Katie Gorka of the Council on Global Security has released an important report, “The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy,” and events of this week show that it couldn’t be more timely. The separate terror attacks in Canada and a long string of terror attacks here in the U.S. show that the counter-terrorism policies of Western governments are fundamentally broken, and are directly responsible for getting their citizens killed. Even as I write this there are breaking reports of yet another attack.

The primary targets of Gorka’s new report are the various fictitious narratives and bogus social science models that drive Western counter-terrorism efforts. Chief among these is the “countering violent extremism (CVE)” narrative that has been the centerpiece for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.

CVE has been a colossal disaster because it has no roots in reality. It was always intended as a convenient fiction for politicians, bureaucrats, media and academics to avoid talking about the problem of the ideology that supports Islamic terrorism.

There has never once been a recorded case of anyone on the planet swearing their allegiance to the ideology of “violent extremism” and their willingness to kill others and die in the cause of “violent extremism.” It is a null set. There is nothing to counter, which is the whole point. And yet there are academics and institutions who are the beneficiaries of mountains of taxpayer cash to pursue the elusive CVE unicorn.

CVE has been used to smuggle all kinds of crackpot theories into not just our counter-terrorism policy, but also our foreign policy.

One crackpot theory has been that there are good Islamists that we can use against the bad Islamists. This was the keystone of the Obama administration’s Arab Spring policies. And this theory put into practice in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other places has left the Middle East in even worse shape than Obama found it.

As Gorka observes, the administration’s head cheerleader for this “good Islamist/bad Islamist” approach has been Quintan Wiktorowicz, who served as senior director of the National Security Council under Obama. But the disaster of the Arab Spring has prompted Wiktorowicz and his CVE pals to double-down on this approach. Now we have entirely new categories of actors, such as “vetted moderates,” and even “good bad Islamists,” who presumably are any jihadists not currently wearing a suicide belt.

This rampant idiocy has become so bad that we have the supposed best and brightest in the Washington, D.C. foreign policy elite now calling for engagement with “moderate al-Qaeda” (no, I’m not kidding).

Another theory championed by the CVE crowd is the “lone wolf” syndrome, reportedly where unknown individuals unconnected to any other actor strike without warning. But numerous examples show that terrorist actors are almost always part of a network who were involved in recruiting and tasking terrorist activity. As Max Abrahms at Northeastern University has observed:

Since the advent of international terrorism in 1970, none of the 40 most lethal terrorist attacks has been committed by a person unaffiliated with some terrorist group, according to publicly available data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which is funded by the Department of Homeland Security and stored at the University of Maryland. In fact, lone wolves have carried out just two of the 1,900 most deadly terrorist incidents over the last four decades.

So why “lone wolf”? Simply, it was a mechanism promulgated by the CVE industry, with willing cooperation from law enforcement and intelligence officials, to exonerate themselves when a terrorist attack happened. At its core is terror agnosticism: “There is possibly no way to predict who will turn to terrorism, so therefore we can’t be held responsible when it happens. Oh, and give us more money so we can better improve how we won’t be able to predict terror attacks.”

The two terror attacks in Canada this week, which are already being described by CVE industry practitioners as “lone wolf” attacks, were by individuals already known to Canadian counter-terrorism officials. Reportedly both Martin “Ahmad” Rouleau and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau had their passports taken away by Canadian authorities because they were considered “high risk” to travel overseas to join the Islamic State. We also have reports that Zehaf-Bibeau had contacts with known jihadist sympathizers and at least one individual who had fought in Syria.

Looking at the long string of domestic terror incidents here in the U.S. shows that the so-called “lone wolves,” in virtually every case, were in fact “known wolves.”

In fairness, this “known wolf” phenomenon goes back more than 20 years.

The cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was well known to law enforcement. An FBI informant, Emad Salem, was operating inside their cell and had been repeatedly warning the FBI about the group’s intentions. As far back as 1989, the FBI had been watching these cell members conduct weapons training.

When one of the cell members, El Sayyid Nosair, killed Rabbi Meir Kahane in a New York City hotel in November 1990, law enforcement recovered hordes of information about the cell’s activities and intentions — but, as has been pointed out, it was never translated. My friend and colleague Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted some of the cell members after the 1993 WTC bombing, wrote a whole book about the affair, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.

I’ve seen this “known wolf” problem work first-hand.

When the problem of terror recruitment amongst the U.S. Somali community by al-Shabaab became an issue in 2008 and 2009, there were reports in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, which has the second largest Somali population in the country, that al-Shabaab operative Dahir Gurey was fundraising and recruiting for the terrorist group in the area. He later showed up in Minneapolis.

When we told the FBI about it, the response was that our information couldn’t be accurate, because if it were true they would have heard about it from their local Muslim outreach partners.

Fast forward 18 months: Dahir Gurey was killed in a firefight in Mogadishu operating as a senior al-Shabaab commander. As I reported at the time, local FBI officials had publicly said that there was no known terrorist recruitment in the Columbus area just a week before Gurey’s death. He was featured last year in a recent al-Shabaab recruitment video targeting American recruits. But it’s doubtful our FBI office subsequently asked their Muslim outreach “partners” about it.

A review of domestic terror attacks and terror operatives in the U.S. demonstrates our counter-terrorism “known wolf” problem:

I’ve written previously about the laughable attempts by the FBI to engage in community outreach and the disastrous effect of the U.S. government’s Muslim outreach efforts in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.

There are other cases, such as the FBI’s strange dance with al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, that could be mentioned. Suffice it to say, the U.S. government’s performance in each of these cases has yet to foster any types of reform. What we can see is that the reckless government policies operating in each of these cases has not led to any degree of self-reflection by the system itself or its well-fed CVE enablers.

The first step to recovery is a recognition that what many Western governments are doing with respect to counter-terrorism isn’t working, which is what makes Katie Gorka’s recent analysis critical reading for policymakers. The next step would be to amputate the gangrenous limbs of entrenched interests that encourage these systemic failures, but it isn’t clear that there’s anyone in the White House or on Capitol Hill willing to do what’s necessary.

So as we see jihadist attacks escalate and threats around the world proliferate, we should expect that more Americans will die because of the false narratives and social science hucksters holding their CVE monopoly over our nation’s counter-terrorism system. And no one should be surprised when more of our “lone wolves” turn out to be “known wolves” to our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.