Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance
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199 pages
English

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Description

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb in downtown Oslo, Norway. He didn't stop there, traveling several hours from the city to ambush a youth camp while the rest of Norway was distracted by his earlier attack. That's where the facts end. But what motivated him? Did he have help staging the attacks? The evidence suggests a startling truth: that this was the work of one man, pursuing a mission he was convinced was just.


If Breivik did indeed act alone, he wouldn't be the first. Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City based essentially on his own motivations. Eric Robert Rudolph embarked on a campaign of terror over several years, including the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Olympics. Ted Kaczynski was revealed to be the Unabomber that same year. And these are only the most notable examples. As George Michael demonstrates in Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance, they are not isolated cases. Rather, they represent the new way warfare will be conducted in the twenty-first century.


Lone Wolf Terror investigates the motivations of numerous political and ideological elements, such as right-wing individuals, ecoextremists, foreign jihadists, and even quasi-governmental entities. In all these cases, those carrying out destructive acts operate as "lone wolves" and small cells, with little or no connection to formal organizations. Ultimately, Michael suggests that leaderless resistance has become the most common tactical approach of political terrorists in the West and elsewhere.

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Publié par
Date de parution 15 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780826518576
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance
Lone Wolf Terror and the Rise of Leaderless Resistance
George Michael
Vanderbilt University Press Nashville
2012 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2012
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2011046021
LC classification HV6431.M483 2012
Dewey class number 363.325-dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1855-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-1857-6 (e-book)
For Wolfgang Vladimir
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Evolution of Warfare, Conflict, and Strategy
2 Leaderless Resistance and the Extreme Right
3 Ecoextremism and the Radical Animal Liberation Movement
4 The Strategic Implications of the New World Order
5 The Wiki Revolution and the New People Power
6 Weapons of Mass Destruction and Leaderless Resistance
7 The Global Islamic Resistance Movement
Conclusion: Fifth-Generation Warfare and Leaderless Resistance
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Several people assisted me in this study. I would like to thank all those who granted me interviews for this book, including Thomas P. M. Barnett, Harold Covington, Alan Dershowitz, Francis Fukuyama, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Rohan Gunaratna, Michael V. Hayden, Christopher Hewitt, the late Frederick Ikl , Anthony Joes, Edward Luttwak, Darren Mulloy, the late William L. Pierce, Paul Pillar, Daniel Pipes, John Robb, Martin van Creveld, and Laird Wilcox. Christopher Hewitt and Darren Mulloy offered suggestions on the manuscript that were very helpful.
I would also like to thank the staff at Vanderbilt University Press. I extend my special thanks to Eli Bortz for having confidence in this project. I greatly appreciate the editorial efforts of Ed Huddleston. Finally, I thank the University of Virginia s College at Wise and the Air Force Counterproliferation Center for allowing me time to complete this book.
Introduction
The face of terrorism is undergoing considerable change. There is a noticeable trend indicating the increasing frequency of lone wolf attacks by individuals and small cells with little or no connections to formal organizations. In the past few years, numerous lone wolf incidents carried out by assorted radicals have gained headlines. For instance, in April 2009, Richard A. Poplawski, a man who expressed racist views on extremist websites, fired on police in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing three officers. 1 Just a few weeks after that, an antiabortion activist, Scott Roeder, murdered a physician who performed late-term abortions. 2 In June of that year, a little-known but long-standing right-wing extremist, James von Brunn, opened fire at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., killing a guard. 3 In November, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Virginia-born Muslim psychiatrist in the US Army, allegedly went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed thirteen people and left thirty-eight wounded. 4
More incidents followed in 2010. On February 18, Joseph Stack, a fifty-three-year-old software engineer and tax protester, slammed his private plane into a building in Austin, Texas, that housed offices of the IRS, triggering a massive fireball that set the edifice ablaze and killed Stack and an IRS manager. 5 And on May 1, Faisal Shahzad, a seemingly upright and assimilated computer technician, a US citizen who lived in Connecticut but was born in Pakistan, attempted to detonate three bombs in an SUV parked in the heart of Times Square in New York City. Although he reportedly made contact with the Pakistani Taliban during a trip to Pakistan in 2008, after his arrest Shahzad insisted that he had acted entirely alone while in the United States. 6
Lone wolf terrorism is not confined to the United States, as was tragically displayed on July 22, 2011, when a bomb placed in a Volkswagen exploded in Oslo, Norway, near the offices of the prime minister and other government buildings. The blast killed eight people and seriously injured eleven others. Less than two hours later, a lone gunman disguised as a police officer struck a summer camp operated by the youth organization of the liberal Norwegian Labour Party on the island of Ut ya in Tyrifjorden. The second attack left sixty-eight people dead, many of them teenagers. The admitted perpetrator of both attacks, Anders Behring Breivik, had previously expressed anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiments on a website. In an online manifesto, Breivik counseled fellow travelers to emulate his terrorism by acting alone on their own initiative. 7 Ominously, his style of lone wolf terrorism suggests a high degree of planning and calculation, which could portend greater lethality of such attacks in the future. Breivik maintained no affiliations with hardcore extremists, though he was once briefly affiliated with a youth organization associated with the Far Right group Norwegian Progress, and he was not on the authorities radar screen. Having no criminal record other than minor offenses, he was able to procure firearms and fertilizer for making his bomb without raising red flags. His attacks came out of nowhere. 8
The increased frequency of these lone wolf attacks indicates a shift from terrorism by organized groups to terrorism by unaffiliated individuals. 9 To meet the challenge of seemingly random attacks such as these, in the summer of 2009 US authorities announced an effort to detect lone wolves who might be contemplating politically charged violence. Dubbed the Lone Wolf Initiative, it began shortly after the inauguration of President Barack Obama and was launched in part because of a perceived rise in hate speech and increasing gun sales. 10 As reported, the Lone Wolf Initiative is one aspect of a broader strategy to combat domestic terrorism dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle. 11 As early as 1998, the FBI publicly announced that fringe groups could be planning attacks on their own initiative, as in the case of Eric Robert Rudolph, who supposedly drifted in and out of white supremacist groups before embarking on his one-man campaign of violence, which included bombing abortion clinics, a gay bar, and the Centennial Park at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.
For obvious reasons, since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), the US government has been focused mainly on well-established terrorist groups, such as al Qaeda. However, recent lone wolf attacks suggest that leaderless resistance is becoming the most common form of terrorism in the United States and elsewhere in the West. In essence, leaderless resistance involves a kind of lone wolf operation in which an individual or a very small, cohesive group engages in terrorism independent of any official movement, leader, or support network. 12 To be effective, leaderless resistance assumes that many individuals and groups hold a common ideology and are willing to act on shared views in a violent or confrontational manner.
Despite these episodes of sporadic violence, some observers dismiss leaderless resistance as primarily a nuisance that poses no substantial or existential threat to the nation, something that could be consigned to the field of abnormal psychology. Others, however, believe there is a leaderless resistance trend that should be taken seriously, if for no other reason than the harm lone wolves can inflict. A case in point is the Beltway snipers. As a result of their violent escapades in the fall of 2002, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were charged with, or suspected in, twenty-one shootings in Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington State. All totaled, they were believed to have killed ten persons and wounded three others in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area alone. Although their campaign does not appear to have been ideologically driven, it could nevertheless serve as a model for an individual or group with a political agenda. 13
In the current climate of fear in the United States, leaderless resistance has the potential to seriously disrupt the normal functioning of daily life. Jihadists operating in the United States would not have to resort to spectacular attacks in the style of 9/11 to be effective. Rather, any kind of seemingly random assassinations and bombings could be psychologically devastating to the public. 14 Furthermore, the most notorious lone wolves in the United States-Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Bruce Ivins (the alleged sender of anthrax-laced letters)-wreaked havoc cheaply. 15 Inasmuch as lone wolves operate alone, they are likely more difficult to monitor because they lack ties to organizations that could already be under surveillance. As the case of Ted Kaczynski-the Unabomber-demonstrated, a highly intelligent and motivated person working alone can carry on a campaign of violence over the course of many years.
Increasingly, individuals and small groups are responsible for some of the most lethal acts of terrorism. Well-established organizations, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and al Qaeda, continue to mount operations. But individuals and much smaller cells, sometimes inspired by the same ideologies as more established groups, can autonomously act without central direction. In the contemporary world, the likelihood of major armed conflicts between nations has greatly diminished. Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has entered a unipolar era in which a sole superpower, the United States, dominates. Sometimes referred to as the new world order, this development has dr

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