Review: Thinking Sort of Like a Terrorist

Thinking Like a Terrorist
Mike German
Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2008

In Thinking Like a Terrorist former FBI agent Mike German applies his undercover experience infiltrating domestic white supremacists to offering universal truths and policy advice for a country he considers misguided in the war on terror. The author begins with a definitional arabesque about how one country’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. Eventually, though, he produces food for thought.

This is the meat. German argues that the end game for terrorists is not spectacular massacres but a political victory attained by maneuvering their targets into oppressive measures that ultimately turn popular sympathy in the terrorists’ favor. This strategy is a contest for legitimacy. The terrorists’ audience begins with its own constituency, or identity group, blending the radicalized and the indifferent majority of a group sharing a religion, ethnicity, or other unifying feature. As the targeted government overreacts to terrorist attack, it institutes more and more repressive measures, often at the expense of the identity group. Ultimately, the government cedes legitimacy, yielding the moral high ground to the terrorists, who exploit the situation to prove their case and appear as the more injured party before an increasingly hospitable world stage. The targeted government falling into this trap may win battles but, ultimately, the terrorists win the war. The only way to avoid this pitfall, as German has it, is to investigate and prosecute terrorists as criminals, thereby denying them a platform and the legitimacy they crave.

This reasoning avails, up to a point. That point is where the author saturates every dish with this same sauce: investigate and prosecute. Having investigated and supported prosecution of white supremacists before they carried out domestic attacks, German makes this approach his only hammer and sees every terrorist as a nail.

German concedes little previous exposure to counterintelligence or classified information. So how does he address their role in the war on terror? He dismisses them. Everything done in secret must lack sufficient oversight. Another analyst, Benjamin Netanyahu, anticipated German by a dozen years but thought otherwise. Netanyahu credited successful defenses against terrorist groups by European countries which had to resort temporarily to secret tribunals and special police powers without jeopardizing the civil liberties that German holds dear.[1] In France, for example, secret tribunals to judge terrorists proved more useful than dead or intimidated judges and juries.

German’s offhand dismissal of security measures as wasteful (p. 181) is equally one-sided. He dwells on poor security spending without addressing the value of engaging the public in its own defense. By contrast, others who share German’s concerns instead counsel public awareness and involvement in meeting security threats, declaring, “We are all citizen soldiers.”[2] Similarly, Israeli security specialists like Tomer Benito, having defended critical infrastructure and airliners from Palestinian terrorists, now teach Americans to detect and deter possible terror attacks at the early phase of target selection – without waiting to investigate and prosecute, as German would prefer.[3]

Thinking Like a Terrorist offers food for thought, not a complete meal.

- Nick Catrantzos


Notes: 1. Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism (Collingdale: Diane Publishing Company, 1995) pp7-10. Netanyahu, publishing the book shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing and before his rise to Prime Minister of Israel, also explains how Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigades, and Japanese Red Army terrorists remained marginalized in their respective societies, without gaining public sympathy. Evidently, the author’s interest in terrorism is rooted in personal tragedy and his founding of the Jonathan Institute in Israel to study terrorism. Jonathan Netanyahu, Benjamin’s brother, led the raid to Entebbe, Uganda, which succeeded in freeing Israeli hostages with only a single Israeli casualty, Jonathan Netanyahu himself.
2. Joseph A. Ruffini, When Terror Comes to Main Street, (Denver: Archangel Group, 2006) p. 183.
3. From “Art of Deterrence” workshop, February 27 – March 1, 2007, Los Angeles, by Tomer Benito, principal, Synergy. A former El Al security officer, Benito now teaches target selection, protective response, and anti-terrorist approaches from the Israeli point of view.

The Dark Side of Subsidized Security

In a culture where more is automatically better, it may seem blasphemous to suggest that too much funding undermines security. Counterintuitive, perhaps. Even scandalous. Yet, sadly, true.

Anyone in the protection business has by now accumulated at least a handful of war stories about pet projects funded under the banner of Homeland Security, whether via federal grant or misguided private sector largesse. The insidious nature of subsidized security, however, extends far beyond the Homeland Security realm. Yet the pattern is often common, regardless of the circumstances. A security practitioner championing a worthy cause discovers a funding stream. With a combination of skill and luck, the practitioner obtains outside funding to jumpstart his or her program. What was a one-time windfall begins to feel like an entitlement. It becomes indispensable, and so the primary focus begins to shift away from the original security objective. Soon, the focus becomes grantsmanship and the best efforts go to capture strategies for that next grant check. In the process, security suffers. Reputations suffer and careers end abruptly when abuses surface.

Case in Point: A violence prevention program at a northern campus of the University of California earned a million dollars in federal funding. In order to obtain this funding, an aggressive program manager apparently felt obligated to falsify official crime statistics. Else, how does one account for a campus in the Sacramento suburb of Davis having twice the sexual assaults of its counterpart UC campus in Los Angeles? Details are in this expose' http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/2227823.html?mi_rss=Our%2520Region

Such misconduct is not original. What makes this story interesting is a subtle indicator of institutional complicity or lack of due diligence and reasonable scrutiny. How do we know? As the article reveals, "UC Davis officials said they didn't know why the longtime employee would do it. On Friday, they made it clear they had not asked her to explain her actions." Moreover, the same officials first suspended the individual behind the falsification of crime statistics and then retroactively changed the suspension into medical leave, after which the shamed program manager was able to retire. An attentive reporter figured out that employees suspended on medical leave are immune from disciplinary action unless they return to work. Since this employee did not return to work but retired, the institutional beneficiaries of the grant money were spared the discomfort of the investigation that would be necessary to support any discipline of one employee.

Did the university at least initiate the suspension based on the falsification of crime statistics -- a federal offense? No. As it happens, the misconduct that triggered the suspension (that later became medical leave) was overbilling on travel expenses. Thus we find that cheating in one area offers no immunity from cheating in another. And it now falls to the non-abusers to remove the tarnish from what is otherwise reportedly a commendable program.

- Nick Catrantzos