Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
Senate concluded that “fusion center success stories” related to counterterrorism were fraudulent. They were “unable to confirm that the fusion centers’ contributions were as significant as DHS portrayed them; were unique to the intelligence and analytical work expected of fusion centers; or would not have occurred absent a fusion center.”42 Most of the terrorism convictions in the last decade, moreover, are either manufactured farces, a product of FBI entrapment operations, or legal artifices—smaller convictions enhanced to appear as counterterrorism coups. As of late August 2018, 864 people have been charged for terrorism in the United States, 569 defendants pleaded guilty, courts found 186 guilty, three have been acquitted and three have seen their charges dropped or dismissed, 365 are in custody with fifty-eight awaiting trial, 314 have been caught in FBI stings, and thirty-four have been cooperating informants who have served little to no prison time. Over half of those charged—453 people—have since been released, often without supervision, suggesting the courts do not view them as threats. As Trevor Aaronson, the journalist who assembled and analyzed these data explained, “I could count on one hand the number of actual terrorists, such as failed New York City subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, who posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States.”43
If terrorism is statistically an insignificant threat and intelligence produced at fusion centers cannot be linked to any foiled plots, then, is it correct to repeat the mantra about the misaligned mission and ineffectiveness of fusion centers? The content of the intelligence reports that the US Senate dismissed as “problematic and useless” provides some necessary perspective.44 Given the insignificant threat of terrorism to the United States, fusion centers cannot report on imminent threats. Instead, they often detail attacks in places with active armed movements in order to make the case that law enforcement and the private sector in the United States report information to fusion centers. This dynamic was evident in both of the DHS-recognized fusion centers I studied, the New Jersey Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). In March 2012, the NYSIC, for example, released a threat assessment on major terrorist attacks on hotels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, and Somalia. The report contained no information about threats to the United States. It simply asserted that there was a threat to hotels:
Radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda linked groups, continue to plan attacks against the West, including the United States (US). These groups view civilians as potential targets and will continue to use a variety of attack methods. Lack of information pertaining to a certain category in this report does not necessarily represent the absence of a threat. However, the frequency and tactic of attack analyzed in this report may indicate the most common vulnerabilities to an attack on the hotel sector.45
The ROIC put out a similar report following a June 2012 attack on a hotel in Afghanistan. Like the NYSIC report, the ROIC’s briefing contained no specific threat information but made similar assertions about the nature of threat:
The threat to the hotel industry in New Jersey and the surrounding region is high because of frequent attacks domestically [—of which the report cites no examples—] and internationally, and the potential threat from [homegrown violent extremists] to the hospitality industry. As military and government facilities continue to improve their security measures, terrorists are likely to target hotels and other facilities that are easier to attack. While numerous terrorist groups have expressed the intent to target the United States, the ROIC is unaware of any group that has specifically mentioned the hotel sector in New Jersey as a potential target. Law enforcement and private-sector security personnel should remain vigilant for suspicious activity that may be indicative of terrorist activity.46
Rather than sobering analysis of realistic dangers, these reports construct the threat of terrorism and call on others to gather intelligence.
This type of analysis is common. For example, I collected 163 of the ROIC’s reports, which were posted on a publicly accessible Google Group for New Jersey fire chiefs. This collection covers the period from January to July 2014. It includes fifty-seven examples of the “ROIC Intelligence and Analysis Threat Unit Daily Overview.” This report is broken into two sections. The first section, “Homeland Security Reporting,” includes three subsections: international terrorism reporting, which summarizes news pertaining to political violence abroad or cybersecurity; New Jersey Suspicious Activity Reports, which lists the content of recently vetted Suspicious Activity Reports; and State Threat Posture, which always closes with this disclaimer/call for vigilance:
The ROIC has no specific or current information regarding a threat to New Jersey; however, large-scale events may create potential targets of opportunity for international and domestic terrorist groups as well as lone offenders. Individuals or terrorists could attempt to utilize these high-profile/high-visibility events as a stage to make a statement or otherwise further their goals.47
During the summer months the language shifted slightly to:
The ROIC has no specific or current information regarding a threat to New Jersey; however, large scale events during the summer season will likely generate a large amount of national and regional media attention. These events create potential targets of opportunities for terrorist organizations and Homegrown Violent Extremists (HVEs) that recognize highly populated, high-profile events as an opportunity to further their goals.48
The second section of the daily threat briefing is titled “International Threat Environment,” which covers developments in global conflicts, almost exclusively dominated by events in the Middle East. Clearly, these reports are of dubious analytic value, something both the intelligence analyst tasked to produce them and the law enforcement officers receiving them noted in interviews with me.49 As examples of the prose of pacification, however, these “problematic and useless” reports communicate a pedagogical mission: to educate and encourage police officers, and private security to “remain vigilant” and report “suspicious activity.”
At both the NYSIC and the ROIC, managers consider this pedagogical mission to be important. As a senior supervisor at the NYISC told me:
After 9-11, obviously, everybody was on board. Everybody wanted to play their part and prevent the next 9-11 from happening, but, as time goes on, human nature kicks in and less and less do people want to be prevented from doing things in their lives or be inconvenienced in any way. So we fight that all the time, not only with the public but also with law enforcement, to keep people on track and keep this stuff in their mind.50
A senior supervisor at the ROIC also echoed these comments:
It really comes down to our ability to sell our services and educate the people on the importance of the work that we do. We need to get people to understand the threat environment better so they can act or be proactive in the proper manner and do their jobs better. A better-informed public, a better-informed police officer, a better-informed public safety official is somebody that is going to be doing their job at a higher level and, therefore, the safety of the citizens of New Jersey is impacted in a positive manner as a result.51
Whether or not fusion centers are effective at counterterrorism, these sentiments and related intelligence products are productive: they organize the work done at fusion centers, while also attempting to construct the threat of terrorism and encouraging others to report information.
This pedagogical mission is also evident in the national programming of DHS and the state-level initiatives of the ROIC and NYSIC. One of DHS’s main programs is the “See Something, Say Something Campaign,” a nationwide public education campaign “to raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism and terrorism-related crime, and to emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the proper local law enforcement authorities” and “underscore the concept that homeland security begins with hometown security.”52 The formal goal of the program is to encourage the public to report information to police who will create a “suspicious activity report” that becomes part of a national database, accessible to fusion center analysts and others. The wider effect of this National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, however, is “to encourage and facilitate a new vigilance in peer-to-peer monitoring—in making it as easy and