“Kramer Jihadists”: The Cultural Criminology of FBI Sting Operations against Lone Wolf Terrorists
Wednesday, 22 October 4-6pm, GLT3
Dr Mark S. Hamm will deliver this paper examining FBI sting operations designed to provoke individuals into terrorist activity so that they can be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for decades.
Since 9/11, the FBI has developed a standard procedure for these operations whereby agents reach out to isolated Muslim-Americans and provide them with ideological support, a sense of belonging, and materials needed to carry out a bombing on American soil. The FBI has conducted roughly 50 of these stings, involving some 15,000 informants supported by multi-million dollar budgets. Typically, the FBI has focused on vulnerable young men with mental health or drug problems. Similar to the “broken windows” approach to urban law enforcement, FBI agents trawl cyber neighborhoods of the Internet looking for what they call “Kramer Jihadists” (after the bumbling Seinfeld character) who espouse violence against the United States. The FBI’s mission is to lure these opinionated but criminally inept young Muslim men into conspiracies where agents can provide them with the tutelage and encouragement necessary to turn relatively harmless people into would-be mass murderers—never once considering how such a costly method of wrecking lives might be converted into soft power approaches to salvage them.
Dr Mark Hamm is a former prison warden from Arizona and currently a professor of Criminology at Indiana State University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Terrorism Center, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. He is the leading scholar of prison radicalization in the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote widely about right-wing extremists in the United States, as well as subjects as diverse as apocalyptic violence, cop killer violence, ethnography and terror, and the USA Patriot Act. His books include The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat (2013); Terrorism as Crime: From Oklahoma City to Al–Qaeda and Beyond (2007); In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground (2002); Apocalypse in Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged (1997); and American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime (1993). Professor Hamm received three major grants from the National Institute of Justice: one to study crimes committed by terrorist groups; one to study terrorist recruitment in American correctional institutions; and the other to study lone wolf terrorism in America.