In October 2013, an American man named Syed Rizwan Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet a Pakistani woman who lived there named Tashfeen Malik. They had connected on a dating website and, after exchanging some messages, decided to meet in person. They apparently connected well enough that in July 2014, Farook flew back to Saudi Arabia, where he and Malik married. They returned to the United States, with Malik entering the country on a K-1 visa for fiancées, and settled in Farook's home in California.
A year and a half later, in December 2015, Farook and Malik executed the deadliest shooting attack since Sandy Hook and what some analysts consider the deadliest US terrorist attack since 9/11, killing 14 people in San Bernardino. After launching the attack, Malik posted a message to Facebook that authorities say, while partially garbled, appeared to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.
Perhaps the greatest political controversy that has grown out of the attack is that July 2014 flight from Saudi Arabia to California. Why was Tashfeen Malik allowed into the country? Was there really no indication or warning that she would go on to help launch an act of terrorism on behalf of ISIS? No way to evaluate or predict her sympathies to jihadism?
It's a question that gets to issues of cyber monitoring and policing, as well as to much hazier and less well-understood questions of how people "radicalize" to the point of supporting terrorism. It's also a question that's been confused by wildly conflicting accounts of what happened and when. Finally, it's a debate that raises some hard truths about domestic terrorism that Americans don't want to admit: In some cases, perhaps including this one, they simply may not be preventable — much like the non-terror-related mass shootings that have plagued this country for years.
What follows is an explanation of what's known currently, what it means, why it matters, and how to evaluate the subsequent political controversies.
When did the San Bernardino attackers first express sympathy for terrorism?
On the surface, much of the controversy turns around a simple question of timing: Did Malik or Farook express any sympathy for terrorism or for ISIS before they launched the attack? Or, more damningly, before Malik was granted her July 2014 visa to enter the United States?
There is, as yet, no indication that either Malik or Farook publicly or overtly expressed any sympathies to terrorism at any point before the attack. However, the FBI says they did discuss "jihad and martyrdom" in private messages in late 2013.
It can help clarify all this to look at it as a simple timeline:
- Autumn 2013: Malik and Farook meet on a dating website.
- October 2013: Farook travels to Saudi Arabia for the hajj (annual religious pilgrimage), where he meets Malik in person.
- Late 2013: They exchange direct, private online messages discussing "jihad and martyrdom," according to FBI Director James Comey. It's unclear whether this occurred before and/or after their October meeting.
- June 2014: ISIS rises to global prominence.
- July 2014: Farook travels again to Saudi Arabia, where he and Malik wed, then fly back to the US. Malik enters on a K-1 fiancée visa.
- July 2015: Malik is granted a green card after passing multiple criminal and national security background checks, which include two in-person interviews.
- December 2, 2015: Malik and Farook launch the San Bernardino attack, during which they make their first known public statement about jihadism, in a semi-garbled Facebook post declaring allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
How this story got confused — and became a major controversy
Ten days after the attack, the New York Times published what appeared to a blockbuster scoop and a major embarrassment for the US government agencies tasked with preventing domestic terror attacks.
The story said that Malik had publicly declared her desire to commit acts of terrorism before even arriving in the US. That story now appears to perhaps be false, but it may be too late, as its allegations have entered the public and political consciousness and are likely to remain there.
Here is how the story opens, with what appears to be a damning account of the government's failures:
WASHINGTON — Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband carried out the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., passed three background checks by American immigration officials as she moved to the United States from Pakistan. None uncovered what Ms. Malik had made little effort to hide — that she talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad.
She said she supported it. And she said she wanted to be a part of it.
But on Wednesday, FBI Director Comey said the story was false: "So far, in this investigation we have found no evidence of posting on social media by either of them at that period in time and thereafter reflecting their commitment to jihad or to martyrdom. I’ve seen some reporting on that, and that’s a garble."
Rather, Comey said, the messages discussing "jihad" had been private direct messages — and thus not available to investigators without some sort of warrant, which as of the 2014 and 2015 background checks they'd had no reason to seek.
The Times has not retracted its story, and it is indeed possible that the paper has information that shows Comey is mistaken or even lying. But in a subsequent report noting Comey's remarks, the paper made no effort to challenge them. And the initial Times story had puzzled some terrorism analysts, who'd expressed confusion at the article's vague references to "social media posts" and its inability to quote from the posts or even name the social network involved.
San Bernardino became a debate about online government monitoring
It is perhaps too early, based on these conflicting accounts, to categorically say whether the Times story was correct or false. But it has already widely spread as gospel truth — helped along by TV media such as CNN and by GOP presidential candidates eager to pounce on what they portray as a major and embarrassing failure by the Obama administration.
Tuesday's presidential debate, moderated by CNN, devoted perhaps half an hour to discussing online monitoring as a counterterrorism tool, all premised on the possibly false allegation that Malik had publicly posted about her intention to launch terror attacks.
Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, warned, "We didn’t monitor the Facebook posting of the female San Bernardino terrorist because the Obama DHS thought it would be inappropriate. She made a public call to jihad, and they didn’t target it."
The millions of viewers of this debate were left to conclude something that might not be true: that one of the San Bernardino attackers had a long history of publicly declaring her support for terrorism, and that the US had nonetheless allowed her to enter the country.
This would naturally terrify any American: Our own government, it would seem, is so incompetent at keeping us safe that it can't even pick out a woman who had "made little effort to hide" her public support for jihadist terrorism.
Even if Americans did not agree with GOP candidates who said this was because of, say, Obama's "political correctness," many would naturally conclude that agencies such as the NSA had become too lax or constrained in how aggressively they monitored the social message of Americans like Farook and foreign residents such as Malik.
That is why, two and a half years after the Edward Snowden revelations about US online snooping shocked many Americans into believing agencies like the NSA had gone too far in privileging security over civil liberties, that pendulum is now swinging back in the other direction, with virtually the entire GOP field agreeing that more NSA-style monitoring is the only way to prevent future San Bernardinos.
Still, why didn't the US detect the San Bernardino plot before it happened? Why didn't the government know Farook and Malik had radicalized?
This question gets to a very wide and meaningful distinction between how people think radicalization works — the process by which a normal person decides to take up terrorism — versus how it actually works.
We commonly think of radicalization as a sort of "terrorist switch" that goes off in a person's brain. One day someone is a non-terrorist, who like the vast majority of human beings of every religion abhors violence against innocent civilians. Then suddenly the switch is flipped — maybe because the person sees an ISIS propaganda video or encounters an extremist preacher — and he becomes filled with madness and bloodlust, driven, zombie-like, toward his unflinching mission of jihadist violence.
In this view, the goal of law enforcement is to sniff out the radicalized terror zombies among the population, by looking for the telltale "warning signs" and by monitoring "at-risk populations."
I have bad news: This understanding of radicalization is just not accurate. While it would be comforting to imagine there is a black-and-white distinction between radicalized and non-radicalized people, and that there is some straightforward checklist by which we can identify both the radicalized and the at-risk, that is just not the case.
My colleague Jennifer Williams, who has long studied terrorist radicalization, explained that the process of deciding to take up terrorism is so highly individualized to each person who does it that scholars say no real "model" for radicalization exists. There is no standard road map or universal set of risk factors, try as scholars might to find one. Nor is there typically a single moment by which some switch gets flipped.
There are many reasons for this, but the core reason is that deciding to take up terrorism is ultimately a deeply personal decision made for deeply personal reasons.
That makes detecting an individual person's decision to take up terrorism extremely difficult — perhaps in some cases even impossible. When you look at, for example, Europeans who join ISIS, it is true that some exhibit easily identifiable risk factors, such as participating on jihadist web forums, attending extremist group meetings, and so on. But others act, for example, out of a desire for adventure or a sense of purpose or because they're failing out of school. Those are internal motivations that no amount of NSA monitoring can detect.
That appears, based on the information that is so far publicly available, to be what happened in San Bernardino: that Malik and Farook made a private and personal decision to take up terrorism "inspired" by ISIS, a group that is widely covered in the news and thus required no unusual behavior to learn about. And because they exhibited no outward signs of this decision that law enforcement could plausibly track or investigate, they were free to acquire firearms and plan their attack unmolested.
The only breadcrumb the attackers appear to have dropped was a vague set of social media direct messages in late 2013 that, according to Comey, "show[ed] signs in their communication of their joint commitment to jihad and to martyrdom." But these messages were private: Law enforcement had no legal means to access them, and even if they did, they had no reason to look.
The only universe in which law enforcement would have seen those messages before the attack is one in which the FBI or NSA reads every private social message written by every American or US visitor, then somehow examines them all to look for clues. In the Farook/Malik case, it sounds like that would have to include even messages sent on dating websites. That is a world that sounds Orwellian and perhaps not even technologically feasible.
The San Bernardino controversy reveals hard truths about domestic terror that Americans don't want to acknowledge
Maybe at some point, information will emerge showing that Farook and Malik had exhibited clearly identifiable risk factors, either before Malik entered the US or later but before they launched the attack. So far, though, no such information has come out. Even Malik's own sister told the Times that Malik "had no contact with any militant organization or person, male or female."
But Americans are searching desperately for some clue the attackers left, some failure in US law enforcement. This has come through in desperate political debates over insufficient screening or cyber snooping or some other supposed problem that did not actually contribute to this attack.
That's understandable: We want to live in a world where attacks like San Bernardino are possible to both track and prevent. Because the alternative is pretty scary: a world in which attacks like San Bernardino might sometimes just happen and be more or less unpreventable.
But this may in fact be the world we live in, whether we want to admit it or not. If you don't believe me, consider the fact that Americans already widely accept this as true when it comes to mass shootings that are not connected to terrorism. We accept that we live in a country where mass shootings are just going to happen sometimes.
The same factors that allow mass shootings by "disturbed loners" to happen over and over again, that make it impossible to prevent every attack and guaranteed that some will slip through, apply just as equally to mass shootings by "disturbed loners" who draw their inspiration from ISIS rather than from, say, school bullying.
While San Bernardino is in many ways a terrorism problem — driven and exacerbated by terrorism factors such as the emergence of an apocalyptic terror group skilled at convincing far-off individuals to commit violence on behalf of twisted religious and political beliefs — it is also a mass shooting problem.
Americans want to treat San Bernardino and the risk of future such attacks — and that risk is real — as purely a terrorism problem, because that feels like a problem with difficult but achievable and politically palatable solutions. We want to ignore the ways in which this is also a mass shooting problem, because American political and social factors have made addressing the broader mass shooting problem seem just about impossible.