August 10, 2017 | Quoted by Louis Jacobson - Politifact

No, the Obama administration didn’t invent the term ‘lone wolf’ for terrorists

Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, is none too fond of the terrorism-fighting approach of former President Barack Obama. He made this clear during an Aug. 8 interview on MSNBC.

“There's no such thing as a lone wolf,” Gorka said. “You do know that. That was a phrase invented by the last administration to make Americans stupid. There has never been a serious attack or a serious plot that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaida. At least through the ideology and the TTPs, the tactics, the training, the techniques and the procedures, that they supply through the internet. Never happened. It’s bogus.”

Even limiting the universe to post 9/11 jihadist attacks produces some exceptions to Gorka’s firm “never,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He cited two attacks without apparent links to al-Qaida or ISIS:

Gartenstein-Ross said he’s sympathetic to Gorka’s broader skepticism about the impact of lone wolves. For starters, there is evidence from a recent University of Miami study that online pro-ISIS groups have highly fluid memberships, suggesting that true lone wolves — people acting genuinely on their own without any interactions with like-minded individuals, online or otherwise — are rare in the Internet age.

Experts have cautioned that overuse of the term “lone wolf” may even be hampering investigations. “When you systematically describe attackers as lone wolves, you sometimes end up missing the networks they were connected to,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

 

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