An article from CNN has been bugging me for a couple of days. In it, the FBI claims to have thwarted "jihad" in California. After reading the article a few times, it does seem they have thwarted something but that it was jihad does not seem clear.
Appearing in Los Angeles Thursday, FBI Director Robert Mueller praised local police agencies that uncovered the alleged plot in July while investigating a string of gas station robberies.
"Terrorist threats against the city and county of Los Angeles ... were prevented," Mueller said.
While "investigating a string of gas station robberies" is the interesting part. The prosecutors think that the alleged jihadis were commiting crimes to fund their terrorist plans.
Why gas station robberies? Here is the interesting part.
Prosecutors contend the men were working at the behest of Kevin James, a California State Prison, Sacramento, inmate who founded the radical group Jamiyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS. Washington converted to Islam while imprisoned there for a previous robbery conviction.
In the past, I've seen the subject of religion in prisons debated as a mechanism of rehabilitation. This PBS program, for example, examines the role of christian jailhouse ministry and rehabilitation.
What about Islam? The influence in the US has largely been associated with the Nation of Islam, but that is changing as the NoI wanes and Sunni and Shia movements spread.
It's likely a lack of trust on my part, whether of the motives and results of prison missionaries, or of the conversions themselves, but I wonder to what extent conversion really results in fundamental change. In other words, is jihad (or other religious affiliation) a convenient identity that overlays organized crime and merely displaces other identities like crips, or mara salvatrucha?
There is another conversion that I have in mind that makes me draw this connection between crime and conversion, and how rather than erasing criminal intent, the so-called conversion gave new tools and identity to organized crime. The case is the Comando Vermelho, and there is a book called the Comando Vermelho, a história secreta do crime organizado (The Red Command, the secret history of organized crime) about the emergence of a new, dominant criminal organization that was born in the jails of Brazil.
Under the military regime, one of the tactics the government used against political prisoners (in addition to torture) was putting young leftists in jail with hardened criminals, thinking that this would be an additional punishment. What they didn't count on was that the hardened criminals learned from the political prisoners, how to organize in cells, the language of revolution, and recruitment tactics. From the prisons was born an organization that effectively tapped into the anger of the dispossessed, the organizational skills of militants, and all the criminal know-how in the country. The result has been an organization that controls a remarkable amount of criminal enterprise, as well as a surpsingly large amount of territory in mostly urban areas of the country.
This site summarizes the debate about the role of Islam, with authorities seeing terrorists and chaplains seeing the oppressed (emphasis mine).
"Prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socio-economic status and placement in the community upon their release," FBI director Robert Mueller said Feb. 16 to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.
Prison chaplains and others, however, say such warnings are dangerously ignorant.
In interviews with The Associated Press, chaplains, prison volunteers, correctional officials, inmates and former inmates all insisted that there was no evidence of terrorist recruitment by Muslims in their prisons - although banned pamphlets and books sometimes slip in.
Chaplains describe the typical inmate convert as a poor, black American upset about racism, not Mideast politics; someone who turned to Islam to cope with imprisonment. When they get out, these men are so overwhelmed by alcoholism or poverty that the crimes they are most likely to commit are the ones that landed them in jail to begin with, chaplains say.
I'm going to walk through the bold sections, and try to tie them to both the assertion of organized jihad, as well as the Comando Vermelho.
First, on recruitment to terrorism in the prisons, the first statement by Mueller is telling. The vulnerability of individuals within the system is important - and someone more versed in sociology could do a much better job of explaining this than I can - to survival. However the vulnerability once outside and the difficulties of re-integrating into "normal" society present opportunities for alternative social contexts or subcultures. That is, the lack of active recruitment to terrorism inside does not preclude the ability to create networks that continue outside. Compare to the CV, where not every petty criminal inside the jails became indoctrinated into the twisted Marxist/RobinHood ideology of the criminal elite, yet found a "job" in the organization once on the outside, and back in the urban slums facing the same conditions that led to imprisonment in the first place.
Second, on the ignorance of the warnings that all religious organizing in a threat to national security. This is an important caution, not least for respecting the religious freedoms of everyone including inmates, but also for the potentially dangerous consequences of any attempt to stamp out religious observance in the prisons as well as closing the door to positive work in the prisons from religious organizations that volunteer social services. Again, any lurking sociologist is welcome to chime in and correct me if this is of target.
Third, that "banned pamplets and books sometimes slip in" is difficult to chracterize without understanding what is banned and why. Yet if the banned material is recruitment to terrorist activity and not simply something that the prison system dislikes for various other reasons, is it really evidence of attempts to recruit? If so, how organized are the attempts to slip it in? Unlike the case of the CV where the government itself put the "dangerous knowledge" directly in the cells of the inmates, it is much harder to fathom the impact. Ultimately it is not knowledge itself that is dangerous, but recruitment networks.
Finally, just because "the crimes they are most likely to commit are the ones that landed them in jail to begin with" does not exclude the possibility that, like the petty criminals who go to work for the CV as street dealers, pickpockets, enforcers, or guards, their crimes might feed or fund a larger organization, the extent of which they themselves might not even fully know.
This of course, takes us back to robbing gas stations, and the question of whether criminal enterprise is taking advantage of the religious identity and loyalty of former inmates or terrorist organizers are taking advantage of the vulnerability of former inmates to gather resources. In the case of the CV, by most accounts, the goal was both economic and power-based, as the leaders were more concerned with a profitable enterprise that could repel competitors than with a political takeover. The result, however, has been political, in which entire sections of cities - with many thousands of residents - have become controlled by a de facto CV leadership. The police don't go in, the government can't really control it, and the CV dispenses frontier justice in addition to getting involved in social welfare programs.
In the end I am extremely suspicious of the urge to paint every crime committed by a self-identified muslim as terrorism. It's wrong, bigotry, and counterprodutive to getting the muslim community's support for exposing real terrorists. Yet I am left wondering about the instrumental association of criminals with terrorism. The CV isn't the only fusion of organized crime with anti-system militants (though in the case, it was anti-authoritarian militants, not anti-democracy). The association between Colombian revolutionaries and drug traffickers is another marriage of convenience that has had much greater repercussions than simple profit from criminal enterprise. Likewise all of these organizations draw from marginalized members of the population.* I think it's time to start making a bibliography and trying to get a better handle on the issue.
*[and here I predict a diversion in the comments to crime, poverty, Katrina, Tierney and Will]
Posted by binky at September 25, 2005 03:01 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics | Religion