Members of Fort Dix Plot Accused of Trying to Radicalize Other Inmates

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

This week, federal authorities accused at least two of the men allegedly involved in a plot to attack soldiers at the Fort Dix army base of attempting to radicalize other inmates. The suspects in the Fort Dix plot have filed a request to be granted bail, and in a responsive filing the U.S. Attorney's Office alleged two specific incidents. In one, defendant Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer allegedly gave another inmate a copy of an al-Qaeda recruitment video (the video had been part of the prosecution evidence, which the defendants were able to access; according to prosecutors, Shnewer then tried to share the video with other inmates). In the second incident, defendant Eljvir Duka sent a note to another prisoner stating: "Now you see why we were going to sacrifice all for the sake of Allah in jihad. Fight in the way of Allah first with the mouth then with the sword."

If true, the prosecutors' allegations are unsurprising. While the Fort Dix gang are regarded as wannabes by the intelligence community, their major problem is regarded as poor tradecraft rather than lack of ideological extremism.

But this incident places a small spotlight on a broader problem, radicalization in the prison system. As Out of the Shadows, a report issued in September 2006 by the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute and University of Virginia Critical Incident Analysis Group, states, "Prisons have long been places where extremist ideology and calls to violence could find a willing ear, and conditions are often conducive to radicalization." There are several known instances where people who either converted to Islam or else radicalized while in prison have later been involved in terrorist violence. Richard Reid, who attempted to bring down a transatlantic flight with explosives hidden in his shoe in December 2001, is believed to have converted to Islam and also radicalized while incarcerated in Great Britain. In France, both Ruddy Terranova and Khaled Kelkal -- who were involved with Algerian terror groups -- seem to fit this model. The most prominent case in the U.S., though, is the Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS) plot in California, which is the first known terrorist plot in the U.S. hatched entirely within a prison cell.

One theme I constantly return to in writing about the global war on terror is the need to fight smarter. The prisons are no exception, as a few previous incidents (some of which I have written about, on the CT Blog and elsewhere) demonstrate:

• An alarming amount of extremist literature has made its way into the U.S. prison system.
• The 1993 World Trade Center bombers were able to write letters advocating jihad from prison, including at least 14 letters that went back and forth between them and a Spanish terror cell.
• As of summer 2005, though the federal Bureau of Prisons held 119 inmates with "specific ties" to Islamic terrorist groups, there were no full-time translators to monitor their communications.
  

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