Report: Homegrown Terrorists Are Scrubs
In total, Jenkins counts 176 domestic jihadis and 32 separate terrorist plots in the decade following the attacks. “Lone wolf” terrorists — self-starter militants with little or no reliance on existing terror networks — have been a prominent concern for law enforcement, since they’re by definition hard to track. But Jenkins’ data might make cops rethink their metaphor. Sure, 22 of the plots — an astonishing 69 percent of the total — involved no more than a single person. But it turns out that many of those involved in “lone wolf” cases were either working for al-Qaida or for undercover FBI agents posing as members of the group.
Of 32 plots since 9/11, not even a third of them proceeded to the point of identifying a specific target or making firm plans. Of the ten plots that did, six were secretly FBI stings. A grand total of two out of the 176 “domestic jihadis” ever got around to building an explosive device on his own. One such bomb was incomplete when its maker got pinched. The other, made by would-be Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad, ended in a fizzle.
“Those arrested in stings were demonstrably willing to kill if someone handed them the means,” the report concludes, “but others made little effort to build bombs or acquire guns, which are readily available in the United States.”
The numbers, however, have been growing lately. Jenkins’s data set shows spikes in the number of American jihadists in the last two completed calendar years, with 40 identified in 2009 and 31 in 2010. Somalia’s al-Shabaab terrorist group is a major reason why. Violence and criminality here in the U.S. associated with al-Shabaab shows up as one factor in the larger numbers of the past two years, with 27 individuals
connected to Shabaab in some way during the two year period.