In the wake of the botched May 1 Times Square attack, some observers have begun to characterize Faisal Shahzad and the threat he posed as some sort of new or different approach to terrorism in the United States. Indeed, one media story on Sunday quoted terrorism experts who claimed that recent cases such as those involving Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi indicate that jihadists in the United States are “moving toward the “British model.” This model was described in the story as that of a Muslim who immigrates to the United Kingdom for an education, builds a life there and, after being radicalized, travels to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and then returns to the United Kingdom to launch an attack.

A close look at the history of jihadist plots in the United States and the operational models involved in orchestrating those plots suggests that this so-called British model is not confined to Great Britain. Indeed, a close look at people like Shahzad and Zazi through a historical prism reveals that they are clearly following a model of radicalization and action seen in the United States that predates jihadist attacks in the United Kingdom. In fact, in many U.K. terrorism cases, the perpetrators were the children of Muslim immigrants who were born in the United Kingdom, such as suicide bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain and cyberjihadist Younis Tsouli, and were not first-generation immigrants like Faisal Shahzad.

Now, this observation does not mean that we’re trying to take a cheap shot at the press. The objective here is to cut through the clutter and clearly explain the phenomenon of grassroots jihadism, outline its extensive history in the United States, note the challenges its operatives pose to counterterrorism agencies and discuss the weaknesses of such operatives. It is also important to remember that the proliferation of grassroots operatives in recent years is something that was clearly expected as a logical result of the devolution of the jihadist movement, a phenomenon that STRATFOR has closely followed for many years.

A Long History of Plots

Not long after it began, when the jihadist movement was beginning to move beyond Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal, it quickly appeared in the United States. In July 1990, influential jihadist preacher Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman (“the Blind Sheikh”) moved to New York and began speaking at mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City. After a rival was murdered, Rahman assumed control of the al-Kifah Refugee Center, an entity informally known in U.S. security circles as the “Brooklyn jihad office,” which recruited men to fight overseas and trained these aspiring jihadists at shooting ranges in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut before sending them to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The center also raised money to help fund these jihadist struggles. However, for the Blind Sheikh, jihad wasn’t an activity confined to Muslim lands. He issued fatwas authorizing attacks inside the United States and encouraged his followers to act locally. He didn’t have to wait long.

In November 1990, one of the Blind Sheikh’s followers, ElSayyid Nosair, gunned down Jewish political activist Meir Kahane in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel. Nosair, an Egyptian with a engineering degree, had moved to the United States in 1981 in search of a better life. He married an American woman, had children and became an American citizen in 1989. Several other men associated with the Brooklyn jihad office would go on to conduct the 1993 bombing attack on the World Trade Center. The following men had profiles similar to Nosair’s, i.e., they first came to the United States, established themselves and then became radicalized:

• Nosair’s cousin, Ibrahim Elgabrowny, was born in Egypt, married an American woman and was in the process of being naturalized at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing.
• Nidal Ayyad was a Palestinian born in Kuwait who immigrated to the United States in 1985 to study chemical engineering at Rutgers. Shortly after he graduated from Rutgers in 1991, he began working for AlliedSignal and became an American citizen.
• Mahmud Abouhalima was an Egyptian citizen who entered the United States on a tourist visa in 1985 and overstayed. He applied for amnesty and was granted permanent resident status in 1986. Abouhalima traveled to Afghanistan in 1988 to receive military training.
• Ahmed Ajaj was a Palestinian who entered the United States on a political asylum claim. He left the country under a false identity and traveled to Afghanistan where he received advanced training in bombmaking. He traveled back to the United States with Abdul Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef) to provide leadership and bombmaking skill to the cell of men associated with the Blind Sheikh who would go on to bomb the World Trade Center. Ajaj was arrested as he tried to enter the United States using an altered Swedish passport.

The following are some of the other notable jihadists involved in the long history of plots against the United States who have profiles similar to those of Zazi and Shahzad — and this list is by no means exhaustive:

• Sgt. Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian who immigrated to the United States in 1984 and received his citizenship after marrying an American woman. Mohammed enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as an instructor in Arabic culture at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, N.C. While serving in the U.S. Army, Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan where he reportedly fought the Soviets and trained jihadists. Mohammed also reportedly helped conduct surveillance of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi that were bombed in August 1998, and he pleaded guilty to his involvement in that plot in October 2000.
• Wadih el Hage, a Lebanese who immigrated to the United States in 1978 to study urban planning. El Hage married an American woman and became a naturalized citizen in 1989. He also traveled to Afghanistan for extended periods to participate in the jihad there, then in 1992 went to Sudan to work with Osama bin Laden. In 1994 el Hage moved to Nairobi, Kenya where he opened an Islamic charity (and al Qaeda branch office). El Hage was convicted in May of 2001 for participation in the East Africa embassy-bombings conspiracy.
• All six of the convicted Fort Dix plotters were foreign born. Agron Abdullahu, born in Turkey, and Serdar Tatar, born in Jordan, were naturalized U.S. citizens. Mohamed Shnewer and the three Duka brothers — Dritan, Eljvir and Shain — were ethnic Albanians who apparently entered the United States illegally over the Texas-Mexico border. The men became radicalized while living in the United States and were convicted in December 2008 for plotting to attack U.S. military personnel at Fort Dix, N.J.
• Syed Haris Ahmed, a naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan. In 1996, his parents immigrated to the United States, where Ahmed became a student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, majoring in mechanical engineering. He reportedly traveled to Canada in March 2005 with a friend, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, to meet with a group of other aspiring jihadists to plan attacks. Sadequee is a native-born American citizen whose parents came to the United States from Bangladesh. The two were convicted in 2009 for providing material support to terrorists. Ahmed received a 13-year prison sentence and Sadequee was sentenced to 17 years.

A Well-Established Pattern

Clearly, the pattern exhibited in recent cases by suspects such as Shahzad and Zazi is nothing new to the United States. It has been around since 1990, long before similar cases began to appear in the United Kingdom. Indeed, as we have discussed for several years now, an increase in the number of such operatives was to be anticipated as the jihadist movement devolved from a phenomenon based upon al Qaeda the group (which we call al Qaeda prime) toward one based on the wider jihadist movement. As al Qaeda prime was battered by efforts to destroy it, the group lost its place at the vanguard of jihadism on the physical battlefield. This change means that the primary jihadist threat to the West now emanates from regional jihadist groups and grassroots operatives and not al Qaeda prime.

Of course, while this devolution is a sign of success, it also presents challenges for counterterrorism practitioners. Grassroots operatives are nothing if not ambiguous. They are decentralized, can be insular, and they might not be meaningfully connected to the command, control and communication mechanism of any known militant groups or actors. This makes them exceedingly hard to identify, let alone pre-empt, before they carry out an attack. Government bureaucracies do not do well in dealing with ambiguity, and it is common to see grassroots operatives who had received some degree of government scrutiny at some point but were not identified as significant threats before they launched their attacks. This problem is even more pronounced if the grassroots operative is a lone wolf who does not seek any type of outside assistance or guidance.

But the security provided by this ambiguity comes at a price, and this is what we refer to as the grassroots paradox. The paradox is that decentralization helps conceal militant actors, but it also frequently results in a diminished attack capability. Traditionally, one of the biggest problems for small cells and lone-wolf operatives is acquiring the skills necessary to conduct a successful terrorist attack. Even though many websites and military manuals can provide instruction on such things as hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship, there is no substitute for hands-on experience in the real world. This is especially true when it comes to the more subtle skills required to conduct a complex terrorist attack, such as planning, surveillance and bombmaking. Many grassroots operatives also tend to lack the ability to realistically assess their low level of terrorist tradecraft or understand the limitations their lack of tradecraft presents. Because of this, they frequently attempt to conduct ambitious attacks that are far beyond their limited capabilities. These factors help explain why so few lone wolves and small cells have been able to pull off spectacular, mass-casualty attacks.

In recent months we have seen a message from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula urging grassroots jihadists to conduct simple attacks. This call was echoed by al Qaeda prime in a message from Adam Gadahn released on March 7. The message from Gadahn counseled jihadists against traveling to training camps in places like Pakistan or Yemen and advised them not to coordinate their attacks with others who could prove to be government agents or informants.

Now, neither Zazi nor Shahzad heeded this advice, and both reportedly attended some sort of training courses in Pakistan. But while these training courses may have taught them some basic concepts, the training clearly did not adequately prepare them to function as bombmakers upon their return to the United States. It is doubtful that self-trained operatives would be much more effective — there are subtle skills associated with bombmaking and preoperational surveillance that simply cannot be learned by watching YouTube or reading manuals. Nevertheless, while the threat posed by grassroots jihadists and lone wolves is less severe than that posed by highly trained militant operatives from the core al Qaeda group or its regional franchises, lesser-trained operatives can still kill people — remember Maj. Nidal Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad.

And they also will most certainly continue to do so. Given the large number of grassroots plots that have emerged over the past two years, it is very likely that there are several individuals and groups working on attack plans in the United States and elsewhere at this very moment and some of these plots could prove more successful than Shahzad’s ill-fated attempt. As in the failed Christmas Day airliner bombing, the only thing that kept Shahzad from succeeding was his own lack of ability, not any sort of counterterrorism operation.

This grim truth illustrates the pressing need for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the West to focus on identifying potential attackers before they can launch their attacks. The good news for security personnel is that grassroots operatives, whether they are lone wolves or part of a small cell, often lack street skills and tend to be very haphazard while conducting preoperational surveillance. While these individuals are in many ways more difficult to identify before an attack than operatives who communicate with, or are somehow connected to, jihadist groups, their amateurish methods tend to make them more vulnerable to detection while conducting operational activities than more highly skilled operatives. Therefore, a continued, proactive focus on identifying the “how” of attack planning — such as looking for preoperational surveillance — is of vital importance. This increase in situational awareness should extend not only to protective intelligence and counterterrorism professionals but also to street cops and even civilians (like the street vendor who brought Shahzad’s device to the attention of authorities). Sometimes, a grassroots threat can be most effectively countered by grassroots defenders.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

This week’s Geopolitical Intelligence Report provided a high-level assessment of the economic forces that affect how the Mexican people and the Mexican government view the flow of narcotics through that country. Certainly at that macro level, there is a lot of money flowing into Mexico and a lot of people, from bankers and businessmen to political parties and politicians, are benefiting from the massive influx of cash. The lure of this lucre shapes how many Mexicans (particularly many of the Mexican elite) view narcotics trafficking. It is, frankly, a good time to be a banker, a real estate developer or a Rolex dealer in Mexico.

However, at the tactical level, there are a number of issues also shaping the opinions of many Mexicans regarding narcotics trafficking, including violence, corruption and rapidly rising domestic narcotics consumption. At this level, people are being terrorized by running gunbattles, mass beheadings and rampant kidnappings — the types of events that STRATFOR covers in our Mexico Security Memos.

Mexican elites have the money to buy armored cars and hire private security guards. But rampant corruption in the security forces means the common people seemingly have nowhere to turn for help at the local level (not an uncommon occurrence in the developing world). The violence is also having a heavy impact on Mexico’s tourist sector and on the willingness of foreign companies to invest in Mexico’s manufacturing sector. Many smaller business owners are being hit from two sides — they receive extortion demands from criminals while facing a decrease in revenue due to a drop in tourism because of the crime and violence. These citizens and businessmen are demanding help from Mexico City.

These two opposing forces — the inexorable flow of huge quantities of cash and the pervasive violence, corruption and fear — are placing a tremendous amount of pressure on the Calderon administration. And this pressure will only increase as Mexico moves closer to the 2012 presidential elections (President Felipe Calderon was the law-and-order candidate and was elected in 2006 in large part due to his pledge to end cartel violence). Faced by these forces, Calderon needs to find a way to strike a delicate balance, one that will reassert Mexican government authority, quell the violence and mollify the public while also allowing the river of illicit cash to continue flowing into Mexico.

An examination of the historical dynamics of the narcotics trade in Mexico reveals that in order for the violence to stop, there needs to be a balance among the various drug-trafficking organizations involved in the trade. New dynamics have begun to shape the narcotics business in Mexico, and they are causing that balance to be very elusive. For the Calderon administration, desperate times may have called for desperate measures.

The Balance

The laws of economics dictate that narcotics will continue to flow into the United States. The mission of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations and the larger cartels they form is to attempt to control as much of that flow as they can. The people who run the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are businessmen. Historically, their primary objective is to move their product (narcotics) without being caught and to make a lot of money in the process. The Mexican drug lords have traditionally attempted to conduct this business quietly, efficiently and with the least amount of friction.

When there is a kind of competitive business balance among these various organizations, a sort of detente prevails and there is relative peace. We say relative, because there has always been a level of tension and some level of violence among these organizations, but during times of balance the violence is kept in check for business reasons.

During times of balance, the territorial boundaries are well-established, the smuggling corridors are secure, the drugs flow and the people make money. When that balance is lost and an organization is weakened — especially an organization that controls one or more valuable smuggling corridors — a vicious fight can develop as other organizations move in and try to exert control over the territory and as the incumbent organization attempts to fight them off and retain control of its turf. Smuggling corridors are geographically significant places along the narcotics supply chain where the product is channeled — places such as ports, airstrips, significant highways and border crossings. Control of these significant channels (often referred to as “plazas” by the drug-trafficking organizations) is very important to an organization’s ability to move contraband. If it doesn’t control a corridor it wants to use, it must pay the organization that does control it.

In past decades, this turbulence was normally short lived. When there was a fight between the organizations or cartels, there would be a period of intense violence and then the balance between them would either be restored to the status quo ante or a new balance between the organizations would be reached. For example, when the Guadalajara cartel dissolved following the 1989 arrest of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, and the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO) and the Sinaloa cartel emerged from the Guadalajara cartel to fill the power vacuum, there was a brief period of tension, but once balance was achieved, the violence ebbed — and business returned to normal. However, the old model of cartel conflicts has changed. The current round of inter- and intra-cartel violence has raged for nearly a decade and has intensified rather than abated; there appears to be no end in sight. In fact, death tolls are far higher today than they were five years ago.

This inability of the cartels to reach a state of balance is due to several factors. First is the change of products. Mexican drug cartels have long moved marijuana into the United States, but the increase in the amount of cocaine being moved through Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s changed the dynamic — cocaine is far more compact and far more lucrative than marijuana. Cocaine is also a “strategic narcotic,” one that has a transnational supply chain far longer than drugs like marijuana or methamphetamine, and that long supply chain is difficult to guard. Because of this, organizations involved in the cocaine trade tend to be more aggressive and violent than those that smuggle drugs with a shorter supply chain like marijuana and Mexican opium.

At first, Mexican cartels like the Guadalajara cartel only smuggled cocaine through their smuggling routes into the United States on behalf of the more powerful Colombian cartels, which were seeking alternate routes to replace the Caribbean smuggling routes that had been largely shut down by American air and sea interdiction efforts. Over time, however, these Mexican cartels grew richer and more powerful from the proceeds of the cocaine trade, and they began to take on an expanded role in cocaine trafficking. The efforts of the Colombian government to dismantle the large (and violent) organizations like the Medellin and Cali cartels also allowed the Mexicans to assume more control over the cocaine supply line. Today, Mexican cartels control much of the cocaine supply chain, with their influence reaching down into South America and up into the United States. This expanded control of the supply chain brought with it a larger slice of the profits for the Mexican cartels, so they have become even more rich and powerful.

Of course, this large quantity of illicit income also brings risk with it. The massive profits that can be made by controlling a smuggling corridor into the United States are a tempting lure to competitors (internal and external). This means that the cartels require enforcers to protect their personnel and operations. These enforcers and the escalation of violence they brought with them are a second factor that has hampered the ability of the cartels to reach a balance.

Initially, some of the cartel bosses served as their own muscle, but as time went by and the business need for violence increased, the cartels brought in hired help to carry out the enforcement function. The first cartel to do this on a large scale was the AFO (a very aggressive organization), which used active and current police officers and youth gangs (some of them actually from the U.S. side of the border) as enforcers. To counter the AFO’s innovation and strength, rival cartels soon hired their own muscle. The Juarez cartel created its own band of police called La Linea and the Gulf cartel took things yet another step and hired Los Zetas, a group of elite anti-drug paratroopers who deserted their federal Special Air Mobile Force Group in the late 1990s.

The Gulf cartel’s private special operations unit raised the bar yet another notch, and the Sinaloa cartel formed its own paramilitary unit called Los Negros to counter the strength of Los Zetas. With paramilitary forces comes military armament, and cartel enforcers graduated from using pistols and submachine guns to regularly employing fully automatic assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades. As we have previously noted, thugs with such weapons do pose a threat, but when those weapons are in the hands of highly-trained gunmen with the ability to operate as an integrated unit, the threat is far greater.

The life of a cartel enforcer can be brutish and short. In order to find additional personnel to beef up their ranks, the various cartel enforcer units formed outside alliances. Los Zetas worked with former Guatemalan special forces commandos called Kaibiles and with the Mara Salvatrucha street gang (MS-13). La Linea formed a close alliance with the American Barrio Azteca street gang and with Los Aztecas, the gang’s Mexican branch. Cartels also recruit heavily, and it is now common to see them place “help wanted” signs in which they offer soldiers and police officers big money if they will quit their jobs and join a cartel enforcer unit.

In times of intense combat, the warriors in a criminal organization can begin to eclipse the group’s businessmen in terms of importance, and over the past decade the enforcers within groups like the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have become very powerful. In fact, groups like Los Zetas and Los Negros have become powerful enough to split from their parent organizations and, essentially, form their own independent drug-trafficking organizations. This inter-cartel struggle has proved quite deadly as seen in the struggle between AFO factions in Tijuana over the past year and in the more recent eruption of violence between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas in northeastern Mexico.

This weakening of the traditional cartels was part of the Calderon administration’s publicized plan to reduce the power of the drug traffickers and to deny any one organization or cartel the ability to become more powerful than the state. The plan appears to have worked to some extent, and the powerful Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have splintered, as has the AFO. The fruit of this policy, however, has been incredible spikes in violence and the proliferation of aggressive new drug-trafficking organizations that have made it very difficult for any type of equilibrium to be reached. So the Mexican government’s policies have also been a factor in destabilizing the balance.

Finding a Fulcrum

The current round of cartel fighting began when the balance of cartel power was thrown off by the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes in 1997, which resulted in the weakening of the once powerful Juarez cartel. Shortly after the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka El Chapo, escaped from prison in 2001, he began a push to move in on the weakened Juarez cartel. Guzman initially succeeded and the Juarez cartel became part of the Sinaloa Federation until the two cartels had a falling out in 2004.

Then when the chief enforcer of the AFO, Ramon Arellano Felix, was killed in 2002, both the Sinaloa and the Gulf cartels attempted to wrest control of Tijuana from the AFO. Finally, when Gulf cartel kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen was captured in March 2003, the Sinaloa cartel sent Los Negros to attempt to take control of the Gulf cartel’s territory, and this sparked a series of violent clashes in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. The BLO’s top enforcer, Edgar Valdez Villarreal (La Barbie), led Los Negros into Nuevo Laredo.

These same basic turf wars are still active, meaning that there is still ongoing violence in Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, but as noted above, the actors are changing, with organizations like Los Zetas breaking out of the Gulf cartel and the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) parting ways with the Sinaloa cartel. Indeed, the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels have joined forces with La Familia Michoacana (LFM) to form a new super cartel called the New Federation and are now allies in the struggle against Los Zetas and the BLO, which have teamed up with the Juarez cartel to fight against the New Federation. One constant in the violence of the past decade has been the aggressiveness of the Sinaloa cartel as it has sought to take territory from other cartels and organizations.

In the midst of the current cartel landscape, which has radically shifted over the past year, it is difficult for any type of balance to be found. There are also very few levers with which the Calderon government can apply pressure to help force the shifting pieces into alignment. In the near term, perhaps the only hope for striking a balance and reducing the violence is that the New Federation is strong enough to kill off organizations like Los Zetas, the BLO and the Juarez cartel and assert calm through sheer force. However, while the massed forces of the New Federation initially made some significant headway against Los Zetas, the former special operations personnel appear to have rallied, and Los Zetas’ tactical skills and arms make them unlikely to be defeated easily.

There have been many rumors that the New Federation, in its fight against Los Zetas, was being helped by the Mexican government. (Some of those rumors have come from the New Federation itself.) During the New Federation’s offensive against Los Zetas, federation enforcers have been seen driving around Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo in vehicles openly marked with signs indicating they belonged to the New Federation. While far from conclusive proof of government assistance, the well-marked vehicles certainly do seem to support the cartel’s assertion that, at the very least, the government did not want to interfere with the federation’s operation to destroy Los Zetas.

When pieced together with other observations gathered during the cartel wars, this also suggests that the Sinaloa cartel may have consistently benefited from the government’s actions. These actions would include taking out the BLO leadership after the Beltran Leyva brothers turned against Sinaloa and the government’s success against La Linea and Los Aztecas in Juarez. There are also occasional contraindications, such as the recent large-scale attacks against military bases in the northeast that appear to have been conducted by the New Federation.

Despite these contraindications, the cartels fighting the New Federation believe the government favors the group, and there have long been rumors that Calderon was somehow tied to El Chapo. The Juarez cartel may have recently taken some desperate steps to counter what it perceives to be a dire threat of government and New Federation cooperation. A local Juarez newspaper, El Diario, recently published an article discussing a Los Aztecas member who had been detained and interrogated by the Mexican military and federal police in connection with the murders of three U.S. Consulate employees in Juarez in March. During the interrogation, according to El Diario, the Los Aztecas member divulged that a decision was made by leaders in the Barrio Azteca gang and Juarez cartel to engage U.S. citizens in the Juarez area in an effort to force the U.S. government to intervene in Mexico and therefore act as a “neutral referee,” thereby helping to counter the Mexican government’s favoritism toward the New Federation.

Of course, it is highly possible that the Sinaloa cartel is just a superior cartel and is better at using the authorities as a weapon against its adversaries. On the other hand, perhaps the increasingly desperate government has decided to use Sinaloa and the New Federation as a fulcrum to restore balance to the narcotics trade and reduce the violence across Mexico.

In any case, we will be closely watching the activities of the New Federation and the Mexican government over the next several months to see if this hypothesis is correct. Much hangs in the balance for Calderon, the Mexican people and their American neighbors.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR.

According to AP, “The abuse cases of two priests in Arizona have cast further doubt on the Catholic church’s insistence that Pope Benedict XVI played no role in shielding pedophiles before he became pope. Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, Arizona, then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood. In another Tucson case, that of Msgr. Robert Trupia,” files held no sign  that Ratzinger paid any attention “to a letter from Bishop Manuel Moreno calling Trupia ‘a major risk factor to the children, adolescents and adults that he many have contact with.’”

Meanwhile the New York Times let’s us know about the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who in 1974 “was sent to retire” in Boulder Junction, WI, “after victims of sexual abuse demanded he be removed from work at a school for the deaf near Milwaukee.” However, his abuse of children may have continued. “Recent interviews with people who live in the area and Roman Catholic Church documents” suggest that Murphy, “who is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at the school near Milwaukee, also used his family’s lakefront cottage as a lure in his sexual advances, bringing youths from the school into his home beginning at least in the early 1960s. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee, said that Father Murphy was placed on certain restrictions upon leaving Milwaukee that included not having any contact with children and that ‘he ignored the restrictions.’”

“The bankruptcy trustee for defunct law firm Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler contends the government has once again overstepped its bounds by trying to control additional assets that belonged to convicted fraudster Scott Rothstein. On Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a motion seeking a protective order be entered to preserve new assets, including four Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler bank accounts at TD Bank containing almost $120,000 and ‘all property, other than ‘funds’ voluntarily turned over to the government since news broke in late October that Rothstein was running a settlement scheme out of his law firm. But trustee Herbert Stettin argued that the government could not lay claim to assets that don’t belong to Rothstein and were not included for forfeiture in the original information, calling the motion ‘particularly egregious,’” according to Daily Business Review.

On March 29, an indictment accusing nine individuals of planning attacks against police officers was unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Those named in the indictment had been arrested by a joint anti-terrorism task force consisting of the FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and state and local police. Raids took place from March 27 to 29, with most of the arrests occurring in Washtenaw County in southeastern Michigan, near the border with Ohio. Other arrests took place in Ohio and Indiana. Photos and video of the raids showed special operations police staging outside targeted properties with armored personnel carriers, assault rifles and helicopter support — unusually overwhelming measures, likely taken because of suspicion that the group was plotting to kill police officers.

The individuals referred to themselves as “Hutarees,” a name meaning “Christian Soldiers” according to the group’s Web site, although it is unclear what language the word might come from. The federal indictment indicated that the apparent leader of the group, David Brian Stone, was known to make up names for tactical operations and maneuvers, so it is likely he coined the name of the group as well. The meaning given the term reflects the group’s extremist Christian beliefs and its claims that it was preparing to defend itself and others in the name of Christianity. According to the Hutaree Web site:

Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment … We, the Hutaree, are prepared to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t. We will still spread the word, and fight to keep it, up to the time of the great coming.

All the task force raids transpired and ended peacefully, with one of the members, Joshua Matthew Stone, David’s son, holding out the longest. All nine individuals were charged Monday with seditious conspiracy; attempts to use weapons of mass destruction; teaching and demonstrating the use of explosive materials; and carrying a firearm for criminal violence. According to the indictment, the nine individuals trained in small-unit paramilitary tactics and acquired and trained with firearms, live ammunition, explosives, uniforms, communication equipment and medical supplies. It consisted of two units, one led by David Stone and the other led by his son Joshua, and the two units met and trained together roughly once a month. Another son, David Brian Stone Jr., served as the militia’s explosives instructor and demonstrator.

The most incriminating act the group committed was plotting to kill police officers by luring them into a trap. The group was planning to cause a police traffic stop or fake a 911 call and attack the responding officers, then follow up with more attacks during the official funerals that would follow. The indictment also accuses the elder David Brian Stone of instructing the group to kill anyone who happened upon and did not acquiesce to the group during an exercise set to take place in April 2010. This overt and imminent threat likely precipitated the raid that led to the arrests in late March. The group allegedly intended to trigger a larger uprising against the U.S. government in response to Hutaree activities, a charge that carries connotations of terrorism.

A Lack of Operational Security

Federal charges against the Hutarees relate to events as far back as August 2008, approximately when the group began plotting against the federal government, according to the indictment. It is unclear exactly how federal investigators collected information on the group, although it is not too difficult to imagine, given the group’s relatively high profile. For one thing, it maintained a Web site with photos of members, scheduled meeting times and forums where members and visitors could post comments and communicate with each other. This made it very easy for anyone to find the group and initiate contact with it, which in turn made it an easy target for enforcement.

The group displayed on its Web site and in a YouTube video footage of members training in small-unit tactics, images that never depicted more than six or seven people at a time. A group photo on their Web site shows 17 people, presumably the entire Hutaree membership, a relatively small group for a militia. The videos show them patrolling through woodlands and conducting small-arms firing exercises from behind vehicles. One video shows a mock-up of an improvised explosive device being detonated by a man crossing a tripwire and “killing” him, a demonstration that substantiates the accusation in the indictment that the group was attempting to acquire explosive materials and construct improvised explosive devices. In that same video, members of the group are seen setting fire to the UN flag and raising a flag bearing their own Hutaree insignia: an “H” overlaying a cross with two crossed spears at the bottom. However, the weapons displayed by the group varied: Some members brandished semi-automatic assault rifles while others held bolt-action hunting rifles. The lack of weapon standardization indicates that the group was still operating at a low level of organization.

The group was also thought to have had connections with other militias in the region. The federal indictment specifically mentions a meeting with several other groups that Hutarees planned to attend Feb. 6 in Kentucky. The meeting was meant to “facilitate better communications, cooperation, and coordination between the various militias.” Such contact with other militias is probably what emboldened the Hutarees to expect a coordinated uprising from these groups when the Hutarees started their offensive against the U.S. government. Although representatives of the group were ultimately unable to attend the February meeting, their intention to go indicates that they communicated with other groups in the region, and this would have increased the number of people who knew about them and could report on their activities. (In fact, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Detroit field office, Andrew Arena, confirmed that an outside militia member had gone to the FBI after interacting with the Hutaree group.) It also means that the group likely engaged in e-mail and/or telephone contact with outsiders, which would allow law enforcement authorities to keep tabs on the group’s thoughts and plans.

Finally, one of the arrested individuals, Kristopher Sickles, had been a guest numerous times on nationally syndicated radio shows, once in August 2009 under the pseudonym “Pale Horse.” Publicly, Sickles associated himself with the Ohio militia, a fact that, when combined with details from the indictment, indicates that the group was not necessarily exclusive and that members of the Hutarees also trained with other groups in the region. The fact that the Hutarees trained together only once a month gave members ample opportunity to be involved in other militia activities. The fact that Hutaree members associated with other groups is not surprising; it would have helped them expand the movement and improve communications. But it would also have undermined the authority of any one group and prevented a clear hierarchy from forming, since the foot soldiers would not have answered to any one commander. This sort of dynamic dilutes any one group’s potency and leaves it more vulnerable to detection.

In his radio talk-show interviews, Sickles claimed he and his compatriots were “practicing their constitutional rights” by collecting firearms and ammunition and encouraging others to do so as well, emphasizing the need to “be prepared.” When asked what he was preparing for, Sickles named the economic crisis and the threat of U.S. involvement in more foreign wars while alluding to certain unanticipated and unnamed threats. He did not advocate the radical Christian ideology that was put forward by other members of the Hutarees and certainly did not publicly advocate attacking law enforcement officers.

The Risk of Going Public

Maintaining such a public profile greatly reduces the ability of any group to carry out surprise attacks on police officers and opens the group to infiltration. Sure enough, the federal indictment alludes to at least one case in which David Brian Stone sent diagrams and information on explosive devices over the Internet to “a person he believed capable of manufacturing the devices,” wording that indicates that either the FBI was using a source or an undercover agent had convinced Stone that he was an explosives expert who could help them. Such a source would be able to keep tabs on the group and draw them out. This tactic is extremely common in domestic counterterrorism cases involving Islamist militants and shows how the terrorist attack cycle is vulnerable, no matter who the actors are. Other cases, such as the Newburgh, N.Y., plot, involved law enforcement penetration into the suspected group and promises to deliver explosive material.

Successful domestic terror attacks require a high degree of isolation on the part of the operatives. The more people brought in to assist with the operation and become familiar with the group’s intentions, the higher the group’s risk of discovery. Unlike successful domestic terrorists before them, like Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski, the Hutarees failed spectacularly at maintaining isolation, and this allowed authorities to penetrate their circle and maintain surveillance, thus mitigating any threat they posed.

The targets that the Hutarees had identified were police officers, who themselves are vulnerable targets (as seen in the fatal shootings in Seattle in November 2009), and considering the tactics the Hutarees devised to lure officers in and the arsenal they possessed, they certainly posed a risk. However, the degree of publicity that the Hutarees generated indicates that they were not practicing good tradecraft when it came to operational security — making the group an easy target for federal law enforcement agencies. This is an Achilles’ heel for many militant and criminal conspiratorial plots, especially plots originating inside the United States, where federal, state and local agencies are able to monitor a group’s e-mail, voice communications and activities.

This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR