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New Information on the Paris Attacks
In trying to learn more about the Paris attacks, I haven’t come across much that I feel confident commenting on, but I’ve learned a great deal that sheds light on the matter. I’ve organized much of it here, along with links to references, many of which are repeated.
What follows should be taken with the normal stipulation that information is likely to change and that there’s likely a great deal that’s known by authorities but hasn’t been released.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud
- The mastermind of the attacks was well-known to both French and Belgian authorities, and had been publicly sought by name as a terror suspect since at least January of this year.
- He travelled, under his own name, from Germany to Turkey in January 2014, taking along his 13-year-old brother. Despite being on various watch lists, he was not detained. He and his brother subsequently arrived in Syria and joined ISIS, where Abaaoud worked as a recruiter and logistics man.
- The authorities’ last known contact with him was a series of calls he made to accomplices in Belgium, apparently from Greece. These calls were intercepted and listened to by Belgian authorities “for days,” but Abaaoud subsequently disappeared. Shortly thereafter, Belgian police raided his accomplices’ hideout and killed them during the ensuing gun battle. Abaaoud’s travels since have been a matter of speculation.
- He was subsequently the subject of a feature of an interview in the February 2015 edition of the Islamic State’s famously well-produced (but tediously-written) magazine. The article seems to imply that he had travelled back to Syria recently, but it’s vague, and there are clear lies throughout the piece. The article starts on page 72, but be aware that you’ll have to scroll past — among other things — hi-resolution pictures of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive.
- Abaaoud was involved in multiple attempted attacks in France and Belgium, most of which failed, including the train attack thwarted by American passengers back in August.
- Abaaoud is now believed to have been one of the gunmen who shot-up the restaurants from a car during the attacks. Chillingly, it’s also believed that he went back to view the butchery hours later and successfully mixed in the with crowd.
- Abaaoud was killed along with a female cousin a few days after the raid, after his cellphone number was identified and its location tracked (I wrote about this here). The identity of the third body found in his apartment is either unknown or has not been released.
The Abdeslam Brothers
- Most of the purchases and rentals (cars, apartments, etc.) for the Paris Attacks were made by Salah and Brahim Abdeslam who, like Abaaoud, grew up in the Molenbeek suburb of Brussels. One of them — most venues say Salah, though The New York Times reports it as Brahim — served time in prison with Abaaoud in 2010.
- Ibrahim owned a bar, where Salah worked, known to be a drug den. According to Le Monde, the authorities closed it after people had been caught smoking marijuana there. According to The Wall Street Journal, Brahim subsequently sold it and used the funds to finance the plot in its final days.
- According the same Le Monde article above, Brahim was arrested in May after robbing a convenience store (no word yet on whether he was described as a “gentle giant”). Amazingly, the event was captured on camera by a Belgian TV crew.
- Brahim was with Abaaoud during the drive-by shootings, and blew himself up with a suicide vest. Though he, Abaaoud, and possibly a third gunman murdered 39 people during their series of drive-bys, no one else died in the explosion (though there were injuries). Indeed, at least three of the suicide vests involved in the attacks killed no one but the attackers, and a fourth killed only a single other person.
- Salah is the only member of the cell believed to have escaped. He was last spotted fleeing from France into Belgium with the help of at least two others who have since been arrested. He is the subject of an international manhunt. During the attacks, it’s believed his job was to drive three other bombers to the stadium. It’s not clear why he didn’t participate more directly, or why he chose to run.
The Other Attackers
- The true identities of two of the suicide bombers at Le Stade de France is still in question, though it’s fairly clear that both posed as Syrian refugees who entered Europe through Greece. The identity of the third, a French national who ran off to join ISIS last year, was known almost immediately after the attacks.
- While there is no public information on the identity of one of the Bataclan killers, both of the others were known Jihadists and French citizens. Samy Amimour was the subject of an international arrest warrant, and was known to be in Syria fighting with ISIS late last year. His father’s (successful) attempt to find him but (unsuccessful) attempt to bring him home and un-brainwash him was the subject of a Le Monde feature from last December. How and when he returned to France is either unknown or unreported.
- The other Bataclan killer was Omar Ismail Mostefai, a petty criminal with a long record who became radicalized five years ago; so much so that his friends tried to notify French authorities. He travelled to Syria through Turkey in 2013 and came to the attention of Turkish officials, who notified French authorities about him twice. As with Amimour, it’s not clear how or when he returned to France.
The amount of intelligence failure involved in this story is so staggering it’s alm0st impossible to take in.
When I traveled through Greece a few years ago the
time serving government lackeycustoms official didn’t look up from the passport to see if I matched the picture, the description or even the country.Policies, regulations, and laws don’t matter if they are not enforced. Example #2938701.
“gentle giant”
Bravo!
This supports my repeated suggestion that admitting thousands of Syrian immigrants (regardless of whether or not they are called refugees) is fraught with danger. Even if we had competent bureaucracies, it is clear that no data exists in Syria which can be reviewed. All the rationalizations and justifications for vetting simply name multiple redundant agencies and the passage of time. NO ONE had identified reliable sources of actual data which could be relied upon. Not even the Mayflower passenger manifest to (which the president (sic) alluded).
Sure is scary when authorities know who the bad guys are, but are powerless to do anything until it’s too late.
Right. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20. Frankly, I’m no longer surprised by the fact that most of the pieces of the puzzle were in plain sight, but that no-one put them all together. That happens over and over again, not only with terrorist attacks, but also in many instances of mass murder in the US and probably elsewhere (but that’s another story).
I think this is one of the reasons that so many mistrust the assurances of their leaders that “everything is being done,” and that “everybody is being thoroughly vetted,” when it comes to finding, and rooting out, the bad guys. To argue with the President on this issue runs the risk of being called (at best) a knuckle-dragging paranoid (ie a Republican), or a scaredy-cat. But it seems to me naive in the extreme to pretend that the government, which couldn’t find its own bum if it had handles, will suddenly, and for the first time in living memory, get with the program and do its job well. It can’t do the job well when it has the data, so why should it be any better at it when the data is conspicuously lacking or hard to pin down?
(I’m open to the idea that the US screening/vetting/tracking and investigation process is far superior to that of Europe, and that the sort of thing that happened in France couldn’t possible happen here. Can someone convince me that’s true, because my cynical gut hunch says that it’s not.)
I’m afraid that the ‘fight them over there so they don’t come over here,’ approach, which has motivated American leaders in the past, doesn’t hold much water with the current occupant of the White House. He’s quite happy, it appears, to set us up to ‘expect’ terrorist incidents on this side of the pond, and to conscript the American public as boots on the ground in this country while he refuses to put boots on the ground anywhere else.
This is the sort of thing that makes me question, among other intel areas, the NSA’s blanket surveillance of our telephone data. Stipulate, arguendo, that the NSA is only collecting metadata on our phone calls. With a demonstrated inability to use the data already being collected–those other plainly visible pieces of the puzzle–in what way will these additional pieces, these metadata, be used?
There’s no evidence any of our, or the French, or the British, or the… intelligence agencies have any useful techniques for sifting among the vasty sea of data to pull out likely areas that want further, or more urgent, or more focused investigation.
That’s not a reason to not bother, or to shut down the NSA (there may be other reasons for the latter, but this isn’t one of them), but I’d be more sanguine if I had reason to believe that there were some serious effort going into the effort to develop those techniques.
Eric Hines
If you like your suicide vest, you can keep your suicide vest.
Every time I hear “experts” describe the Paris attacks the words used are intricate, precise, highly coordinated, etc. I do not understand these descriptions. How precise and well planned can an attack be when all four of the suicide bombers blew up only themselves or maybe one other person? At least one of the suicide bombers, if not several of them, were either right outside of the football stadium or actually inside, I believe, the concert hall with several thousand people around. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I am actually thanking God that thousands more people were not killed, but precise and well planned? Mr. Meyer, can you set me straight? What am I not seeing here?
I thought the primary use of the metadata was to try to identify money laundering schemes.
There is a separate phone snooping program that is used to develop lists of associates of known bad guys, but that uses personal data and not metadata.
Tom,
Having a painting on the wall of Woodrow Wilson must be removed. The Washington Redskins must change their name. Climate deniers should be arrested.
Meanwhile, someone is outwardly manifesting belief in Jihad. They leave the country to recruit others and gain training. Jihad by its very definition is Sedition, Subversion, and the most virulent Incitement to Violence that exists. Jihadists openly murder gays, rape women, and commit acts of genocide against the helpless.
When will we have proven our perfect tolerance for the other? When will we have questioned enough our own motives without questioning the motives of murderers?
This isn’t that difficult if we would allow ourselves to connect the dots.
Regards,
Jim
So far as I’ve read, the Paris Attackers had at least 10 suicide vests between them:
I agree with you that — the Bataclan attack aside — the suicide vests were remarkably ineffective as murder weapons, despite at least four attempts to use them in precisely that way. The stadium bombers were, I think, objectively incompetent.
And a lucky thing too, or Obama would have rounded up every Ricochet member and sent us to Gitmo by now.
It would be nice, if only as a change of pace, to hear that one of the individuals involved in such attacks was a complete surprise to the intelligence services involved. “Yeah, he was on our watch list” loses some of its piquancy when you say it about everybody who participated .
Sorry to report, Claire, that intelligence failures don’t explain these happenings. That’s why it is impossible to comprehend or rationalize. That the first person traveled under his own name and was never apprehended is a failure of will, which in turn is a direct result of political correctness and adherence to the established narrative. These barbarians operate in the open because they can. No civil functionary wants the irredeemable blot on their record for detaining someone that is non-white and non-Christian. When we begin believing what the barbarians say and interdict them, we’ll be safer.
The same inferior mindset that neglects public safety in this way operates internally as well as externally to the US. So in the meantime, living in the heart of a bluer than blue state, I increase my ammo hoard and practice marksmanship.
Splodeygrams are the new way to reach out and touch someone.
Lizard.
As Tom’s remarkable outline makes clear, the Paris attacks were a massive intelligence failure. But we need to understand how failures like this happen:
Basically, failures like this happen because our intelligence officials mistake information for intelligence. They collect “facts” but don’t connect the dots; they don’t make the intellectual (sometimes politically volatile) leap to say what it means.
Information is raw material; intelligence is information with a meaning attached to it.
Simply put, all of our intelligence services are so highly focused on gathering information they simply don’t have the time — or the analysts — required to understand what it means soon enough to act.
Well, also — and I may be betraying my prejudice here, but I do live in France — they happen to Belgians.
More on this here, here, here, and here. And lots more in French, of course, where the vitriol directed toward the Belgians has been so extreme that the Belgians issued a diplomatic démarche:
Mind you, it’s typically French to blame Belgiums for being feeble-minded and incompetent. But let’s drop all political correctness here: they are. Basically.
The notion of “intelligence failure” reminds me of Nidal Hassan and his attack on soldiers at Fort Hood.
I think of an intelligence failure as a failure to gather the information that was available, or to analyze it and connect the dots. In the case of Fort Hood, the information was gathered and the dots were connected, in that people in authority knew that he was a mentally troubled soldier of Allah in contact with known jihadists. But because of political correctness no one had the courage to do what was necessary to remove Hassan. In fact, after the shooting, the head of the army said that “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”
Here is a fictional scenario that I can imagine coming to pass: Hillary Clinton is elected president. Somehow the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and various other Muslim enemies seem to know what the US government and military intend to do before we do. Only years later do we learn that Hillary’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin, was an agent working for the Muslim Brotherhood. But the connection was there all along with anyone not blinded to the obvious by political correctness.
I was reading recently the story of FBI spy Robert Hanssen. At least twice his superiors were tipped off directly with suspicions about his activities and there were a number of other red flags, but no-one ever acted on the information in any meaningful way.
If the FBI won’t even respond to information about one in its own midst who’d been leaking highly damaging information against it for over 20 years, someone they knew existed and were desperate to catch, then what hope do we have that the police will bother to act on every tip-off about a potential terrorist?
All the surveillance in the world does no good if it means the authorities are drowning in information of varying degrees of usefulness. And with every extra resource they receive comes more bureaucracy.
Herbert E. Meyer—”Basically, failures like this happen because our intelligence officials mistake information for intelligence. They collect “facts” but don’t connect the dots; they don’t make the intellectual (sometimes politically volatile) leap to say what it means.”
That’s a good point, and it applies in other fields. Data mining has made its appearance in my field, astronomy, within the past fifteen years. It is tough to make the distinction to a student between finding a correlation and understanding the physics that explains it…or, for that matter, having a model that can be tested by the data. My advisor had once told me that I should wait at least a day after making any data plot before presenting it at the research team meeting, because I needed that time to think about what it actually meant.
“Here is a fictional scenario that I can imagine coming to pass: Hillary Clinton is elected president. Somehow the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and various other Muslim enemies seem to know what the US government and military intend to do before we do. Only years later do we learn that Hillary’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin, was an agent working for the Muslim Brotherhood. But the connection was there all along with anyone not blinded to the obvious by political correctness.”
There’s a possibility that this is going on right now.
Axe-man has it right (#21). This was a failure of will, not of analysis. Hence, my comment about enforcement.
This is why it doesn’t matter how well informed or thorough our immigration/refugee management officials might be. They are not willing to respond appropriately to known dangers.
The greatest threat to American security at home is ideology, not incompetence or ignorance.
Yep. We have enemies in very bad places to have enemies.
It’s a relief to see so many caught the flaw in the “intelligence failure” narrative. If none of the ISIS operatives were known to French or Belgian officials, that would indicate an intelligence failure. That the public now knows as much as we do about them demonstrates the absence of an intelligence failure. Having said that, I’m assuming there wasn’t an analytic failure here…assuming the French and Belgians had not simply concluded ‘bad guys, but no serious threat.’ That would certainly be a failure of intelligence analysis.
The authorities had strategic intelligence about these murderers, but one can imagine they lacked specific warning (or tactical intelligence) about the 13 November attacks. Or perhaps they missed obvious clues, either because they failed to properly analyze data they had or because they weren’t collecting data that they should have been. Presumably, when memoirs are published, we’ll discover if any of that is true.
In the interim, we should assume it was a failure of will to act upon the intelligence they’d already generated. At the macro-level what causes systemic failure in this putative “war on terrorism” has not changed since 9-11. If treated as law enforcement, enemy warriors exploit the opening which we consciously provide them. Treat it as a war—as Lincoln did by suspending habeas corpus, as France and Belgium are now with their emergency decrees—and you have a fighting chance of defeating your insider threats.
From the New York Post, November 22nd, 2015
Reminds me of what David Weber calls the three laws of Securitydynamics:
But sometimes the problem is politicians who refuse to act, either because the warning doesn’t fit their agenda or they don’t have the courage to face the truth and act on it. The FBI had Maj. Nidal Hassan’s emails to Al-Awlaki months before the Ft. Hood attack. Nothing was done, even though the emails made a slam dunk case of Conduct Unbecoming an Officer that would have ended Hassan’s military career with a Bad Conduct Discharge if not a Dishonorable Discharge. Probably would have gotten him some prison time, too.
When the politicians have their heads in the sand (or other places where the sun doesn’t shine), it makes it tough for the security professionals to do their jobs properly.
There’s probably more “laws,” but at any rate these three need some caveats.
#1 – Would be better to say intelligence analysts always want more data, but they only want relevant data. And the Agencies collecting that data are generally well aware of the risks and limitations inherent in gathering more information.
#2 – Politicians throw money at problems and build more bureaucracies in order to spend the money they throw around. The response to 9-11 exemplified this, especially the new Cabinet-level Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Congress didn’t give that new DNI line-item fiscal authority over the existing intelligence agencies or DoD’s intelligence activities. If it had, there would be fewer Congressmen sitting on Committees with a say in how the tens of Billion$ are spent each year. So you get just as much duplication and waste in this area as in other parts of the government, with just as great a tendency to conflate effectiveness with level of expenditures.
#3 – When policy makers don’t want to act, they demand more intelligence. This is true for military commanders too. That’s not to say they don’t have good reasons for not acting—often they do. But always the convenient rationale is ‘need more intel.’ Conversely, when operations go well it’s an “operational success.” If they don’t, it’s an “intelligence failure.”