Terrorist Recognition Handbook 344
Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition | |
author | Malcolm Nance |
pages | 480 |
publisher | CRC |
rating | 10 |
reviewer | Ben Rothke |
ISBN | 978-1420071832 |
summary | Perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition. |
The
main theme of the book, as detailed in chapter 1 is
critical
awareness.
The book notes that criminal investigators spend years
studying criminal behavior to better understand and counter
crime. Nance writes that the
field of terrorism is no different as it is a specialized subject that
requires serious study and requires that those in the front line of defense be
as knowledge as possible.
In
a later chapter, Nance gives the Iraq war as an example of a group of leaders
that were not as knowledge as possible and ignored the advice of those that
were as knowledge as possible.
Had the Bush administration consulted Nance, a trillion
dollars and thousands of lives could have been saved in the Iraq
debacle.
The
book is divided into 5 sections comprising 21 heavily-detailed
chapters. Each chapter is a
progression in detailing, understanding and identifying
terrorists. In chapter after
chapter, the book details every aspect of terrorism and indentifies all of the
various elements. The various
aspects of different guns, explosives, and other elements are described and
categorized in detail.
In
the section on suicide bombers, an important point the book makes is that
contrary to popular belief, suicide bombers are rarely
insane. They are most often
intelligent, rational individuals with beliefs that those in the West finds
difficult to comprehend.
Nance does not for a second rationalize the actions of
such groups and individuals.
But notes that it is critical to understand why they do it
in order to prevent future attacks.
Chapter
8 is quite valuable in that it provides a comprehensive overview of how
terrorist cells operate and are organized.
While the cell is the fundamental unit of a terrorist
group; cell operations and their members are the least understood part of
terrorism. Their operations
are always secret and never seen, until they
attack. The chapter details
the many types of terrorist cells, operative membership pools, and how cells
and leadership communicate.
Chapter
19 is a fascinating primer on al-Qaeda and the global extremist
insurgency. The chapter
details how al-Qaeda divides its enemies into two categories:
Far Enemies and Near
Enemies. The terms are taken from the Islamic concept of the
community and those who oppose it.
While the far enemies of al-Qaeda are the USA, Australia,
UK, Europe and Israel, the near enemies are those Moslem's or nations that
al-Qaeda sees as corrupted governments or apostate
rules. These include the
governments of over 20 countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh,
India and many more comprising billions of people.
While
the post-9/11 attacks from coalition forces have indeed hurt al-Qaeda and
killed many of its top leaders, Nance notes that al-Qaeda now acts a terror
strategy consultancy. This
transformation of al-Qaeda is in response to the loss of its base of
operations in Afghanistan and the displacement of its leadership to the
Pakistani border.
The most significant
changes were a shift of operational responsibility from the regional terror
commanders, who executed a long awaited plan for jihad operations, to a more
radical and difficult to detect posture: jihadist who were self-starting and
worked independently from al-Qaeda.
The
most significant changes al-Qaeda's structure occurred when it was able to
co-opt the Jordanian Salafist group Tawhed Wal Jihad and organize the foreign
fighters into Iraq into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
AQI changed the structure of the military committee's
roles dramatically and Iraq would become the cornerstone of al-Qaeda's global
operations. Much of the
invasion of Iraq was premised on a link between Iraq and
al-Qaeda. There was never
such a link, but the war turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as al-Qaeda
is now a mainstay in Iraq.
The
book writes that it is important to note that contrary to popular belief,
al-Qaeda is not a single terrorist group, rather a collection of like-minded
organizations that cooperate and receive funds, advice and orders from Osama
bin Laden and his supporters. al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a physical
chain of terrorist training camps to a virtual network that uses the Internet
to create a network centric information and advisory
body. Nance therefore notes
that al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a global terrorism operation into a
terrorism management consultancy.
The 6 main aspects of this
consultancy are that al-Qaeda: provides inspiration, contributes finances,
shares collective knowledge, provides weapons resource and contacts, accepts
responsibility and releases video propaganda.
Besides
a few minor historical errors, some grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and
not a lot of details about cyber-based terrorism,
Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual
for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities is a most
important book in that it avoids all of the hype, politics and bias that come
along with such titles, and simply focuses on its task at hand, to be a field
guide for anti-terrorist and counter-terrorist professionals to use to prevent
attacks.
Such
a title is sorely needed by groups such as the TSA, who still think that
anti-terrorism means having people remove their shoes at
airports. The book notes
that the European approach of guarded vigilance
via a sustained level of anti-terrorism readiness and
awareness is a much better concept than the US approach of spiking to
heightened alert levels.
The
Terrorist Recognition Handbook is a
must-read for anyone tasked with or interested in anti-terrorism
activities. One would hope
that every TSA and Homeland Security manager and employee get a copy of this
monumental reference.
It would change the face of TSA and the Department of
Homeland Security, and might perhaps really enable them to identify
terrorists, and not simply require the elderly to take off their support shoes
at airport checkpoints.
Ben Rothke is the author
of
Computer
Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should
Know.
You can purchase Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The Sad Part (Score:5, Interesting)
Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Posting anonymously to avoid having to deal with all the Slashcons who will pile on to tell me that all the Mooslimes are TEH TERRORIZTS!
Speaking of terroists... (Score:5, Interesting)
A must-read for anyone concerned about the direction our nation is heading.
Here's an excerpt that's very relevant to the topic in question:
Re:The Sad Part (Score:4, Interesting)
It never fails to amaze me that, when faced with the monumental failure of our bureaucracies to prevent 9/11, we respond by creating yet another bureaucracy. And, to top it off, we allow the dang thing to be unionized, thus ensuring it's utter failure and moribundity for all time.
Sometimes I wonder if we deserve what our forefathers left to us.
It's a poor 'guide' (Score:5, Interesting)
This book is the biggest load of cruft I've had the displeasure of pursuing in a long, long time.
Nearly a complete, waste of time and money and is more than likely bound to spark more than a few more uber-paranoid people locking themselves up in their trailer with a shotgun pointing out the window.
The only perks about this farce was the netural informational aspects such as how individual terrorists as well as terrorist groups and cells form, operate and work as well as the mind-set, cultural and historical information presented.
As a "guide" it's practically useless, as a source of information about the how and why terrorists operate and think, it IS fairly interesting.
Too bad that information is often available (in bits and pieces) via other sources on the net.
Re:The truth about prevention... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Speaking of terroists... (Score:3, Interesting)
Its like NP complete problem. You have an algorithm that works, but it doesn't scale. If you can make an approximation solution that trims the set to a reasonable size where the scaling problems of algorithm don't hurt you as much, you have a win.
So, it doesn't matter that it identifies 10,000 wrong people. What matters is how do you deal with those 10,000 wrong people. Do you automatically assume they are bad, or do you say we put them through a tougher form of screening.
Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh. (Score:5, Interesting)
What Daniel Pipes really is a hack writer and pundit for the establishment. His role is to lay an ideological foundation for US foreign policy that is already being carried out. His father was one of the main hawks against Stalinist Eastern Block style Communism during the 60's. He makes a living creating "boogeyman" stereotypes of the people who resist the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies and foreign meddling.
The fact that he runs a group that systematically harasses left leaning university professors in the United States only adds to the fact that he is a rightwing political opportunist who profits off of demonizing cultures and creating racist stereotypes. His group Campus Watch specializes in taking anonymous unsubstantiated claims of conservative students who are upset over their grade. He's not a legitimate academic and has no place in the culture of discussion that academia should be. If all he did was just advance a position, no matter how much I disagreed with it, that would be fine; but intimidating and harassing one's political opponents is not free speech.
Re:Speaking of terroists... (Score:3, Interesting)
While that may be true enough for the hypothetical case you referenced, real life gets a bit more difficult.
Instead of a hypothetical population of one million, try the population of NYC (20 million).
Instead of a hypothetical "nearly perfect" terrorist test with 100% sensitivity and 99% specificity (1% false positives, 0% false negatives), try a more realistic estimate of 40-60% specificity, with an indeterminate level of sensitivity (40-60% false positives, indeterminate number of false negatives).
In short, this more realistic assessment will trim your initial set of 20 million to 8-12 million, with who knows how many real terrorists slipping through the cracks. Not terribly helpful, is it?
Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh. (Score:5, Interesting)
So... test them again! (Score:3, Interesting)
The glaring problem with his logic is that if you repeat the test your accuracy will tend to go up, and if you apply complimentary tests, you get even better accuracy. The original writer assumes that you test, then you execute, then you forget... Well that happens, to be sure, but it's a problem of rigor.
I mentioned Guantanamo Bay because it's a fine example of a willful failure to be rigorous. Shrub, Inc.'s only concern was to generate perceived results and delay further testing as long as possible. To fill up space and create the appearance that (a) there are lots of terrorists and (b) we caught lots of them. And they got a bunch of useful political prisoners - not really imprisoned for their beliefs or affiliations - but as pure fodder for use by the political class.
Had we applied more rigorous testing there never would have been a Guantanamo Bay prison. And if we ever begin to do so, the place will evaporate in a black cloud of oil smoke.
Re:That's easy (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The Sad Part (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh. (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a video clip of the full lecture so you can judge for yourself:
http://www.rit.edu/academicaffairs/etc/gannett/videos/2005-04-14.ram
Are you actually willing to substantiate your claims?
Re:Daniel Pipes? (Score:1, Interesting)
i'm not a big fan of the word "terorrism"....i prefer what we called it when i was younger: crazy people.
there's lots of crazy people in the world, irrespective of religion.
the war on terror is a sham. you can't "defeat terror", you only propagate it and fan the flames by living in terror.
our founding fathers were right about one thing: foreign policy. the warned us against extensive involvement outside our borders and look where it's gotten us.
hmm...what does this have to do with technology? i used to love slashdot but some of these random postings are diluting an otherwise excellent site.
Re:That's easy (Score:3, Interesting)
Although this has been known for some time. It's not poor, defenseless people who become terrorists, no matter how much mr. Obama would like them to be. It's knowledgeable, rational, intelligent and rich people, who have but to choose from the thousands of opportunities the world offers them (like he himself is, or any presidential candidate obviously).
yes, people have forgotten the lessons of the seventies about the Baader-Meinhof group.
No clothes. (Score:4, Interesting)
But I think that you've just proven my essential point: the american 'hegemony' is founded on some astoundingly well-crafted pervasive propaganda at home, with the theme of being a global benefactor.
Ask around: "why do we perpetually have half a million troops overseas in over 100 countries?" The reasoning of the american public in justifying such a massive permanent deployment in so many bases is very thin, if not jingoistic and naive, or outright frightening to citizens of other countries. Americans just don't believe in the scale of clandestine maneuvering through their history, and they have an essential sense of manifest destiny.
21C hegemony (shorthand for empire) does not resemble victorian Brittania, in the way that late post-industrial capitalism doesn't resemble feudalism.