, buying explosives, and they arrested them. It's called Asparegus 18 because it's 18 of them and comes from the region where they grow Asparegus in Belgium. They proselytized because they're born again. And because they proselytize and they think they're right, they have disputes with the Imam, and that's how they often become detected. It's usually the Imam who calls the police because they threaten him. And then they think they can commit crime because they take theories. Now, there are millions of those. And so law enforcement authorities say, Well, how can you tell the guys who are serious about this? Well, the guys who are serious about it usually do things together. And And most of their favorite activity is paintball. It's definitely paintball. And paintball is implicate not only in the case here in Northern Virginia, but the pandemic, the 24 guys who were arrested in Australia all did paintball. The Toronto guys did paintball.
Marc Sageman: The 7-7 London bombers did paintball. We only have the picture when they did whitewater rafting, but they were doing paintball for about three years. Some people, like the Hofstatt Group, shooting practice. Others do paramilitary camping, such as the Madrid guys, the French guys, the Casablanca guys. If you do together this very small step to actually put live ammunition instead of paint in your gun. Other attribute is that they're very active on Jihadi chat room and download a lot of things on website. By the time that you have suspicious behavior, it may be too late because I tried to show you there's a very late and long lead time, and then when they do things, it's very fast. Sadat was killed in 10 days. From the inception of that operation to the execution, 10 days. Khaled Al-Islambouli found out 10 days prior to the parade that he was going to be part of the parade. He called Faraj, his boss, and said, I can take Pharaoh. And so first cousin came in, Faraj, his childhood friend who had a cousin. Those were in the army. Those four guys were the guys who killed Sadat, 10 days, even if you have this group penetrated.
Marc Sageman: They don't sit on the means of destruction. That is the most difficult thing for them to acquire. Once they have it, they're going to take the easiest target of opportunity close by. They don't wait. They don't wait. This is not 2011 anymore. They don't plan yours. This is very much a pattern nowadays, whether it's London, whether it's Hofstadt, whether it's Madrid, whether it's Casablanca. Literally, by the time they have the bombs, it's going to be two or three days. That's it. Because that's when they're vulnerable. So when they do suspicious behavior, when they're interested in terrorist activities, download a lot of information from the Internet, discuss ideas or plans about terrorist activities, communicate an inappropriate in any target. That comes so late in the operation. Casing the target, maybe the day before. Sometimes they don't. In Madrid, they never cased it. But the 7-7 guys, they did two weeks prior. But getting the means of destruction, once you have that, you got to disrupt it, you got to arrest them. Even if you don't have a case, you just have to stop them at that point. That's all I have to say. Leave it open for you guys to torture me now.
Marc Sageman: Thanks. Dr. Saitzman, I'm Navy captain Dave Belt, National Defense University. Probably a few people in the room are working on the military's big question now is how to counter ideological support for violent extremism. We can't work toward stopping the bunch of guys syndrome, but where on the trajectory that you mentioned and that you've studied, where could we interdict this your trajectory to counter violent extremism in this type of group? Well, those people have to develop a collective identity. One thing I didn't talk about because I didn't have time is really the difference between Europe and the United States. If you look at the number of arrests, in the United States, we basically have three, four dozens at most. In Europe, they have thousands. They have three times a Muslim population with the same general population. You realize that some structural elements are involved in it. One is really the development of the collective identity of Muslim against and hostile to the population at large. That usually does not happen in the US for various reasons. The point is that it's really when people develop this collective identity hostile to the environment, that's almost what you have to stop.
Marc Sageman: Once they start proceeding along this path, and especially when they take evidence from around the world. When we do things that can be construed as this is a war against Islam, this becomes much worse. I'm not arguing that the invasion of Iraq created this problem. This problem was there before. This has really added oil to that fire and convinced many of the British guys were not really that radical in 2002. They became radical later. But 9/11 happened before Iraq. So Iraq did not create this problem. It's really this notion of collective identity, what actually amplifies it and makes with their only thought, the most relevant thought in their life. It's a very complex process of activating this collective identity of Muslim period, as opposed to Muslim and British, they reject the West. Even their spouses are very much in with them, very much motivating them, and Most people think that when women have lots of kids, they think that perhaps their husband should not do that. Now, those are the most militant women. Why? Because they're having kids for the Jihad. They want little boys so that they can blow themselves up to fight for the group.
Marc Sageman: It's a very, very tough problem, this war of idea. But one thing that I'm absolutely convinced it is not a military function to fight it. The military, because of the uniform, because of the way they think about it, probably at the last one that you want to fight this war of ideas. You can reinforce people who have credibility in that audience to convince them that violence may not be the solution. In a way, the old terrorists, the Egyptian terrorists, the Gamma Islamia, the guys who did look sore but just gave up violence right after that. Those guys should be on the internet and say, Listen, Listen, brother, I think you're wrong. We tried violence. It got us nowhere. If anything, it prevented us. It made us fall back further to our goal of establishing this fair and just a I don't think it's achievable through violence because we preachers, not judges. We cannot judge who we should kill and who we should not kill. This is God's prerogative and not humans. That's really where Al-Qaeda goes wrong. There are many ways to tackle this problem. The military is the last one that would want to do that.
Marc Sageman: But on the other hand, I don't really think that just good public diplomacy is the way to achieve it, especially when what's portrayed on the ground that the US does is contrary to what we say on the airwaves. It's a tough problem. It's a tough problem. But I'm not pessimistic. Again, I think those are young kids chasing a dream. It turns out the more violence and atrocities Al Qaeda and its derivative are causing, those are going to turn off those kids. That dream is becoming unpalatable. They're going to turn to another I'm very reassured at what happened in France last October. Those were 14, 15-year-olds who were burning cars. There's not an ounce of Islam in there. They don't believe in Islam anymore. They think that they're the oldest brothers, and they're wrong. Those kids burn cars because they're French. I'm serious. They are French. They're third-generation French, but French people don't look at them as French. They did that for equality. They wanted to say, Look, if you guys are true Republicans and so on, give us jobs, give us opportunities. And when the government tried to do that this past spring, the rest of the nation had this huge demonstration because the French authorities, the French government, wanted to liberalize the labor market as No, we like it just fine.
Marc Sageman: Screw those kids because they're foreigners. We'd like to have those jobs guaranteed for life. So you see, to fight it, it's almost a case-by-case basis on each country, which issues are important to those kids, and so on. I think that this wave has crested. But the more images of Americans in uniform shown on Al Jazeera, Al-Arabia, and Israel. Well, actually, it's American ammunition falling on Lebanon. This is not advancing our cause with us kids. I'm sorry to be so long winded, but it's a very difficult, difficult problem. Dean Cox, Air Staff. You indicated you thought Al Qaeda had been neutralized by our action, but the most recent attempt to down airplanes out of London had all the earmarked of Al Qaeda and was a duplicate of an earlier Al Qaeda plan. Do you think that that most recent attempt was not Al Qaeda and someone else? No, I think it's probably Al Qaeda, but it worked the way it was advertised. Namely, we detected them about a year ago. We monitored them. We probably monitored the communication. We surveilled them in Pakistan. We surveilled them in England. It worked for them not to be detected.
Marc Sageman: That's really the fate of the Al Qaeda central. We are so focused on those guys that we're going to detect them. We are not morons. We really aren't. You can't look at them in a vacuum. You have to look at them with us looking at them. That's why I say it's neutralized. Those guys did not do it, and they weren't even close. They weren't even close. What triggered it is the arrest of that guy in Pakistan. That's why I say the old Al Qaeda is neutralized. Don't get me wrong, they to do a storm. They're still flooding there in their cape. They're probably that they haven't been able to do much.
Bob Reilly: Hi, Bob Reilly from OSD Policy. It seems to me in a way that the problem is much worse than you make out and that your grounds for optimism may be somewhat fragile in the sense that Al Qaeda is just a manifestation of a much larger problem within the Islamic world, and most particularly within the Arabic world, that growing numbers of people see that or perceive that the maintenance of their faith, of the meaning of their lives, somehow requires our destruction as the great Satan, whose very existence is antithetical to the continuation of this faith. They have to make some sense of the dysfunctional world in which they live, so they're attracted by the Salafist narrative. Let's go back to the time in which things did work for us. What competing narrative can draw the Islamic world away from this attraction, which in my own view of the scene, seems to be growing. The voices of sanity within the Islamic world, the voices of tradition in the Islamic world that would make the very points that you were, are not the ones that are gaining strength.
Marc Sageman: I agree. I mostly agree with your analysis. I'm optimistic in the long run because those guys are committing a lot of atrocities, and that dream is not going to be as attractive. Look, Most people look at them and think they're religious scholars. Those guys know shit about religion. They don't. Look at all the guys who are arrested in London. Is there one guy who is a religious scholar among them? I mean, it's the same everywhere. Don't think that those guys are over intellectual religious scholars. They're not. Now we're looking at them, what attracts them to this dream? What attracts them to this stream? What attracts them is that they hate the government. And if we are propping up the government like in Egypt, they're going to hate us. The only place in the Middle East where we loved, and we can do no wrong, is Iran. Why? Because we hate the government. And since they hate the government, we're the good guys. It's a very simple dynamic. You're absolutely right. Now, what We can't count a narrative we can have? The narrative is a very simple one. It's one that's been around for about 150 years.
Marc Sageman: Corruption is greed, greed is capitalism, capitalism is now the US. We had that back to the 19th century. That goes with the territory. Now, we were the toast of the Middle East until very recently. It's not because we're a or anything like that. We were really very much a land of opportunity. We were perceived as fair. We were perceived as having strong values. But now we're just seen as a big hypocrite bully, throwing our weight around because nobody is there to stop us. That's exactly what they think of us. Now, first of all, we have to bring our deeds consistent to our words. We really do. In a sense, we have to show some restraint. The best thing to do is to show a model for them to emulate, to to capture this American dream, to show that, yes, corruption, injustice is rampant in the society. We don't have a perfect society, but we're much closer there than those guys are. We have to distance ourselves a little bit from those rulers. I understand all the problems involved if the government of Egypt falls to Islamic fundamentalists. If you think that Lebanon is bad, think 70 million of angry people.
Marc Sageman: Israel will face a much greater problem, and we will face a much greater problem. I'm not minimizing things, but we can't really be in bed with tyrants all over the Middle East, tyrants who are hated and despised. We have to actually stick closer to our values the same way we had the courage to do so in the '50s, '60s, and even '70s, '80s. This anti-Americanism is pretty recent. It could be reversed, but before, we really have to have a policy that's consistent with the core values of the United States. Thank you. I'm Randy Papadopoulos from the Naval Historical Center. I noticed a gap in your analysis that I wonder if you could explain, which is that you've attributed this to the discussion with Middle Eastern regimes. But these are largely Sunis, not Shiaites, and yet we are not seeing in the Shia world, specifically Iran, as you just mentioned, anything like this on the same scale or on the same dynamic that you've been discussing messing? What if you could explain that, disparity? Well, it's no disparity. Iran had it 30 years ago. We're the great Satan? Where do you think came from? It came from Iran.
Marc Sageman: It's now that we're It means a government that that generation who was not around in the '70s loves us. No, I think it's the same thing. It's our support of regime that they hate that make them hate us. It's not so much us. In a sense, they hate America. They don't mind Americans. They think Americans are nice guys, except when they're in uniforms and they have sunglasses and they kill you. That's not good. But they hate the government, what America stands for now. But coming here, lining up for visas, they like that. It's not so much as the Shia Suni divide here. It's that the Shia were there way a generation before these guys.
Bob Reilly: If I may, and Bob Reilly, again, just to demonstrate we don't all agree with you, Professor. I would take issue with your last remark by pointing out the intellectual genealogy of Al Qaeda in the work of Syahid Kutub, who, of course, in the Muslim Brotherhood, could be said to have inspired the assassination of Sadat, who was himself, as you know, hanged in Egypt, whose brother taught in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden. I told a Kamehny today, the Supreme Leader of Iran, translated into Farsi, some Sayyid Kutup's works, we're not unacceptable in his ideology, or Maududi's ideology, or Hassan Al Bana's ideology, because we're not acting in comportment with our ideals, but because of our ideals, which are considered shirk, blasphemy. Thanks.
Marc Sageman: I don't think we disagree. I think we disagree on who the terrorists are. They're not Said Kutub. Said Kutub could write all he wants, he would have been completely forgotten. Nobody would have paid attention to him. It's a little bit There's that thing in one of a Shakespearean play about two janitors say… One guy said, I'm very gifted. I can call the spirits from the bottom of the sea. The other guy said, Well, anybody can do that. That's not difficult. What's difficult is, will the spirits come? That's the key. Would people read it? Well, it turns out that most of those guys don't read Sayyid Kutum. They are not intellectual in that sense. They are not religious intellectual. You have very few ideologues, and we, because we don't like to do a good scientific study of what people think are terrorists, we actually look at just the ideology. This reminds me of all this Kremlin knowledge of the past who kept rereading Marx to try to guess what the Soviet Union was going to do next. It's pointless. It's not there. It's not there. What you need to do is to look at who the followers are and why are the followers attracted to this?
Marc Sageman: And they didn't become attracted to it until the Nasserite regime was completely discredited by the 1967 war. Remember, religion had very little following in Egypt. It was all a secular regime, a socialist secular regime. The Pan-Nasserite movement, this Pan-Arabist movement that he was preaching, had tremendous following at the time. It's only when he was completely discredited with that war. It was a devastating war. I mean, they in six days, what, five armies were completely blown out by the Israelis? Where's all that boost? That's when people started becoming attracted to this notion of Islam is the answer and they're attracted to sound bites. Look, they're engineers. They know nothing about religion. I keep hammering you that. They are not religious scholars. And that's really They're looking for a dream. And it's a dream, and it's a vague dream that really attract them because they can project anything that they want onto that dream, just the same way the communists did. If you ask the communists, Did you guys achieve a communist society? They would have said, No, we're on the way there. We are socialist on the way there. But the communist regime is a transformation of man by man.
Marc Sageman: You have the withering away of the state because when everybody's virtuous, you don't need a state. This is the same answer the Salafis will give you. If you have Allah in your heart, you don't need a state. Everybody's virtuous. It's this utopia that they're looking for. It's a pipe dream, I think, but it's a dream. It's not so much that those guys keep on reading Kutub and Faraj and Azam and all the derivative of or Mustafa Shukri. It's not that. It's really the following your dream. When you ask a 19-year-old or 20-year-old, Do you do that? Can you show me in Kutub? He wouldn't be able to do that. He may just recite one or two truncated verse from the Quran that would just support his position, but that's about it. Drug dealers, real estate guy, Fahet, Spaniards are just looking for money. Bouncers in nightclubs, not religious scholars. The point here is you're wasting your time trying to understand from the ideology what those guys do. That dream changes all the time. The anarchists were looking for a stateless ideal. It wasn't about religion. Then the anticolonist thought that we get rid of the colonial power.
Marc Sageman: It's going to be paradise on earth. The leftist in the '70s, and less so in the '80s, same thing. When we're going to have this communist state, Everybody, it's going to be paradise on Earth. The same thing with these guys. It's a dream that they follow. It's not really a literally detective analysis of the scripture, whether it's Kutub or so on. I'm Captain Jim Carr from the Navy staff. You said tonight, sir, you thought the wave had crested. What evidence leads you to believe that the wave has crested and we're moving past us and into some newer state? You look at polling data. Polling data, if you look at the difference in the last few years, show that support for terrorism has diminished dramatically. Anti-americanism is as high as it ever was. It's close to 90 %. Sometimes, there is no statistical difference to 100 % in some of those countries in terms of the anti-American But it's not the terrorism of Al Qaeda that attracts them anymore. I mean, they pissed off at us. There's no doubt. But what happened in Amman, the continuing killing, slaughter in Iraq, what happened in Saudi Arabia, what happened in Morocco?
Marc Sageman: It turned a lot of people off. It really turned. Even in Egypt, it really turned them off. That's why I think that the attraction for this strategy, the Al Qaeda strategy, and that dream that goes along with it may have crested, but that doesn't mean that we're home free. They still are 100% anti-American. But that's going to wane according to our policy, which is still evolving. So I think it's appalling data.
Introducer: Okay, let's call it a night.
Marc Sageman: Thank you.