Frontline's 'American Terrorist': How Do You Stop Home-Grown Terrorism?
A remarkable documentary, Frontline’s American Terrorist tells the tale of David Coleman Headley, a U.S.-born citizen who was a key member of the terrorist cell that killed more than 150 people in the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India.
American Terrorist follows reporter-producer Sebastian Rotella as he traces Headley’s travels from his well-to-do Philadelphia-based family to Pakistan (where Headley’s father was born) and various other overseas sites. Rotella reports on Headley’s increasing infatuation with the militant Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
After 9/11, there was a period when Headley — who’d been arrested for dealing drugs — was recruited by the DEA to spy on terrorists. But as Rotella and director-producer Tom Jennings show, our government failed to track the full extent of Headley’s activities. Headley was at once distinctive looking — he has one blue and one brown eye, striking in photographs — and yet was able to blend in anonymously, both in America and overseas, where he trained in combat and bomb-making with the Pakistan-based terrorist Sajid Mir.
American Terrorist, a co-production of Frontline and ProPublica, is a longer, updated version of the 2011 documentary A Perfect Terrorist. What’s new about it? Well, start with two words: Edward Snowden. Snowden’s 2013 surveillance revelations prompted government proclamations that the information-gathering techniques Snowden had exposed resulted in some major successes in the prevention of terrorist attacks — and specifically a plot Headley had been involved in against the Danish newspaper that had published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
American Terrorist places Headley’s case in the context of the National Security Agency’s appropriation of vast amounts of phone and internet data. At Congressional hearings, the NSA used Headley as an example of a successful use of government surveillance. However, as Rotella and Jennings demonstrate through research and interviews with members of the intelligence community, crucial information about Headley’s terrorist activities was indeed buried deep within a vast info-dump, but in the Mumbai case, for example, it was never acted upon, until British intelligence essentially made the connection for the U.S. (Headley is now serving 35 years in prison.)
The overall impression left by American Terrorist is that, as well-meaning as much of this country’s efforts may be, the mass processing of confiscated data has probably done less to yield up workable information about terroristic plots than the intelligent detective work of humans following leads and making informed connections, in this country and abroad.
Frontline's American Terrorist airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on PBS.
