Webinar: The Dangerous Campaign to Free Aafia Siddiqui

Adam Savit:

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Adam Savit and I’m happy to welcome you back to the Center for Security Policy for our webinar series. Today’s program is entitled, The Dangerous Campaign to Free Aafia Siddiqui, featuring retired CIA officer Sam Faddis and Sam Westrop of Islamist Watch and moderated by my center colleague, Kyle Shideler. Please note that you are in listen-only mode, but can submit text questions through the Q&A box in the GoToWebinar panel and I’ll read as many questions as possible at the end of the program. This event is being recorded. Will be available later today on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/securefreedom and on our website at securefreedom.org. With that, I’ll hand it to the center’s Director for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, Kyle Shideler.

Kyle Shideler:

Thank you, Adam. On January 15th of this year, a British Pakistani Muslim man named Malik Faisal Akram entered the Colleyville, Texas synagogue of Congregation Beth Israel and held four people hostage, including Beth Israel’s rabbi. Now during negotiations with law enforcement, Akram made clear that his goal was to seek the release of notorious convicted al-Qaeda terrorist, Aafia Siddiqui, who was being held in nearby Carswell federal prison. The investigation to Akram is still ongoing and the answers to questions like what kind of ties he may have to other jihadists or Islamist groups is still underway. But in the media, it has recently been raising the question of what role did domestic Islamist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have in agitating for Siddiqui’s release from prison. What role did this play in impacting and motivating Akram to undertake his hostage-taking? Who is Aafia Siddiqui and why would her early release from prison be dangerous for American national security?

Kyle Shideler:

We have two really great guests with us today to discuss this topic. Joining me is Charles Sam Faddis. He is a retired CIA operations officer and also former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism centers, weapons of mass destruction unit, and that’s going to be important for reasons we’ll learn shortly. He is also a published author and commentator on national security. Also joining us is Sam Westrop. He is the director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, and he was previously the research director of the Boston-based Americans for Peace and Tolerance, and he’s also an expert on British Islamism and much of South Asian Islamism as well. So I’m really glad that he’ll be able to join us to talk about some of those aspects of this case.

Kyle Shideler:

So let’s go ahead and jump right in with a question for Sam Faddis. To start off with Sam, who is Aafia Siddiqui? We know that she was captured in 2008 and interviewed in Afghanistan when she grabs a rifle and opens fire on US soldiers and FBI agents who were there to interview her, and that’s why she’s in prison today serving over 84 years prison. But how did she get to that place? Why was her capture important to US counterterrorism efforts?

Sam Faddis:

Right. So I think the first thing to understand about Siddiqui is just a little bit of context really quickly. Everybody is familiar, unfortunately, with 9/11 and almost 3,000 Americans being killed. What perhaps they don’t understand is that al-Qaeda and actually a number of other terrorist groups have had ambitions to carry out attacks with much greater effect. In other words, kill even more people to carry out mass casualty attacks, particularly involving weapons of mass destruction. So chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear weapons.

Sam Faddis:

Al-Qaeda was working on that when we went into Afghanistan. In 2001, they had at least one lab working with anthrax. They had multiple programs looking at other weapons of mass destruction. They were in discussions with some former Pakistani nuclear scientists about the possibility of developing an atomic bomb to give to UBL. And all of these WMD programs historically have sort of run… They’ve been structured kind of the same way. They are very compartmented and they are plugged directly into the leadership of al-Qaeda. So it’s not like hundreds to people are in the loop here.

Sam Faddis:

So Siddiqui, at the time she was wrapped up, she was at the heart of this ongoing effort. Siddiqui was a Pakistani lady, very bright. I believe her bachelor’s degree’s from MIT, her graduate degree from Brandeis. She undergrad level had a degree in biology and then neuroscience at a master’s level. This is a lady with a very strong background in hard science, totally committed to the cause in direct contact with senior al-Qaeda people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And at the time she was taken off the street, it was not some sort of random event. She didn’t just get swept up in something. She was the subject of a man hunt. She was on the FBI’s most wanted list. She was at the top level of the folks that CIA was hunting, looking at terrorist weapons of mass destruction programs.

Sam Faddis:

So this is no accident she’s taken on off the street. The gunshot, the shooting that occurred during interrogation subsequently, as tragic as that is, is incidental to what happened here ultimately that she was prosecuted for that. Doesn’t really have anything to do with why we were looking for her and why we took her off the street. She was carrying a substantial quantity of cyanide at the time she was captured. She was carrying, as I recall, hard copy and on a thumb drive a whole bunch of other information on weapons of mass destruction, and this is not a couple of articles that you would pull off the internet. This is design stuff, serious stuff. She also had substantial information on casing of targets in New York City and in the environments. So again, this is not just a tourist map with some circles on it. This is the product of serious effort by al-Qaeda to identify case in specific targets in the New York City area for attacks.

Sam Faddis:

Included on that list would be things like the Empire State Building, which is always on the list because it’s a landmark, but also Plum Island which is effectively shut down now, but was for a long time a facility the coast of Long Island where research was done on dangerous diseases. Primarily diseases that are dangerous to livestock, but potentially some of those are also communicable to humans. And in any event, an attack on livestock has the potential to be devastating to the United States and cause all sorts of disruptions.

Sam Faddis:

So this is a very serious, very hardcore lady at the heart of this effort. That’s why she was taken off the street, was to disrupt that. This was known and that’s why we were after her at the time, and that’s really the main reason that she’s locked up and should run locked up for the rest of her life.

Kyle Shideler:

You mentioned her relationship with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. For those of our audience who don’t know, can you discuss what that relationship was and also why KSM, as he’s known, was so important to al-Qaeda’s efforts during this period?

Sam Faddis:

Well, KSM is in the top tier of al-Qaeda… People will say he was the number three in al-Qaeda structure. Gets a little fuzzy and is not always as clearly translatable into our terms. But in any event, this is one of the senior most important AQ guys on the planet. And again, as I said earlier, this is characteristic of weapons of mass destruction programs that AQ has been involved with. They are always compartmented. There’re always a very limited number of individuals involved and they always are managed directly from the center, meaning bin Laden and the immediate circle around him. This is not something where you’ve got hundreds of people plugged in. If you think about Siddiqui, this is a rare commodity for them. She is clearly a monster because her desire is to kill Americans by the tens of thousands if she can possibly do it.

Sam Faddis:

So also a very sharp lady educated in the best institutions in the West and actually also able to move despite her ideology and her [inaudible 00:09:09]. She despises everything about Western culture. She’s able to move, well, comfortably, I guess I would say, in the West in terms of conducting operations, which would not be true for every guy that she pulled off the street in Pakistan or somewhere else. So this is a very, very rare combination of skills and abilities. That’s why she was so dangerous. That’s why we were hunting for her. That’s why the lady needs to stay locked up for the rest of her life.

Kyle Shideler:

I think you mentioned her comfort in moving in and among Western society, and this is part of the point I want to bring in Sam Westrop to talk about. Sam, Siddiqui gets her start in jihadist organizing, not Pakistan at all, but actually in Boston. We know, for example, that she was a major member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Muslim Students’ Association for a time where she does a lot of jihadist organizing. Can you talk to us a little bit about what the Islamist scene in Boston is like that she’s moving in and what her role was during this period?

Sam Westrop:

Yeah, it’s a good question. And as you say, her journey to radicalization happened not in Pakistan, but here in the West. Especially in the ’90s and 2000s, this was an all too common story. Western universities served as hot beds of radicalization for Islamist terror. And that was because of Islamist control to a large extent because of Islamist control of student associations backed up by national networks of mosques and seminaries and training organizations tied to Salafi Jihad, tied to other Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood or other very South Asian networks as well.

Sam Westrop:

And Aafia is a key example of this. She came at age of 18, 19 to the United States. Started off at Houston, transferred to MIT where yes, she became very involved in the Muslim Student Association. And her journey there is a really good example of what is frequently referred to as the conveyor belt of radicalization, which is a term actually really just means the process by which someone moves from nonviolent extremist ideas to violent extremist ideas. And MSA, especially in the ’90s of 2000s, played a key role in that and Aafia is far from the only example.

Sam Westrop:

Deborah Scroggins, by the way, has written a very interesting book on Aafia’s time in Boston. And I do it for anyone really interested in the new Shia, I do recommend this. One of the things that Deborah Scroggins notes is that it started off really with a Muslim Brotherhood slot. And the MSA at that time was, to a large extent, controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Aafia started wearing clothes not so familiar to anyone with knowledge of Pakistani cultural dress, but more Arab, more Muslim Brotherhood minded clothing. She started praying at the Islamic Society of Boston, which was then a very important Muslim brotherhood institution. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader was [inaudible 00:12:23] original list of trustees.

Sam Westrop:

But that didn’t stick forever, the Muslim Brotherhood, and this conveyor belt kept her moving. Aafia was from a Deobandi family, which is a South Asian Sunni Hanafi school of Islam. Deobandi is a relatively modern movement set up in the 19th century in opposition to British rule. And her family was Deobandi and it’s a politically-minded religious set. And here in Boston, she quickly involved herself with Deobandis as well, rediscovering more dogmatic ideas from her childhood and people like Suheil Laher who was a very prominent Boston cleric and had a foot both in the Deobandi world, but also in the Salafi-Jihadist world, became very important to Aafia.

Sam Westrop:

Aafia started volunteering with a group called CARE International, which originally was called the Al Kifah Refugee Center. There, she met a whole bunch of prominent jihadist financiers, people involved, not just with that group, but also with another organization called Ptech, which the federal government nation investigated for terror ties. Boston was an epicenter of jihad in the ’90s and early 2000s, a key hub for it. And Aafia came at exactly the right time to see the beginning of that rise.

Sam Westrop:

CARE International was shut down because of its al-Qaeda ties. Aafia became one of the most wanted women in the world. This was an extraordinary network. She didn’t just graduate from MIT. She graduated from perhaps one of the leading jihadist networks in the West. It wasn’t just though the Muslim Brotherhood and the Deobandi. She also involved herself with local Salafis. There was Abdullah Faaruuq, who was the Imam of the Mosque for the Praising of Allah, which is a mosque in Roxbury, just a little bit south of Downtown Boston. With him, she went around prisons handing out Islamist material, including books by Sayyid Qutb, the great Egyptian Islamist idea look. So I think the point I’m trying to make here is that not only can we see a clear, as I said, conveyor belt from being a young impressionable 18-year-old Pakistani student to nonviolent extremism to different types of nonviolent extremism, and then ultimately did you have to terror, but we also see this maelstrom of conflicting Islamist ideologies. And Aafia bouncing around between them gradually becoming more and more extreme.

Sam Westrop:

Boston was a hub for this kind of thing and it’s a business on the side. But there’s a significant number of folks in Pakistan who used to fear, and still do, sending their children to universities in the west. And if you think about that, that’s really the wrong way around. I have a good friend, mother was terrified about him coming to study in the UK. And she warned him, “Stay away from the Muslim Student Associations.” It’s the wrong way around, at least to my mind. But this is the fact of universities. This is the danger of universities.

Sam Westrop:

And today, the Boston scene is a little different. The jihadist element is not as strong, but there are still the same folks around who radicalized Aafia. Suheil Laher, who was part of CARE International, part of Ptech, a key mentor to Aafia, amazingly somehow escaped prosecution. Well, Suheil Laher today works for Brandeis, the same university that Aafia graduated from. It’s an extraordinary ability of these Islamists not just survive, but to thrive within the same Boston scene that should know more than anywhere else in the country how dangerous these people are. Abdullah Faaruuq still runs that mosque in Roxbury. He’s been quite close with Maura Healey, the district attorney who’s now just announced to run for governor. So the same circumstances that propelled Aafia, the same people that propelled Aafia 20 years ago, 30 years ago, are now still here and still thriving. There’s no necessary reason to think that an Aafia could not emerge again from this city.

Sam Westrop:

Lastly, I’ll just point out I mentioned this ideological maelstrom that led to Aafia’s radicalization, where that same convoluted mix of Islamist ideas that spawned Aafia, that generated Aafia, today is now competing to win her legacy, to represent her legacy, to advocate for her freedom. This internal intra-Islamist competition is key to Aafia’s rise, but also now to the campaign for her release. And I’m sure we’ll get into that in a little bit.

Kyle Shideler:

Yeah. I think you make a really good point when you note that as you get closer and closer to the jihadist element, you get a very turbulent mix of various Islamist sects and ideological finer points. But there seems to be on something on which they can agree often and it does tend to be this violent point.

Kyle Shideler:

Sam Faddis, Aafia Siddiqui is sentenced to 84 years in prison. Given her present age, she’s about 50. That likely means she will die in prison if she serves her entire sentence. So far, she has served less than 15 years. What would be some of the concerns that a counterterrorism professional like yourself would have if Siddiqui were to be released early as a result of this campaign which Sam Westrop mentioned?

Sam Faddis:

Well, look. I’ve seen some compelling information of which I am at present completely ignorant. I have no reason to believe that Siddiqui has changed her ideas or ideology one wit while she’s been in confinement. And what would she do when she went back out? I think she would be back at work in a heartbeat. And just to drill down a little bit on mechanics, because we’ve talked a little bit about weapons of mass destruction. Okay? Anytime we start talking about weapons of mass destruction, we end up talking in really horribly antiseptic technical kind of terms about effectiveness of weapons. And so I’m probably going to be guilty of that in talking about some of these. I don’t mean to imply that there’s anything that’s not horrible about this. These things are terrible. But when you get into the business of designing weapons of mass destruction, these are the kind of considerations you got to deal with, right?

Sam Faddis:

There’s all kinds of ways to think in terms of using biological, chemical, nuclear, radiological weapons. The devils and the details as it always is, is a terrorist. Okay, that’s cool. Now, how do we actually make that happen? How do we actually use this to kill people in large numbers?

Sam Faddis:

So one of the substances with which all groups have ended up being obsessed is the use of cyanide. Why? Because cyanide is obviously deadly to humans. It is also actually pretty commonly available because it’s used for a whole bunch of industrial purposes. So you can get your hands on cyanide in very large quantities all over the planet, and in fact many groups have, and then you can kill people with it. Now you have to figure out how to disseminate it. What al-Qaeda was working with at the time she was taken off the street and a number of other groups she was working with, is using cyanide to generate cyanide gas and doing it using devices which they call the mobtaker, which are very, very simple to construct at a commonly available ingredients.

Sam Faddis:

You can puncture hands on the things you need to build these things pretty much anywhere on the planet and you can generate cyanide gas. And most effectively, you generate cyanide gas in a closed space. Again, it’s just horrible to think in these terms, but this is how they think. That means train cars. That means, at best, subway cars, because they’re not only enclosed, but they’re underground. Right? New York City is the epicenter of mass transit and subways in the United States. In the way that most major cities in the US don’t use mass transit anymore, New York City does.

Sam Faddis:

This lady is caught with large quantities of cyanide, she’s caught with design details on these devices. And where has she been casing? She has been casing right in the heart of the New York City metropolitan area because that was one of multiple plans on the table. To, in very short order, set off multiple such devices at rush hour in New York City underground. Nobody has any idea what the ultimate math on that is, but that’s potentially thousands of people dead any morning in New York City. And this lady, she wasn’t thinking abstractly about this. She was the lady driving the train, conceptualizing the mastermind behind this plant. And they were perilously close to being able to pull it off, which has been an obsession of theirs for a very long time.

Sam Faddis:

I obsess about these details because any fantasy that what anybody wants to trot out that this is some sort of idea log but she is not really going to do anything, concretely is a lie. If you are trotting that out, you’re either horribly naive, just blissfully ignorant or you’re deliberately pedaling a lie because what you’re advocating for is the release of a mass murderer who if you put her back on the street will go right back to where she was and be right on the verge of killing Americans by the thousands. That’s what we’re talking about.

Kyle Shideler:

Do you think, Sam Faddis, that her knowledge on these types of things is the reason why she has been a target for terrorists like ISIS, like al-Qaeda, to do a trade or to have released? In the hostage-taking in Texas, Akram made a statement that, for example, ISIS had attempted to trade the hostage James Foley for Siddiqui’s release. Foley being one of the journalists who was notably executed by ISIS in Syria. Is that part of the reason why on the violent jihad angle, groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda are so obsessed with seeing her released?

Sam Faddis:

Yeah. I’m sure that she has, by this point, acquired symbolic value beyond that and simply securing her release would be a propaganda victory in and of itself. But yes, al-Qaeda doesn’t have stacks of people standing around with her qualifications, which are not just her education that she got going through Brandeis, but now the qualifications she gained in years of perfecting these techniques working for al-Qaeda and added to that, the willingness to actually do this. Right? Even in jihadist circles, there are often distinctions between the guys who will talk a lot and the person who will actually strap on the vest or go kill thousands of individuals.

Kyle Shideler:

You made an interesting point, which leads me back to Sam Westrop. Sam, Europe is seeing a major problem right now with terrorist recidivism in prison. Is Sam Faddis’ assumption, I guess, that Aafia Siddiqui is unlikely to have de-radicalized in prison set a pretty good assumption? What are we seeing in terms of recidivism from terrorists like Siddiqui coming out of prisons? Do they go back to their old ways? Do they change?

Sam Westrop:

In the case of Siddiqui, we know very much that her views have not changed. The statement she puts out through her lawyer, who happens to be linked quite closely to the Texas branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, show yes, a continued hard-line radicalism. It was only shortly after she was in prison that she was writing letters to Barack Obama warning him about the Jewish conspiracy. No, this is not a woman who has shared any remorse or repentance. She remains completely committed to her cause, as Sam Faddis suggested.

Sam Westrop:

Prison radicalization remains a very important topic across Europe. And this is mostly unexplored in the US. But one of the things I worked on seven, eight years ago in the UK was looking at the decision of the British government to mostly appoint Deobandi clerics to be the chaplains in British prisons. Deobandis, I remind you, is the same sect from which Aafia came, the same sect that produced the Taliban, the same sect that is responsible for 80% of terrorist attacks in Pakistan and controls 40% of British mosques, the same 40 stem from where the majority of ISIS recruits and other terrorists came. So governments across Europe, this is not just limited to Britain and in the US, governments insist whether through stupidity, through Islamists advising them, through naivety, insist upon placing clerics that radicalize into positions of care over prisoners.

Sam Westrop:

There’s also the problem of high profile prisoners radicalizing others. And with some of the jihadists in the 2000s, the British government made an extraordinary mistake in putting them all in one place where they probably set about radicalizing every other prisoner in the jail, converting to Islam, converting them to jihad. At some point, the radicalization prisoners was so bad. The British government realized that some of these really hard line extremists were radicalizing prisoners through Morse code through the wars, supposedly. I have questions about how effective that radicalization program was.

Sam Westrop:

But all this to say that yes, governments are terrified about extremism in prisons. France is a particularly good example of this as well. This is a major source of terrorist recruitment. This is compounded by the fact that foolish, feckless, counter violent extremism programs in prisons that seek to de-radicalize prisoners but do not assist with early release if terrorists simply go through these programs and commit to no longer being an extremist. Unsurprisingly, extremists lie about their extremism. And so CBE programs combined with these radical clerics are not just radicalizing a new generation of Islamists, but pushing them out of prison early to go do their thing. Now, luckily with someone like Aafia, she’s high profile enough and dangerous enough to stay in prison until the day she dies. But certainly there are lots of people around the world, including foreign states, that are working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen and she is released very soon.

Kyle Shideler:

Well, let’s talk about one of the foreign states, which is Pakistan. Pakistan has been very high profile in its, I’ll just go ahead and say support, for Aafia Siddiqui and in leading campaigns to keep her high profile and ultimately seeking her release. What do you think is behind the thinking of the Pakistani government in doing that?

Sam Westrop:

Yeah. Well, Sam Faddis spoke about the desire of terrorist organizations to release Aafia Siddiqui. The bargaining by al-Qaeda, the demands by ISIS, but lots of other terrorist groups as well. The Taliban have demanded her release, the Haqqani Network have demanded her release, Far Eastern groups, African movements like Boko Haram have demanded her release. Why is she this cause for Islamists around the world from the Pakistani government to these terrorist groups to nonviolent extremists in the West? Well, especially for the Pakistani government, a large part of it comes down to the fact that there is this current void within Sunni Islamism about who leads its most violence manifestation. Who is the new bin Laden? Who is the new al-Qaeda? Who represents the future of Sunni Islamism? And this is not clear, especially since Saudi Arabia, to some extent, left the scene. A whole bunch of different actors are competing for the rights, the fame, to represent global Islamism. Pakistan is one of those actors.

Sam Westrop:

As of the Deobandis as a smaller sect as our terrorist groups, Aafia Siddiqui is the cause of our time, because it is a means by which these Islamists legitimize themselves gain credibility. This is even apparent here locally in the US with internal Islamist politics. And I’ll go into that in a second. But to actually answer your question, I realize I veered a little, of course. She’s important to Pakistan firstly for that reason. This is Pakistan under Imran Khan re-Islamizing in a manner that Zia-ul-Haq, the great Pakistani Islamist of the 1970s trying to make turn Pakistan into a global Islamic power competing and cooperating with Qatar and Turkey to do that, increasingly at loggerhead with places like Saudi and Qatar. Imran Khan is trying to become an Islamist leader and Aafia Siddiqui is a way to do that.

Sam Westrop:

It was on his party, the PTI, the release of Aafia was on their manifesto, was one of their items. It has official Pakistani government policy to secure the release of Aafia Siddiqui. In fact, quite a few Pakistani politicians reiterate this fact. But she’s often referred to, in Pakistani media, as the daughter of the nation. She is seen as the great victim of the Western war on terror, unjustly cruelly imprisoned by a cabal of corrupt Western Jews and democratic deviants and so on. This is the narrative that goes on in Pakistan. And today the question is, to what extent is the Pakistani regime pushing Western Islamists to secure the release of Aafia Siddiqui? And to what extent is the other way around, Western Islamists appealing to Pakistan to assist them? And understanding that balance of powers is quite tricky, but we have a bit of an idea.

Sam Westrop:

The most important thing to remember about Pakistan, however, is that it’s two sects dominated. One, the Barelvis and second, the Deobandis. And Imran Khan is making common calls with both the most extreme groups within these two sects in recent years. And Aafia Siddiqui has been on the agenda of both. This recent attacker, this recent hostage taker was a Deobandi. He attended a Deobandi mosque in the UK. He had ties to Pakistani Deobandi movements into South Asian Deobandi movements like Tablighi Jamaat, which is a very prominent Deobandi mission group. These are movements through which the Pakistani regime pushes influence and pushes ideas and pushes it agendas. So Pakistan is not just committed and rhetoric only. It is actively using proxies and partners across the world to push for Aafia’s case.

Sam Westrop:

Now, the last thing I mentioned about Pakistan. There was a new ambassador, a Pakistani ambassador, Masood Khan. He is a Kashmiri leader, closely tied into a number of Kashmiri jihadist groups, also very closely tied to Jamaat-e-Islami, another South Asian Islamist group with a huge presence in the West, huge presence in the US. Masood Khan, this ambassador, has been working very closely with a particular group called ICNA, the Islamic Circle of North America. The Islamic Circle of North America has been the leading voice, or at least one of the leading voices on advocating for Aafia over the last 10 years. And Masood Khan himself has called for Aafia’s release, this new ambassador.

Sam Westrop:

We will see increasing collaboration between the Pakistani regime and Western American Islamists such as Jamaat-e-Islami, such as Deobandi, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, to secure Aafia’s release. And I’m sure we’ll see money going into legal assistance, into lobbying, into media, into protests. Pakistan is on the rise, and Aafia is just a means for it to assume its power to impose its influence.

Kyle Shideler:

This is one of the things that concerns me about the state level involvement of Pakistan. Because while it’s hard to see the US government giving in to Akram in his hostage-taking or even giving into a group like ISIS or Boko Haram in trying to release Aafia Siddiqui. When you start talking about intergovernmental relations and things that governments need from one another, all of a sudden it begins to seem more plausible. And it begins to seem more plausible especially if there’s an internal fervent from some of these groups to support Aafia’s release as well. I find that very concerning.

Kyle Shideler:

Sam Faddis, you briefly mentioned AQ’s relationship with Pakistani scientists when it came to nuclear programs, for example. Do you have any insight into Pakistan’s role in supporting violent jihad, both during Siddiqui’s era but also at present?

Sam Faddis:

Yeah. Let me characterize it this way. I think you have… And I’m speaking from a 30,000 foot level for the sake of time an overview. There are at least two things going on here, right? You have Pakistanis who may or may not. And I’m now talking at the governmental level, the intelligence services so forth. They may or may not really share the ideology of many extremist groups, but they effectively believe that they can utilize these capabilities to pursue Pakistani national objectives. They can sort of play with fire and at the end of the day, the monster won’t ever turn on them. The Saudis did this, too. Many of them did this for a long time too, until all of a sudden one day they woke up and realized the ground was on fire underneath their feet. And like they were coming for the royal family now, and then all of a sudden some people got in. It got their attention.

Sam Faddis:

Then there is, without any question, also the issue that by this point in history, many Pakistanis in the intelligence services, the military, even the security services that guard the nuclear weapons and so forth have themselves been completely radicalized, right? It’s not just a matter of, they think they can play with some sort of Islamic radicalism and use it for their national objectives and then keep it bottled up. They actually share these objectives. The guys that I’ve made reference to before that were working with Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11 and well down the road to talking about designing a nuclear weapon, they had met with bin Laden. And there’s a limit to how much detail I can provide on that because a lot of that is just still too sensitive to discuss, but they had progressed to the point where they had met with him and discussed design of a nuclear weapon.

Sam Faddis:

Without question, they did this because they believed completely in the program of the Taliban and al-Qaeda and the idea of the caliphate and all of this. These were not guys who were for hire that were being bought by bin Laden. There was no compensation changing hands here. They believed that this was a historic moment and that by handing atomic weapons to al-Qaeda, they were doing the right thing from their standpoint, from an ideological standpoint. So in addition to the sort of old problem with the Pakistanis creating a monster they can’t really control, we now have the fact that we’re well down the road to large portions of the security state being completely on board with this radical jihadist ideology.

Kyle Shideler:

Well, I think we’ve successfully made the case that Aafia Siddiqui should not be released from prison. Sam Westrop, what is your thoughts on somethings that Americans can do if they’re concerned about this? They hear you rattle off the names of some of these groups and individuals that are operating here in the United States to affect Aafia’s release. But what are some tangible steps that Americans can take if they care about this issue? It’s not as though there is a bill that’s going to be passed for Aafia’s release that they can urge their senators to vote against. So what should they do or what should they be thinking about doing?

Sam Westrop:

Yeah, it’s a good question and you’re right. I only named about a quarter of the groups that are currently pushing for Aafia’s release. There’s a huge wave advocating for Aafia. And as you say, a limited extent to which one can push back apart from rely on her existing conviction and the laws around that conviction. As you say, if something is going to circumvent, the rules that keep Aafia in place it is Pakistani government’s outreach.

Sam Westrop:

So I think there’s a number of things that we, as ordinary Westerners, can do. Firstly, opposed Pakistan. Pakistan is an Islamist regime and the West has been far too slow to realize that. It’s bizarre status as an ally during the war on terror, I’m sure which Sam Faddis could go into in some detail, was highly questionable at the time and remains perplexing today.

Sam Westrop:

Opposing Pakistan is key to this. Pakistan is not just to be fought on the international stage though. Pakistani money is working their way into our politics, into congressional caucuses, into American media, into proxies and charitable fronts and businesses and laundering networks. Pakistan is everywhere and federal efforts to expose these influence operations, to tackle them, to force farer restrictions on a whole bunch of folks. After all, ISI operatives have been convicted of serving as unlawful Pakistani regime representatives in the past. There are many more here today, some of which we at the Middle East Forum have written about that deserve closer scrutiny by law enforcement. Better restriction on the ability of foreign states to put money into the pockets of our politicians. Both Republicans and Democrats are getting a hell of a lot right now from the Pakistan regime. So that’s one side of things.

Sam Westrop:

The other is the domestic Islamist question and pushing back against these groups. A lot of these groups that advocate for Aafia’s release, ICNA, CAIR, various clerical and neo-Salafi groups, many of these groups receive federal funding, and we’ve written a lot about that. And both under Trump and under Biden, they’re getting a lot of money, millions and millions of dollars. Money is fungible. And so they may get this money for some charitable cause, but it’s subsidizing their work advocating for Aafia. So the lot we can do to stop funding and enabling our own destruction, and that’s a key part of the fight against Aafia, is pushing back against the stupidity that is the Western approach to Islamism, which America is not alone in… It’s guilty of being responsible for… God knows it’s doing the same mistakes every European state has made for the last 20 years.

Sam Westrop:

But there’s so much that we shouldn’t be doing that we insist on doing, whether that’s partnering with Pakistan internationally or funding the Islamists in our own backyard. There are certain things that need to change. And yet the Middle East Forum writes a lot about this. CSP writes a lot about this. It really takes a few politicians to stop and listen.

Sam Westrop:

The other last point that I’ll make is this. There has been a fascinating and terrifying decline in media interest in the question of Islamism over the last few years. Every now and again, we will get a shift back in a few days of discussion again. The hostage-taking did that. Afghanistan, to some extent, did that. But by next week no one will be talking about this again until the next event. It remains vitally important to push journalists to cover this stuff, to cover this information. They should be exposing these Pakistani networks. They should be exposing these radical Islamist operations advocating for convicted terrorists, but they’re not. And that goes to both the left and the right. The right in particular is being not as forthright as it once was on this issue in recent years. And so pushing not just our politicians but our media to hold these groups to account, to fight their abuse of Western democratic processes and their taking of government support and infiltration of public institutions. All of this needs to be exposed and stopped.

Kyle Shideler:

Yeah. I think the one point I would add to that, if anything positive has come out of this synagogue hostage-taking situation, it has been a very positive response from a number of organizations within the Jewish community, which have called into account both Akram and the hostage takers, very own antisemitism, but then also the antisemitism of Aafia Siddiqui herself, the antisemitism of groups like CAIR and ICNA, which are advocating for her release. And this is a topic on which they should be much invested, but which many organizations have been quiet in recent years, particularly when it comes to calling out some of these high profile Islamist groups. So I would say that was one positive, if we can talk about an event like that being positive at all.

Sam Westrop:

One tiny thing to add… I’m sorry for… I keep adding things. One other positive from this event is that for the first time in quite a while, I have seen American media talk about Tablighi Jamaat and Deobandi. Not a lot of them, but a few. It’s popped up in a few places, in both the left and right.

Sam Westrop:

For whatever reason, American law and enforcement and journalists have never investigated Deobandi networks in the United States and yet there are significant numbers of them with huge multimillion dollar seminaries in New York and in Illinois, especially. In Illinois right now, a whole bunch of Deobandi charities have just set off for Afghanistan where they’re meeting with Taliban representatives of bringing American raise monies. This should be the subject of front page news, investigative work by our major newspapers, but it’s not. So we’ll do it and CSP will do it.

Sam Westrop:

But one positive from this is that there may now at least be an interest in what the sects behind the Aafia Siddiqui emerged from and what the sect that is pushing for her release represent and what possible threat they might pose to the United States. We would be mad, completely mad, to do what we did in the ’90s and just start to disregard this issue once again, especially while these networks faster and grow on our own backyard.

Kyle Shideler:

As you say, it’s not the first time that we’ve taken our eye off the ball. On that note, let’s bring back Adam Savit. Adam, do we have any questions from our audience that we can work through?

Adam Savit:

We do, indeed. Speaking of the ’90s, if Boston was a center of Islamist activity in the ’90s, do we know what region has taken its place today?

Kyle Shideler:

That’s a good question. Sam Westrop, thoughts?

Sam Westrop:

Well, there’s a few places come to mind. Again, I would divide it by sects. So I mentioned Illinois, especially Chicago, when it comes to Deobandis, that’s an area to be particularly worried about. Iranian activity in Southern California remains extremely concerning, especially with Hezbollah times. Different locations based on different sects is my general fear, but Boston still has its problems. There are still extremists here. I mentioned Suheil Laher is still active here as is Abdullah Faaruuq. And up and down the East Coast, there are similar Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaʿat-i networks that continue to contribute to the radicalization of young American Muslims.

Kyle Shideler:

I think when it comes to Pakistani networks, and Sam correct me if I’m wrong, I’d throw in Houston. Major hub.

Sam Westrop:

Yeah. Sorry to plug my own piece, but if you haven’t read it yet, earlier this year or last year, Middle East Forum produced a in-depth exposé of a very big Houston network with direct ties Kashmiri and Pakistani jihadists that is closely involved in local politics there as well. Yeah, Houston is a very important example.

Adam Savit:

What if any were her connections to the Palestinian authority or Hamas?

Kyle Shideler:

Sam Faddis, do you know if she had any ties to Hamas? I know, for example, she was fundraising for the Al Kifah Refugee Center, which it must be noted was founded by Abdullah Azzam, who was both a co-founder of al-Qaeda and also a co-founder of Hamas. But do you know of any ties between Aafia Siddiqui and the Palestinian terrorist movements?

Sam Faddis:

I don’t remember from an operational perspective that any of that was on our radar. We were hunting for the lady because of the fact that she was a member of al-Qaeda and working directly for al-Qaeda’s senior command on planning for WMD attacks in the United States and that planning was way down the road.

Sam Westrop:

Yeah, that’s right. And from what I’ve read of Aafia’s rhetoric, the Palestinian territories really came up within her rantings and ravings. It was very much South Asia focused. And aside from her bridal hatred for the West, the other topic that came up a lot was India and Kashmir. And it’s important to remember that Aafia was suspected not just of being part of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but also Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Deobandi anti-Indian crew dedicated to killing Hindus in Kashmir. So yeah, different parts of the world occupied Aafia’s attentions. And I think one minor criticism of our industry over the last 20 years is that we have somewhat over focused on Islamists obsessing over Gaza and the Palestinian territories at risk of ignoring the other Islamist networks and their just as dangerous intersections with other parts of the world such as Kashmir.

Sam Faddis:

Do Islamists ever collaborate with White supremacists in these anti-Jewish operations?

Sam Westrop:

Yeah. That’s a very good question. And actually we’re seeing that a lot in France right now with a growing… If anyone is interested in this subject, just from a more literary perspective, Michael Holodeck’s submission is a very good exploration of the subject. One of the conclusions being that at some point, those on the far right will start to realize that there’s a loss about Islamism that rings true with far right ideas and sort of extreme of social conservatism, as you might call it. Or this extreme imposition of anti-homosexuality, anti-adultery, anti… Things that ring true not just with the far right, but with regular conservative sometimes as well and they may misinterpret Islamists as potential allies.

Sam Westrop:

So this is happening to some extent in France, and we see a growing collaboration between members of the national front and other Neo-Nazi and White supremacist groups with some Islamists. Admittedly, there’s still a lot of hostility. It’s not an official collaboration by any means. But there are elements of White supremacist networks that start to see Islamists as friendly.

Sam Westrop:

Another good example of this, by the way, is around Iran and Assad. And during the Syrian civil war, you saw dozens of far right European leaders. And when I say far right, by the way, I’m not being lazy as American media. I’m talking about genuine White supremacists, genuine Neo-Nazi types. You saw European far right leaders go and drove to Syria on regime trips paid for by Iran and the Assad regime where, by the way, they were also joined by far left leaders. So yeah, there’s long been an interesting collaboration in that regards. Here in the US, the more legitimate representatives of Islamism and groups like CAIR are very careful to avoid the far right as best they can. At least they have been in the last 10, 15-

Kyle Shideler:

They were not always careful.

Sam Westrop:

Yes, exactly. There have been key exceptions to that. I suspect we’ll start to see a resurgence in the US. A resurgent desire to mix again with the far right. And we’re already seeing growing efforts by some Islamist groups to get back involved in the campaign against LGBT rights or any of these woke buzzword over fears that they spent the last 20 years being too left wing. And an effort to advance their own agendas, they’re now moving back towards the rights. And some of these genuine bonafide far right groups are seen as natural allies by a growing contingent of new Salafi groups and so on. So this is an obscure and definite tangent for this discussion. But this will have some effect on the campaign for Aafia at some point as well. And I will be very interested in the day that we start seeing non-Muslim folks on the far right starting to advocate for Aafia as well. And I bet you, it happens at some point.

Adam Savit:

What is it about Brandeis that produces so many anti-American graduates? I don’t know if that’s statistically born out, but maybe.

Kyle Shideler:

[crosstalk 00:52:19] know that it’s particular to Brandeis.

Sam Westrop:

It’s not. Of all the universities in the US, the one Jewish university you would expect to be the last place to produce a graduate like Aafia Siddiqui. And yet, they didn’t learn. As I say, they hired Suheil Laher to be on their faculty. They have made some other bad decisions about the groups they partner with and the people they work with. But I don’t think Brandeis is any worse than a lot of other American universities. It’s just the more shocking, because it’s such a betrayal of its Jewish roots to work with these violent antisemites.

Kyle Shideler:

And part of it, I think, is the level of acceptable discourse on some of these topics in the universities is such that extremists like Laher increasingly don’t sound as extreme as they ought, at least on the university campus. When you have on the university campus open embrace of the PFLP, open embrace of violent groups in the US like Antifa, it doesn’t seem so odd all of a sudden to have guys like Suheil Laher saying the things that they say. The temper and the tone on college campuses is a major problem.

Sam Westrop:

That’s right.

Adam Savit:

To what extent do you think the lack of civics or national pride in junior high high schools is in the West leads to attitudes in universities that then enable the radicalization of people like Siddiqui?

Kyle Shideler:

I buy it. I certainly think it plays into what I was talking about with that temper and tone on the university campuses. Look, is there a class that you could’ve put Aafia Siddiqui in that would’ve taught her not to be a jihadist? I don’t know. I doubt it. Not when all of the other networks and relationships in her life were pushing her in another direction. I’m extremely skeptical of that. And that gets to some of the countering violent extremism programs that Sam Westrop was talking about, where the idea that you can talk somebody out of this stuff. It simply hasn’t been born out. Now, is it going to be useful in discouraging people from seeking out extremist ideas before they have them? Sure. Maybe. It’s worth doing. It’s worth having a good American civics education regardless of whether it keeps you from being an extremist. But for somebody like Aafia Siddiqui, I don’t think there’s a one stop fix.

Adam Savit:

Was there any intelligence or chatter about the synagogue attack before the event?

Kyle Shideler:

That’s a good question. I don’t know. Sam Faddis, can you weigh in on the way intelligence is shared, how events like this are detected and maybe why it wasn’t detected in this case?

Sam Faddis:

Well, the short answer to the original question is, I don’t know. I am unaware of any information that told us in advance that there was going to be an attack. Sort of a broader comment, I suspect… Well, not I suspect. I know our intelligence collection on this kind of thing is horrible, right? We have come to rely overwhelmingly on technical means of collection, which often when you’re talking about individuals in small cells and terrorist groups, all of which, by the way, are completely aware of our capacity to suck up every email and phone conversation on the planet that’s often of very, very little value. So what you really need is you need human sources. And I think what we have seen is that our capacity to recruit those human sources inside target networks or target groups is minimal. We don’t do it. We don’t know how to do it anymore. And politically, we avoid doing it. We give them a wide birth and stay away from them. So it’s sort of a black hole.

Kyle Shideler:

And in part, we [crosstalk 00:56:57].

Sam Westrop:

I’m sorry, Kyle. Proceed.

Kyle Shideler:

I said, part of the reason we stay away from it is because if you go after these sort of things, you will be targeted by Islamist groups like CAIR, like ICNA. The very ones that are defending Aafia Siddiqui are also ready and willing to attack US security or law enforcement attack verbally. Law enforcement when they engage in the kinds of things that work.

Sam Faddis:

Let me add this from operational experience. And we were talking earlier about what we did during the 1990s and what we didn’t do in terms of looking at al-Qaeda. All kinds of people during that timeframe proposed operations to go after bin Laden and penetrate the network and even potentially take lethal action against bin Laden. Those operations, many of which have been discussed publicly for some time, were routinely shut down. After a while, there’s a chilling effect, right? If you’re an officer and you’re out there trying to conduct operations and everybody you know who proposes an operation like that has the op shutdown, it’s not approved, it’s very clear that they wish you had not brought it up. Pretty soon, people stop trying. You stop banging your head against the wall. You self-select into steering clear of it. So they don’t have to come and chase you away from the target after a while because people stop going after that target. They just say that’s a waste of time, you’ll never get approval. If we’re talking domestically, DOJ will never sign off on that. Forget about it. Work another target.

Adam Savit:

Okay. I think that’ll have to be the last one. So Kyle, if you want to wrap up and I’ll have a very brief housekeeping.

Kyle Shideler:

Sure. Well, I just want to thank our guests, Sam Faddis, Sam Westrop. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your knowledge and your participation in this campaign. As Sam Westrop noted, this is one of the unfortunate events, this hostage-taking, but it has brought a very important issue back to the forefront of attention and it’s important that we take advantage of such moments to educate people about the threats that we still face. Gentlemen, I appreciate your presence today, and Adam over to you.

Adam Savit:

And thanks to our audience today, as well. Remember that the center’s important programs are only possible because of your generous support. If you do enjoy these webinars as much as I do, please visit our website, securefreedom.org, and click on the white donate button in the upper right-hand corner, where you can make an instant contribution or get information about other methods of giving. Thanks again for joining us, have a great afternoon.