Americans have been misled, former FBI official Philip Mudd told about 100 Penn Staters on Friday.
Al Qaeda, he said, is not actually a terrorist group.
‘This is a revolutionary organization.’
And the violent attacks it encourages, Mudd went on, ‘are not an end.
‘They are a means to inspire a revolutionary movement.’
Appearing at the Lewis Katz Building, Mudd spoke for about 90 minutes Friday afternoon as part of a public speaker series put on by the International Center for the Study of Terrorism. The center is based at Penn State.
Mudd, who left his government career in March, has served as deputy director for the FBI’s National Security Branch and for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. He was working on a policy assignment in Washington, D.C., when terrorists struck on Sept. 11, 2001. Within two months, he was part of U.S. outreach to the Afghanistan government.
And for the next several years, Mudd had a constant role in monitoring and analyzing daily threats to the U.S.’ national security.
It was ‘fascinating, but so painful’ to know the threats facing the nation, especially in the months after the 2001 attacks, Mudd said.
But in 2002, when an al Qaeda insider began revealing its thought processes to Washington, the government mounted a more strategic campaign to destabilize the organization, he said. With more effectiveness, the U.S. was able to target al Qaeda’s top leadership in the Middle East.
‘What I saw is committed people who are quite talented and would never turn away from the belief they had,’ Mudd said of top al Qaeda leaders.
That belief, in large part, is that they are revolutionaries, part of a long movement that will span decades or centuries — well beyond their own lives, Mudd said. He said their work is meant to inspire and motivate other would-be terrorists across the world.
Meanwhile, that original ‘core’ al Qaeda group — the one responsible for the 2001 attacks in the U.S. — no longer has the dominant role it once held in planning terrorist acts, Mudd said.
In fact, he said no terrorist operation detected by the U.S. since 2001 has been wholly operated by the al Qaeda core group.
‘What we have today is a group of people who have increasingly less contact with al Qaeda,’ Mudd said.
From an intelligence standpoint, he said, the shift makes it harder to detect and identify likely terrorist operators. But the good news is, because the threats now tend to come from relative amateurs, the dangers tend to be less lethal, Mudd said.
‘We’ve got at least 10 years to go against these like-minded kids’ who are inspired by al Qaeda, including Americans who’ve been radicalized by the movement, Mudd said. ‘ … Emotionally inspired kids are not dedicated. They’re not going to be at this for a lifetime. They don’t even know what they believe.’
Much of the global al Qaeda-inspired movement has been undermined by its mass and deliberate killings of innocents, which has been hotly debated within top al Qaeda leadership circles, Mudd said.
That murderous trend and controversy, he believes, will be keys in the ongoing demise of the movement, even as the world sees attempted attacks over the next several years, Mudd said.
‘The adversary wants us to react, wants us to call them al Qaeda’ and call them Muslims, he said. What they don’t want, he said, is to be called murderers and ‘killers of innocents.’
So the next time there’s a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Mudd said, the country should ‘grieve for the dead, sweep up the glass and call (the terrorist) a murderer.’
‘There is no justification for the murder of an innocent,’ he said, ‘and they know it.’
‘Revolutions aren’t killed by operations; they’re killed by the death of ideology,’ Mudd said. ‘ … The core of their revolution is dying. Let’s let it die.’
Earlier coverage
