Terrorists taunts may tell attack timing

WASHINGTON D.C. — Osama bin Laden mumbling from his cave, a cassette tape threatening the West with yet more violence: In an era filled with worries over terrorism, can we turn the taunts of terrorists against them, using their own words to predict their next move?

Some scientists are asking just that question. In a presentation at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting here, three teams of linguistics experts turned their attention to two types of Middle Eastern groups they view as different: terrorists and extremists. Using the extremist groups, which call for political change but don't commit violent acts, for comparison to the terrorist groups, the teams went looking for telltale clues that might precede another bombing or suicide attack, particularly in the weeks or months before it happens.

"There is some evidence of a tightening down in language," before a terrorist attack, said psychologist Lucian Conway of the University of Montana in Missoula, who presented one team's results. All three looked at 320 translations of Arabic of documents released by the terror groups, al-Qaeda and al Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen in Saudi Arabia, along with the extremist groups Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA).The latter two groups don't commit violence, but share the terror groups' goals of establishing a kind of fundamentalist religious control over Middle Eastern nations, Conway says. The documents range from published statements to recorded denunciations released over the last two decades, and were provided to the researchers by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which sponsored the research.

"This is a pilot effort, but the results are interesting," said DHS's Allison Smith, who organized the meeting panel. Using the same translations, each team looked at them in different ways:

•Conway's team selected paragraphs at random from translations, and scored them by hand for "integrative complexity" putting a numerical score on the degree to which the words express multiple viewpoints. If you say a sandwich looks funny, tastes funny and smells funny, then that description has a higher integrative complexity score than simply noting it looks funny. Violent intent was linked to lower scores and less complex language, such as simply denouncing the presence of foreigners in the Middle East, for example, rather listing their many perceived ill effects on society. Researchers in the 1980's had used the technique to find signs of bellicosity in diplomatic documents that preceded attacks in international crises throughout the 20th Century.

•Psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas led a team that looked at the translations with an automated search for "function" words. Function words are the nuts and bolts of writing: pronouns such as "he," "she" and "it," articles such as "the" and "a," and others, the boring words that most folks don't notice as they read, but which stitch together written or spoken thoughts. Certain patterns of function words can reveal the "personality" of an author, and a predisposition to dishonesty or violence, some research has suggested.

•Linguistics expert Antonio Sanfilippo of the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Wash., led a team that performed an automated search of the translations for "framing," themes or points of view embedded in the arguments inside the documents. Describing enemies as less than human, for example, is a frame. Best known for its use in social science to analyze political viewpoints, framing analysis might also reveal increased tendencies by terror groups to describe their victims in hostile terms before an attack, Sanfilippo said. "Looking at how a message is framed can tell us something about the intent of the communication source," he says.

Smith said that DHS hoped to see some link between language and the timing of the roughly 95 attacks that either killed 10 or more people, or attempted to kill 10 people (for example, shoe bomber Richard Reid's 2001 attempt to blast a hole in an American Airlines flight to Miami) by the two terror groups in the last two decades.

So what did the researchers find? Intriguingly, each group reported some signs of language changes among the terrorist groups starting a month before such attacks, while the extremist group language went on as before. "The terrorists became less likely to use elaborate statements," Conway said. "Maybe they were just tired," he adds.

Similarly, in the month before and after attacks, the function word analysis found terror groups used fewer emotional words and increased signatures of honesty in their rhetoric, such as less use of equivocating words such as "but" or "while," Pennebaker says. "Overall, there was a drop in complex thinking," he said. From al Qaeda translations, he added, "it is very possible we may be identifying the linguistic predictors of bin Laden himself."

In the frame analysis, terrorists tended to increase themes of their own isolation from society around the time of attacks, Sanfilippo said, using phrases to evoke their state of hiding. "Maybe this is not surprising. Terrorists typically pull back from their friends and relatives," he said. Perhaps in going to ground before an attack, the terrorists convey some sign of their even more limited contact with society.

Still, the researchers acknowledged their results didn't point to a single linguistic flashpoint to tell whether an attack was imminent. Pennebaker in particular agreed with skeptical questions from the audience at the AAAS meeting about relying on English translations from Arabic, rather than the original language, in the analysis. "Yes, this is an issue," he said. Furthermore, the research needs to broaden to include screeds from terror groups outside the Middle East, Sanfilippo suggested. Irish Republican Army missives before attacks in the 1970's might reveal a totally different language pattern, for example.

One question that Pennebaker fielded was whether terrorists could knowingly change their language before an attack to prevent the teams from using the analytical techniques to predict an action. "In theory, yes. But in practice, it's impossible," he said. Even knowing the analytical method intimately, he said his own attempts to write phony ransom notes that would fool the automated analysis always failed badly. Once you start writing and get into the nitty-gritty of moving words into their proper places, he says, disguising your writing style becomes almost impossible. "I know how to cheat the system and I was shocked at how lousy I was at it."