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Worse still, even though Farook first started planning a terrorist attack way back in 2011, before the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) even existed in its current incarnation, Obama promised more air strikes against ISIS in response, just as the French bombed a bunch of mostly empty sites in Syria in response to the Paris attack. The problem is that's likely to help the group recruit more fighters to travel to Syria or inspire more attacks by individuals in the West."The use of military force to bomb terrorist organizations in so-called safe havens appears to be one of the most powerful recruitment tools there is," Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations, says of attacking failed states like Syria or Yemen in the name of denying terrorists safe havens. "If you believe the Safe Haven Myth, you must continually use force to attack terrorists organizations, which provides the basis for their recruitment to replace the foot soldiers you killed."Rather than remain silent about America's deadbeat Sunni "allies," its leaders need to demand they work to combat the extremist ideology fostering Islamic terrorism most threatening to the country.
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Immediately after 9/11, the US government tried to make FBI pursue Islamic terrorism more like the CIA would, divorcing intelligence collection from specific crimes. As recently as last year, advisors insisted the FBI should spend more time mapping out where potential Islamic terrorists might come from, which amounts to profiling, even though FBI agents reported they found little value in the activity."We no longer teach prescriptive interviewing as opposed to brute interrogation." —David Gomez
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Ultimately though, 14 years after starting but making little progress in a global "war on terrorism," it is time—at least for Americans—to return to thinking about these attacks in terms of crime, not Terrorism. That's true, in part, because (as President Obama observed), gun crimes of all sorts are the bigger threat in the US—not to mention a great deal of violent or impactful crimes that go unsolved as the country obsesses about just one kind of attack. Both German and Gomez argue the FBI should focus on the crimes themselves, for which politics or ideology are just the motivation. Indeed, some crimes, such as weapons trafficking or robbery, may lay the groundwork for larger terrorist attacks. German further argues that by focusing on otherwise unsolved crimes, you'll end up stopping the terrorism that such crime facilitates. "Focusing on solving uncleared violent crimes will save more lives and unintentionally interdict more terrorism than mass surveillance ever will," he says.The federal response, thus far, to the occupation by a far-right militia of a wildlife refuge in Oregon may provide lessons. Though the occupation is still in its early days, the government seems committed to de-escalating the situation, not only to avoid loss of life, but also to diminish the appeal of the occupiers. That's a dramatically different approach than the feds usually take to Islamic terrorism or even unarmed civil disobedience. But it has the advantage of treating these people as trespassers with guns, rather than as a movement that, by being targeted, might attract others.We need to stop letting terrorists terrorize us, because that only makes them stronger. If they're treated like criminals, just as the other mass shooters are, we might begin to focus on underlying causes of all kinds of shootings, and save a lot of lives along the way.Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist covering national security and civil liberties and a fellow at X-Lab, a technology policy think tank. Follow her on Twitter.We need to stop letting terrorists terrorize us, because that only makes them stronger.