Assessing The Terrorist Threat

Al-Qaeda and allied groups continue to pose a threat to the U.S. in 2010. They have the capacity to kill dozens, or even hundreds, of Americans in a single attack. A key shift in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. citizens and residents have played in the leadership of al-Qaeda and aligned groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups. Indeed, these jihadists do not fit any particular ethnic, economic, educational, or social profile. This report is based on interviews with senior U.S. counterterrorism officials at both the federal and local levels, and embracing the policy, intelligence, and law enforcement communities. Map. This is a print on demand report.

Outlines the essential components of risk assessment and management, which entail the following sequential tasks: Critical infrastructure and key asset inventory; Criticality assessment; Threat assessment; Vulnerability assessment; Risk calculation; and Countermeasure identification. Risk assessment and management concepts and methodologies are evolving rapidly. Here, each component is defined and briefly examined. Protocols are supplied to quantify/calculate criticality, threat, vulnerability, and risk. Experience with risk assessment and management are limited in many law enforcement agencies. To assist in reversing this situation, this report supplies capacity building info. that includes promising programs, software, and training references.

The search for a distinct "terrorist profile" has been going on for many years, and while it is generally agreed that nobody is born a terrorist, there is plenty of disagreement about why a person might become one. Whereas personal and situational push and pull factors can be combined to determine how and why young people become involved in terrorism, preventing an individual from following a path that ends in violence without moral restraint poses an enormous challenge, especially in an open society. This book presents papers from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop titled "A Review of the Utility of Existing Terrorism Risk Assessment Instruments and Policies: Is there the Need for Possible New Approaches?", held in Berlin, Germany, on 29-30 November 2019. Researchers were asked to present papers for discussion sessions with invited participants and practitioners from a number of NATO member and partner countries. Various assessment instruments for identifying problematic individuals at an early stage were presented by experts. It was generally agreed that, due to cultural, religious and other differences, there is no simple way to identify the relatively few high-risk individuals among the larger population of politically radicalized but not necessarily violent individuals who pose no threat. Framed by an Introduction and Conclusion, the 16 chapters in the book are divided into three parts: Theory and Risk/Threat Assessment Instrument Policy Themes; Implementation of Politically Motivated Terrorism Protocols; and Personality Traits/Disorders, Anti-State Terrorism Profiles and the DSM-5 Personality Trait Instrument. This practice-oriented book will be of interest to all those tasked with protecting society from some of its most dangerous members.

As the war on terrorism wages on, our nation's policymakers will continue to face the challenge of assessing threats that various terrorist groups pose to the U.S. homeland and our interests abroad. As part of the RAND Corporation's yearlong "Thinking Strategically About Combating Terrorism" project, the authors of this report develop a way to assess and analyze the danger posed by various terrorist organizations around the world. The very nature of terrorism creates a difficulty in predicting new and emerging threats; however, by establishing these types of parameters, the report creates a fresh foundation of threat analysis on which future counterterrorism strategy may build.

Revised edition of International handbook of threat assessment, [2014]

Al-Qaeda and allied groups continue to pose a threat to the United States. Although it is less severe than the catastrophic proportions of a 9/11-like attack, the threat today is more complex and more diverse than at any time over the past nine years. Al-Qaeda or its allies continue to have the capacity to kill dozens, or even hundreds, of Americans in a single attack. A key shift in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. citizens and residents have played in the leadership of al-Qaeda and aligned groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups. Another development is the increasing diversification of the types of U.S.-based jihadist militants, and the groups with which those militants have affiliated. Indeed, these jihadists do not fit any particular ethnic, economic, educational, or social profile. Al-Qaeda's ideological influence on other jihadist groups is on the rise in South Asia and has continued to extend into countries like Yemen and Somalia; al-Qaeda's top leaders are still at large, and American overreactions to even unsuccessful terrorist attacks arguably have played, however inadvertently, into the hands of the jihadists. Working against al-Qaeda and allied groups are the ramped-up campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan, increasingly negative Pakistani attitudes and actions against the militants based on their territory, which are mirrored by increasingly hostile attitudes toward al-Qaeda and allied groups in the Muslim world in general, and the fact that erstwhile militant allies have now also turned against al-Qaeda. This report is based on interviews with a wide range of senior U.S. counterterrorism officials at both the federal and local levels, and embracing the policy, intelligence, and law enforcement communities, supplemented by the authors' own research.

This CSIS report states that terrorism is no longer the leading international threat to the United States or its top defense priority, but challenges related to violent extremism remain. The threat from Salafi-jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State has declined, and ethnonationalist threats are largely contained. However, a broader patchwork of violent far-left extremist ideologies has become more prominent on the global stage.

The search for a distinct "terrorist profile" has been going on for many years, and while it is generally agreed that nobody is born a terrorist, there is plenty of disagreement about why a person might become one. Whereas personal and situational push and pull factors can be combined to determine how and why young people become involved in terrorism, preventing an individual from following a path that ends in violence without moral restraint poses an enormous challenge, especially in an open society. This book presents papers from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop titled "A Review of the Utility of Existing Terrorism Risk Assessment Instruments and Policies: Is there the Need for Possible New Approaches?", held in Berlin, Germany, on 29-30 November 2019. Researchers were asked to present papers for discussion sessions with invited participants and practitioners from a number of NATO member and partner countries. Various assessment instruments for identifying problematic individuals at an early stage were presented by experts. It was generally agreed that, due to cultural, religious and other differences, there is no simple way to identify the relatively few high-risk individuals among the larger population of politically radicalized but not necessarily violent individuals who pose no threat. Framed by an Introduction and Conclusion, the 16 chapters in the book are divided into three parts: Theory and Risk/Threat Assessment Instrument Policy Themes; Implementation of Politically Motivated Terrorism Protocols; and Personality Traits/Disorders, Anti-State Terrorism Profiles and the DSM-5 Personality Trait Instrument. This practice-oriented book will be of interest to all those tasked with protecting society from some of its most dangerous members.