The Sham “Terrorism Expert” Industry

Glenn Greenwald writes,

A Highly Ideological, Jingoistic Clique Masquerades As Objective Scholars, All To Justify US Militarism

Shortly prior to the start of the London Olympics, there was anoutburst of hysteria over the failure to provide sufficient security against Terrorism, but as Harvard Professor Stephen Walt noted yesterday in Foreign Policy, this was all driven, as usual, by severe exaggerations of the threat: “Well, surprise, surprise. Not only was there no terrorist attack, the Games themselves came off rather well.” Walt then urges this lesson be learned:

[W]e continue to over-react to the “terrorist threat.” Here I recommend you read John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart’s The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11, in the latest issue of International Security. Mueller and Stewart analyze 50 cases of supposed “Islamic terrorist plots” against the United States, and show how virtually all of the perpetrators were (in their words) “incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational and foolish.” They quote former Glenn Carle, former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats saying “we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are,” noting further that al Qaeda’s “capabilities are far inferior to its desires.”

In the next paragraph, Walt essentially makes clear why this lesson will not be learned: namely, because there are too many American interests vested in the perpetuation of this irrational fear:

Mueller and Stewart estimate that expenditures on domestic homeland security (i.e., not counting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan) have increased by more than $1 trillion since 9/11, even though the annual risk of dying in a domestic terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.5 million. Using conservative assumptions and conventional risk-assessment methodology, they estimate that for these expenditures to be cost-effective “they would have had to deter, prevent, foil or protect against 333 very large attacks that would otherwise have been successful every year.” Finally, they worry that this exaggerated sense of danger has now been “internalized”: even when politicians and “terrorism experts” aren’t hyping the danger, the public still sees the threat as large and imminent.  As they conclude:

… Americans seems to have internalized their anxiety about terrorism, and politicians and policymakers have come to believe that they can defy it only at their own peril.  Concern about appearing to be soft on terrorism has replaced concern about seeming to be soft on communism, a phenomenon that lasted far longer than the dramatic that generated it … This extraordinarily exaggerated and essentially delusional response may prove to be perpetual.”

Which is another way of saying that you should be prepared to keep standing in those pleasant and efficient TSA lines for the rest of your life, and to keep paying for far-flung foreign interventions designed to “root out” those nasty jihadis.

Many of the benefits from keeping Terrorism fear levels high are obvious. Private corporations suck up massive amounts of Homeland Security cash as long as that fear persists, while government officials in the National Security and Surveillance State can claim unlimited powers, and operate with unlimited secrecy and no accountability. In sum, the private and public entities that shape government policy and drive political discourse profit far too much in numerous ways to allow rational considerations of the Terror threat.

* * * * *

But there’s a very similar and at least equally important (though far less discussed) constituency deeply vested in the perpetuation of this fear. It’s the sham industry Walt refers to, with appropriate scare quotes, as “terrorism experts,” who have built their careers on fear-mongering over Islamic Terrorism and can stay relevant only if that threat does.

These “terrorism experts” form an incredibly incestuous, mutually admiring little clique in and around Washington. They’re employed at think tanks, academic institutions, and media outlets. They can and do have mildly different political ideologies — some are more Republican, some are more Democratic — but, as usual for D.C. cliques, ostensible differences in political views are totally inconsequential when placed next to their common group identity and career interest: namely, sustaining the myth of the Grave Threat of Islamic Terror in order to justify their fear-based careers, the relevance of their circle, and their alleged “expertise.” Like all adolescent, insular cliques, they defend one another reflexively whenever a fellow member is attacked, closing ranks with astonishing speed and loyalty; they take substantive criticisms very personally as attacks on their “friends,” because a criticism of the genre and any member in good standing of this fiefdom is a threat to their collective interests.

On a more substantive level, any argument (such as Walt’s) that puts the Menace of Islamic Terror into its proper rational perspective — namely, that it pales in comparison to countless other threats (including Terrorism from non-Muslim individuals and states); that it is wildly exaggerated considering what is done in its name; and that it is sustained by ugly sentiments of Islamophobic bigotry — is one that must be harshly denounced. Such an argument not only threatens their relevance but also their central ideology: that Terror is an objective term that just happens almost always to mean Islamic Terror, but never American Terror.

Thus, Walt’s seemingly uncontroversial article was published for not even 24 hours when it was bitterly attacked for hours on Twitter this morning by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, and it’s not hard to see why. Looking at Gartenstein-Ross’s reaction and what drives it sheds considerable light onto this sham “terrorism expert” industry.

Gartenstein-Ross’ entire lucrative career as a “terrorism expert” desperately depends on the perpetuation of the Islamic Terror threat. He markets himself as an expert in Islamic Terror by highlighting that he was born Jewish, converted to Islam while in college, and then Saw the Light and converted to Christianity. During his short stint as a Muslim, he worked at the al-Haramain charity foundation in Oregon — the same one that was found to have been illegally spied upon by the Bush NSA — but became an FBI informant against the group because — as he claimed in a book,”My Year Inside Radical Islam”, which he subsequently wrote to profit off of his conduct — he was horrified by “the group hatreds and anti-intellectualism of radical Islam.”

He is now listed as an “expert” at the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (the group’s list of “experts” is basically a Who’s Who of every unhinged neocon extremist in the country). Gartenstein-Ross is specifically employed by the Foundation as something called “Director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization.” According to his own bio, he also “consults for clients who need to be at the forefront of understanding violent non-state actors and twenty-first century conflict” including for “major media companies, and strategic consultations for defense contractors” and “also regularly designs and leads training for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Leader Development and Education for Sustained Peace (LDESP) courses, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Anti-Terrorism Assistance, and domestic law enforcement.”

Unsurprisingly, Gartenstein-Ross — like so many “terrorism experts” in similar positions — is eager to depict Islamic Terror as a serious threat: he knows where his bread his buttered and does not want the personal cash train known as the War on Terror ever to arrive at a final destination. If you were him, would you?

In 2009, he wrote a study entitled “Homegrown Terrorists in the U.S. and U.K.” which, needless to say, was only about Muslims: an “examination of 117 ‘jihadist’ terrorists in the United States and the United Kingdom” which “concludes that religious beliefs” — namely, Islam –”play a role in radicalization.” In 2011, he wrote a book entitled Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror, which argues that “despite the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a significant threat.” He has hyped the ludicrous alleged Iranian Quds Forces plot against the Saudi Ambassador (explaining that ”Holder weighing in on the plot’s connection to Iran means the administration is deadly serious about it”), and recently touted Nigeria as the “next front in the war on terror.”

To be sure, Gartenstein-Ross is more nuanced and sophisticated than the standard neocon “terror expert” cartoon — his 2011 bin Laden book argues against wasteful counter-terrorism programs that are out of proportion to the actual threat, and he has, to his credit, publicly opposed some of the more crass Islamophobic attacks — but if the War on Islamic Terror disappears, so, too, does his lucrative career as a “terrorism expert.” In that regard, he’s a highly representative figure for this industry.

Walt’s clearly expressed and uncontroversial argument about the exaggerated Terror threat prompted hours of angry derision and personal mockery today from Gartenstein-Ross (who ironically often holds himself out as the Beacon of Civil Discourse). It began this way:

Gartenstein-Ross then demanded that Muslim Terror be taken more seriously than Walt suggests: “terrorists actually put 3 bombs on passenger planes since 2009.” He was then joined by fellow “natsec” clique members for hours of swarming group mockery aimed at Walt (that’s how they typically behave). Gartenstein-Ross continued: Foreign Policy ”should rename Walt’s blog ‘An Ideologue in an Ideological Age.’ The idea he transcends ideological blinders is laughable.” Professor Walt, he then said, is “far less rigorous than his reputation suggests” and “the gap between perception & reality is rather astounding.” Then: “when an academic starts blogging it’s often easy to tell if that ‘authority’ is undeserved.”

All this public impugning of Walt’s reputation, scholarship and character over the crime of pointing out that the threat of Islamic Terror is wildly overstated by people who have an interest in perpetuating the threat. It’s as though Gartenstein-Ross and his friends were eager to jump up, wave their arms, and prove Walt’s argument by identifying themselves as precisely the fear-mongering culprits he was criticizing.

Exactly the same thing happened this week in response to Juan Cole’ssuperb post entitled “Top Ten differences between White Terrorists and Others,” pointing out all the revealing differences in how white perpetrators of violence are talked about versus non-white (especially Muslim) ones. Cole’s argument was every bit as threatening to the vested interests of the “terror expert” industry as Walt’s was, as it reveals the ugly truth that the hysteria over the Muslim Threat is motivated far more by Islamophobic bigotry and subservience to U.S. Government militarism than any rational policy assessments or high-minded scholarship.

This was too much to bear for J.M. Berger, a self-described “specialist on homegrown extremism” and author of “Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam,” which, in his words, “uncovers the secret history of American jihadists” — meaning Muslims, of course. “American Muslims have traveled abroad to fight in wars because of their religious beliefs,” says the book’s summary. (Symbolizing how relentlessly incestuous this clique is, Gartenstein-Ross randomly took a moment out of his attack on Walt today to pimp what he called Berger’s “valuable book”). Like Gartenstein-Ross, Berger avoids the more overt forms of anti-Muslim rhetoric, often stressing the need to distinguish between Good Muslims and the Terrorist kind, but he spends his time doing things like shrieking about the Towering Menace of Anwar al-Awlaki and generally hopping on whatever Muslim-Terrorism-is-a-Grave-Danger train that comes along.

Berger denounced Cole’s piece as “80 percent BS, 20 percent fair points” and said it was composed of “lazy generalizations.” Specifically, Berger complained that when a Muslim launches a violent attack, there are “whole stories dedicated to AQ being fringe and Islam being peaceful,” but when there’s a violent attack by a white shooter, “no one does stories about how white people are mostly peaceful and non-racist” (apparently, the true victims of unfair media coverage of Terror attacks are white people, not Muslims). He insisted, needless to say, that white perpetrators of violence are depicted as lone nuts while attacks by Muslims are depicted as part of a broader Terror threat only because it’s so true. It’s vital to Berger that Islamic Terror continue to be perceived as a vital, coordinated national security threat or else J.W. Berger and his “expertise” will cease to matter.

The key role played by this “terrorism expert” industry in sustaining highly damaging hysteria was highlighted in an excellent and still-relevant 2007 Washington Post Op-Ed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. In it, he described how the War on Terror has created an all-consuming Climate of Fear in the U.S. along with a systematic, multi-headed policy of discrimination against Muslim Americans based on these severely exaggerated threats, and described one of the key culprits this way:

Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum.The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation.

It’s very similar to what Les Gelb, in expressing his regret for supporting the attack on Iraq, described as “the disposition andincentives [in America's Foreign Policy Community] to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.” When I interviewed Gelb in 2010 regarding that quote, he told me that D.C. experts know that they can retain relevance in and access to key government circles only if they lend theoretical support to U.S. militarism rather than oppose it.

(Notably, people in these insular, government-subservient D.C. enclaves try to suppress and delegitimize any discussion of who funds them and what their careerist and cultural incentives are by denouncing any such discussion as illegitimate ad hominem; that’s all a way of demanding that they be accepted at face value as “experts” and that the financial and institutional pressures and groupthink precepts shaping their world and their views never be assessed).

Similarly to Brzezinski’s Op-Ed, Ken Silverstein recently wrote an excellent June, 2012 Harpers article examining the fraud known as Matthew Levitt, Ph.D., who heads the “Counterterrorism and Intelligence Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,” where he tracks “global jihadist movements” (as usual, “terrorism experts” fixate on Muslims). Levitt has been repeatedly used by the U.S. Government as a “terrorism expert” witness in the prosecution of dozens of Muslims accused of Terrorism despite a history of discredited claims and extremely dubious grounds for claiming “expertise”. Silverstein writes:

That is a description that applies generally to the sham “terrorism expert” industry.

* * * * *

Not all of these “terror experts” are driven primarily by careerist relevance. Some are actually vapid enough to be True Believers, addicted to the excitement and sense of purpose that Terrorism provides. Fran Townsend — Bush’s former Homeland Security adviser, CNN’s “national security expert,” and a paid supporter of the Iranian Terror group MEK — provided a small but telling example this morning. She was apparently at New York’s LaGuardia Airport when a very exciting episode happened which she “reported” on Twitter as it unfolded. First was this:

Code words! Security breaches! How scary! And exciting! Moments later:

The mystery builds! Then:

Here, things start to palpably deflate. The depressing realization starts to set in that nothing of any significance has happened, that it’s all just some routine, banal event of no consequence. Then: the inevitable, deeply disappointing denouement:

In other words, nothing — all that breathless excitement over absolutely nothing: a perfect little microcosm of America’s Terrorism policies and its “terror expert” industry over the last decade.

* * * * *

But the most pernicious attribute of this “terror expert” industry, the aspect that requires much more attention, is its pretense to non-ideological, academic objectivity. In reality, these “terror experts”, almost uniformly, have a deeply ideological view — a jingoistic, highly provincial understanding — of what Terrorism is and is not. They generally fixate on Muslims to the exclusion of all other forms of Terror. In particular, the idea that the U.S. or its allies now commit Terrorism is taboo, unthinkable. Their views on what Terrorism is track the U.S. Government’s and, by design, justify U.S. government actions. They are not “experts” as much as they are ideologues, rank propagandists, and servants of America’s establishment power centers.

The reason the term “terrorism experts” deserves to be put in quotation marks is not as some ad hominem insult (something the mavens of the “terror expert” clique are incapable of understanding, as they demonstrated with their ludicrously personalized outrage when I applied this critique to one of their industry’s most cherished Patron Saints, Will McCants). Rather, it’s because — as I’ve written aboutmany times before — the very concept of Terrorism is inherently empty, illegitimate, meaningless. “Terrorism” itself is not an objective term or legitimate object of study, but was conceived of as a highly politicized instrument and has been used that way ever since.

The best scholarship on this issue, in my view, comes from Remi Brulin, who teaches at NYU and wrote his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris on the discourse of Terrorism. When I interviewed him in 2010, he described the history of the term — it was pushed by Israel in the 1960s and early 1970s as a means of universalizing its conflicts (this isn’t our fight against our enemies over land; it’s the Entire World’s Fight against The Terrorists!). The term was then picked up by the neocons in the Reagan administration to justify their covert wars in Central America (in a test run for what they did after 9/11, they continuously exclaimed: we’re fighting against The Terrorists in Central America, even as they themselves armed and funded classic Terror groups in El Salvador and Nicaragua). From the start, the central challenge was how to define the term so as to include the violence used by the enemies of the U.S. and Israel, while excluding the violence the U.S., Israel and their allies used, both historically and presently. That still has not been figured out, which is why there is no fixed, accepted definition of the term, and certainly no consistent application.

Brulin details the well-known game-playing with the term: in the 1980s, Iraq was put on the U.S. list of Terror states when the U.S. disliked Saddam for being aligned with the Soviets; then Iraq was taken off when the U.S. wanted to arm Saddam to fight Iran; then they were put back on again when the U.S. wanted to attack Iraq. The same thing is happening now with the MEK: now that they’re a pro-U.S. and pro-Israel Terror group rather than a Saddam-allied one, they are magically no longer going to be deemed Terrorists.That is what Terrorism is: a term of propaganda, a means of justifying one’s own state violence — not some objective field of discipline in which one develops “expertise.”

This flaw in the concept of “terrorism expertise” is not a discrete indictment of specific “scholars,” but is a fundamental flaw plaguing the entire field. Even the most decorated and honored “terrorism experts” are little more than ideological propagandists, because that’s what the term necessarily entails. Today, Brulin wrote the following to me regarding U.S. Reagan-era policy in Central America — namely, supporting Terror groups (death squads) while denouncing Terrorism — and the specific “terrorism expert” often held up as the field’s most prestigious, Bruce Hoffman:

One obvious question comes to mind: how do “terrorism experts” deal with US policies in Salvador during the 1980s?

A comprehensive analysis of the two major “terrorism studies” journals, “Studies on Conflict and Terrorism” (simply titled “Terrorism” until 1992) and “Terrorism and Political Violence” shows that overall these journals have dealt with this issue by … being silent about it. More precisely, several authors in fact absolutely accept that the concept of “state terrorism”  is a valid one, and that acts by “death squads” clearly fall under that definition also. They simply never deal with this issue in the context of the real world policies of the United States and of the Reagan years in particular, a silence all the more surprising than Reagan was the first American President to develop a “discourse on terrorism”.

Reacting to Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Exum wrote: “Greenwald makes it seem as if states are never mentioned as terrorist actors, but there is a lot of literature on the use of coercive violence by states and state terrorism”.  This is true of course, but at least when it comes to the conflict of El Salvador studied here, and to US policies in that country, those who did write about this issue havenever been published in the major “terrorism studies journals.”

Exum then adds: “Bruce Hoffman published this book in 1999. I’m pretty sure those two guys are terrorism experts without the scare quotes.”

In “Inside Terrorism”, to his merit, Hoffman devotes a full chapter to the question of the “definition of terrorism.” What follows in the rest of his book is naturally dependent on what he decides to include and not include in his definition of “terrorism”. Here is, in full, how Hoffman deals with the issue of “death squads” (emphasis added):

“The use of so-called ‘death squads’ (often off-duty or plain-clothes security or police officers) in conjunction with blatant intimidation of political opponents, human rights and aid workers, student groups, labor organizers, journalists and others has been a prominent feature of the right-wing military dictatorships that took power in Argentina, Chile and Greece during the 1970s and even of elected governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia and Peru since the mid-1980s. But these state-sanctioned or explicitly ordered acts of internal political violence directed mostly against domestic populations — that is, rule by violence and intimidation by those already in power against their own citizenry — aregenerally termed ‘terror’ in order to distinguish that phenomenon from ‘terrorism’, which is understood to be violence committed by non-state entities. (Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 27).

Sadly, Hoffman does not tell his readers who at the time “termed acts by death squads ‘terror’”, or who wishes to do so “in order to distinguish this phenomenon from ‘terrorism.’”

Not only is this argument rather less than convincing, but most crucially no one in Washington, at the time, ever used this argument, and this for obvious reasons. Indeed, as Hoffman himself notes, the “death squads”, “even in elected governments like El Salvador”, were “state-sanctioned”, precisely what the Reagan administration kept denying at the time. Furthermore, Hoffman’s argument makes no sense in the historical context: can one imagine the Reagan administration defending US aid to El Salvador as part of the “fight against terrorism” while stating that the ties between that State and the “death squad” posed no problem because they merely fell under the concept of “terror”?

Thus, the role of “terrorism experts” cannot simply be described as blindly accepting of the official “discourse on terrorism”, although this is already a strong critique. As the case of El Salvador demonstrates, what they have done is to invent arguments aimed at excluding from discussion specific issues, while hiding or being completely silent about the actual debates that took place on this topic at the very heart of Washington. In so doing, they have allowed a “terrorism discourse” to developed and become hegemonic despite the many internal inconsistencies that have been at its heart from the very beginning.

Finally, one will note that Hoffman, in Inside Terrorism, makes no mention of the Contras and their support by the Reagan administration. This is a difficult decision to explain, since aid to the Contras falls under the concept of “state sponsored terrorism”, the validity of which is accepted by all experts. Here, Hoffman uses the technique used by so many other “terrorism experts” in this case:he simply decides to not write about it, with no explanation given.

The entire field is one huge effort to legitimize U.S. state violence and delegitimize the violence by its enemies (along those lines: the court-martial of accused Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan began today, and I asked earlier today on Twitter whether this attack constituted Terrorism given that it targeted a military base and soldiers of anation at war. My mere asking of this question sparked all sorts of intense outrage from the predictable “natsec” D.C. mavens: Of course it’s Terrorism, as Hasan killed unarmed people including one civilian, exclaimed people who would never, ever dare apply the Terrorism label to the civilian-devastating U.S. attack on Iraq or the use of American drones and cluster bombs to kill innocent civilians by the dozens; that is the discourse of Terrorism: violence by Muslims against a U.S. military base during a time of war qualifies, but violence by the U.S. Government against thousands of innocent Muslim civilians never could).

Brulin is far from alone among scholars in recognizing the true purpose of this sham discipline. Harvard’s Lisa Stampnitzky, whom I interviewed several months ago, is also a leading scholar on the exploitation of Terrorism and the field that calls itself “terrorism experts.” In a superb journal article in Qualitative Sociology, she documents that “‘Terrorism’ has proved to be a highly problematic object of expertise”; in particular, “Terrorism studies fails to conform to the most common sociological notions of what a field of intellectual production ought to look like, and has been described by participants and observers alike as a failure.” She notes that the harshest condemnations have come from those who work in this academic discipline: “Terrorism researchers have characterized their field as stagnant, poorly conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods.” That includes Bruce Hoffman himself, who, she notes, wrote:

Fifteen years ago, the study of terrorism was described by perhaps the world’s preeminent authority on modern warfare as a ’huge and ill-defined subject [that] has probably been responsible for more incompetent and unnecessary books than any other outside the field of sociology. It attracts phonies and amateurs…as a candle attracts moths’… [T]errorism research arguably has failed miserably.

Stampnitzky adds: “More than 15 years after this assessment, descriptions of the field are rife with similar claims.” Indeed, her forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press is entitled “Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented Terrorism” and, in her words, it “explains how political violence became ‘terrorism,’ and how this transformation led to the current ‘war on terror’.” For that reason, she argues in her dissertation, “those who would address terrorism as a rational object, subject to scientific analysis and manipulation, produce a discourse which they are unable to control, as attempts at scientific discourse are continually hybridized by the moral discourse of the public sphere, in which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology.” Indeed, she explains in her journal article, “One of the most oft-noted difficulties has been the inability of researchers to establish a suitable definition of the concept of ‘terrorism’ itself.”

In a recently published journal article in International Security, entitled “The Terrorism Delusion,” Professors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart (cited by Walt) extensively document what a fraud the concept of “Terrorism” has become over the last decade. Specifically, ”the exaggerations of the threat presented by terrorism and then on the distortions of perspective these exaggerations have inspired— distortions that have in turn inspired a determined and expensive quest to ferret out, and even to create, the nearly nonexistent.”

Richard Jackson is a Professor at the The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand. He has written volumes on the fraud of “terrorism expertise” and the propagandistic purpose of this field of discipline. He has documented that most self-proclaimed “terrorism experts” simply ignore the primary cause of the violence they claim to study: “most terrorism scholars, politicians and the media don’t seem to ‘know’ that terrorism is most often caused by military intervention overseas, and not religion, radicalization, insanity, ideology, poverty or such like” — even though “the Pentagon has known it for years.” In one article entitled “10 Things More Likely to Kill You Than Terrorism,” he notes that “The chances of you dying in a terrorist attack are in the range of 1 in 80,000, or about the same chance of being killed by a meteor,” and that bathtubs, vending machines, and lightning all pose a greater risk of death.

In a book critiquing the “terrorism expert” field, Jackson argued that “most of what is accepted as well-founded ’knowledge’ in terrorism studies is, in fact, highly debatable and unstable.“ He therefore scorns almost four decades of so-called Terrorism scholarship as ”based on a series of ‘virulent myths’, ’half-truths’ and contested claims” that are plainly “biased towards Western state priorities.” To Jackson, terrorism is “a social fact rather than a brute fact” and “does not exist outside of the definitions and practices which seek to enclose it, including those of the terrorism studies field.” In sum, it means whatever the wielder of the term wants it to mean: something that cannot be the subject of legitimate “expertise.”

* * * * *

There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than “Terrorism.” It shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have to get information from the Terrorists); due-process-free-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists); and rampant secrecy (the Government can’t disclose what it’s doing or have courts rule on its legality because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism).

It is a telling paradox indeed that this central, all-justifying word is simultaneously the most meaningless and therefore the most manipulated. It is, as I have noted before, a word that simultaneously means nothing yet justifies everything. Indeed, that’s the point: it is such a useful concept precisely because it’s so malleable, because it means whatever those with power to shape discourse want it to mean. And no faction has helped this process along as much as the group of self-proclaimed “terrorism experts” that has attached itself to think tanks, academia, and media outlets. They enable pure political propaganda to masquerade as objective fact, shining brightly with the veneer of scholarly rigor. The industry itself is a fraud, as are those who profit from and within it.

Via: "Salon"

Changing the Narrative for War

By Philip Giraldi
Published 12/29/09
Courtesy Of Campaign For Liberty

In spite of the calamities of the past eight years, there continues to be no shortage of neoconservatives in one's face in the media, advising their fellow Americans that wars can be won quickly and decisively and that using military force to change how other nations behave is sound policy. The Washington Post features Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, all three Kagans, John Bolton, and Eliot Cohen on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the epicenter for those who favor muscular interventionism. The New York Times, America's most influential newspaper, is somewhat more circumspect, featuring neocons-lite David Brooks and Thomas Friedman regularly, but also including the more measured foreign policy analysis of Frank Rich and Roger Cohen. But even at its best The Times never really breaks the mold by bringing in someone who rejects the entire American imperial and interventionist enterprise. Such individuals do exist and many appear regularly at Ron Paul events and on Campaign for Liberty, but it is as if the mainstream media has decided that such views are outside the pale, the journalistic equivalent of praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time or advocating the disenfranchisement of women voters. And occasionally the Times features a real game breaker that goes in the other direction in the form of an op-ed that sets new benchmarks in terms of audacious support of Washington's self proclaimed right to enforce its own standards on the world. Such an op-ed was "There's Only One Way to Stop Iran" by Professor Alan J. Kuperman which, ironically, appeared on Christmas Eve.

As a former intelligence officer I frequently shake my head when I read a piece like "There's Only One Way to Stop Iran" because I know exactly how what the Soviets used to call disinformation works. When the policy stinks and you have to create buzz about it anyway, you dig up someone who can plausibly describe himself as an "expert" and then find some obliging folks in the media to publish a piece that enables you to change the story line. That is what I used to do myself back in the days when I was working hard to demonize the Soviets. Take an incident or development, twist it a bit so you can come to a conclusion that is at odds with the facts, get your paid asset to write it up, hand it over to another paid agent in the media, and then let it fly. It will be picked up here and there, spread around the world and incorporated into other news coverage, and eventually everyone is saying we have to stand up to the Russians. Or Chinese. Or Iranians. Or the Yemenis.

Recently we have seen change the narrative applied to justify all sorts of outrages, including the pastel revolutions in Eastern Europe, where, so the accepted story goes, brave bands of reformers took on corrupt and authoritarian old regime leaders. The reality was much different, with European and American Non-Government Organizations funding one group of criminals against another with not a touch of genuine reform in sight. And then there is poor little Georgia, hardly plausible that Tbilisi might have been the aggressor against Russia, was it? But it was (John McCain please take note).

That kind of narrative shift is precisely what Kuperman and those who are like minded are doing, changing the story to turn black into white to make war appear to be the only option to resolve a thorny international problem. Appearing in The Times is particularly damaging because when the Grey Lady gives over its pages to someone like Kuperman they are providing their seal of approval and legitimizing his point of view. Even if they don't explicitly endorse the article they are in effect saying that the argument is extremely credible and worth considering. With the Times imprimatur, the story then becomes part of the broader neoconservative narrative which can exploit the appearance in the Times to convince Americans that a war against Iran would not be such a bad thing and could, in fact, be the best way to eliminate the possibility that Tehran might develop a nuclear weapon.

The only problem is that the entire Kuperman narrative is itself nonsense. It starts by rejecting negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program after assuming that something is true, namely that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. There is no evidence that that is the case and even the US intelligence community continues to assert that Iran abandoned its weapons program in 2003. It then goes on to assume that any agreement with Iran to enable it to buy enriched fuel for electricity generation will inevitably lead to the uranium being further enriched to weapons grade. That amounts to taking a worst case scenario and combining it with another worst case scenario to draw a conclusion. Kuperman then piles on a third worst case assumption, that Iran would unhesitatingly hand over its expensively acquired nuclear deterrent weapon to a terrorist group. In baseball, three strikes and you are out, but apparently three non sequiturs in a single article does not rule you out for a New York Times op-ed.

Kuperman then describes the mechanics of defanging Iran, how taking out the country's alleged nuclear sites would be quick and relatively painless with little in the way of collateral damage to the US. Does anyone hear the word cakewalk? Kuperman has clearly not spent much time in the real world. Using American air power to attack Iran would be piling Pelion on Ossa, with terrible consequences including making it far more likely that Tehran will actively seek a nuclear weapon while guaranteeing a wave of terrorism that could well become global. There would also be a major spike in oil prices that would sink the already struggling American economy, whether or not the US Navy succeeds in controlling the Straits of Hormuz. Kuperman concedes that military action could backfire, but he draws on the analogy of the completely dissimilar Israeli destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, which he regards as a success. He notes somewhat ominously that Iran's much larger infrastructure would require repeated bombings coupled with the threat to use still more force if Tehran were to retaliate. It all sounds a bit like the Cheney doctrine of first attacking Iran and then threatening it with nuclear weapons if it seeks to defend itself. On an optimistic note, Kuperman also throws in a final added benefit to a bit of devastating aerial bombardment, concluding that "air strikes against Iran would be a strong warning to other would-be proliferators."

Actually, they wouldn't be. Attacking Iran would not necessarily destroy its ability to build an atom bomb if it chooses to do so and would only encourage other potential proliferators to proliferate, if only to obtain a deterrent against being bombed by the United States or Israel. Also, thousands of completely innocent Iranians would die, which does not appear to be a consideration that bothers Kuperman very much. As Ron Paul and others have warned, yet another illegal war of choice in the Middle East would inflict damage on the US constitution and the rule of law and would also be a human and economic catastrophe both for Iran and the United States. It would likely not do much good for Israel either. Kuperman surely understands that. The op-ed by-line indicates that Professor Alan J. Kuperman is director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas. If a sustained bombing campaign is the best policy that the Prevention Program can come up with it is perhaps time for the good people in Texas to begin to wonder what exactly their tax dollars are supporting.


Copyright © 2009 Campaign for Liberty

Inside Iran

What Do We Really Know About The Islamic Republic of Iran?

Video Report By Rageh Omaar
Courtesy of "Information Clearing House"

Rageh Omaar embarks on a unique journey inside what he describes as one of the most misunderstood countries in the world, looking at the country through the eyes of people rarely heard - ordinary Iranians. It took a year of wrangling to get permission to film inside Iran but the result is an amazing portrayal of an energetic and vibrant country that is completely different to the usual images seen in the media.

Broadcast 2007 Posted December 29, 2009

Israel Rules

By Paul Craig Roberts
December 29, 2009
Courtesy of "Information Clearing House"

On Christmas eve when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, the New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin,” but his Christmas eve call to war relies on disinformation and contradiction, not on objective scholarly analysis.

For example, Kuperman contradicts the unanimous report of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Russian intelligence with his claim that Iran has a nuclear weapon program. Astonishingly, it does not occur to Kuperman that readers might wonder how an academic bureaucrat in Austin, Texas, has better information than these authorities.

Kuperman is so determined to damn President Obama’s plan to have other countries enrich Iran’s uranium for Iran’s nuclear energy program and medical isotopes that Kuperman commits astounding blunders. After claiming that Iran has a “bomb program,” Kuperman claims that “Iran’s uranium contains impurities” and that Ahmadinejad’s threat “to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 percent level . . . is a bluff, because even if Iran could further enrich its impure uranium, it lacks the capacity to fabricate the uranium into fuel elements.”

What was the New York Times op ed editor thinking when he approved Kuperman’s article? Iran, Kuperman writes, needs “90 percent enriched uranium” to have weapons-grade material, but cannot reach 20 percent or even make fuel elements for its nuclear energy. So, how is Iran going to produce a bomb? Yet, Kuperman writes that “we have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.”

It could not be made any clearer that, as with the US invasion of Iraq, a military attack on Iran has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. An “Iranian nuke” is just another canard behind which hides an undeclared agenda.

One wonders about Kuperman’s non-proliferation credentials. How does a wanton military attack on a country encourage non-proliferation? Aren’t America’s bullying, threats and acts of war more likely to encourage countries to seek nuclear weapons?

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States has wars ongoing in Iraq where the ancient Chaldean Christian community was destroyed--not by Saddam Hussein but by the neoconservatives’ illegal invasion of Iraq--in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yeman, and Sudan. The US initiated a war, which it lost, between its puppet ruler in the former Soviet province of Georgia and Russia.

The US, the world’s greatest supporter of terrorism, is the main financier of terrorist groups that stage attacks within Iran, and US money succeeded in financing protests against President Ahmadinejad’s re-election and in dividing the ruling Islamic clerics. It was American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover that enabled the Israeli war crimes against the Lebanese people during 2006 and against Palestinian civilians in Gaza during 2008-2009, crimes documented in the Goldstone Report.

Iran has never interfered in US internal affairs, but the US has a long record of interfering in Iranian affairs. In 1953 the US overthrew Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammed Mosaddeq and installed a puppet who tortured Iranians who desired political independence.

Despite this and other American offenses against Iran, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly expressed Iran’s interest to be on friendly terms with the United States, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. The US wants war with Iran in order to expand US world hegemony.

One might expect a non-proliferation expert to take history into account, but Kuperman fails to do so. Kuperman also has nothing to say about Israel’s, India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Unlike Iran, none of these countries are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel, India, and Pakistan all developed their nuclear weapons in secret, and many experts believe Israel had American help, an act of treason. All three countries have been rewarded by Washington despite their perfidy. Why is Kuperman concerned about Iran, which submits to the IAEA inspections, but is unconcerned with Israel, a country that has never permitted a single inspection?

The answer is that the Israel Lobby, the US military-security complex, and the “Christian” Zionists have succeeded in demonizing Iran. Every real expert knows that an Iranian nuclear weapon would have no function other than deterring an attack on Iran. Ever since the US lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons, after using them offensively and pointlessly against a defeated Japan, nuclear weapons have served no purpose other than deterrence.

The US has no conflicting economic interests with Iran. Iran is simply a supplier of oil, an important one. A US attack on Iran, such as the one advocated by Kuperman, would most likely shut down oil flows to the West through the Strait of Hormuz. This might benefit refiners, who sell gasoline to the West and could charge enormous prices, but no one else would benefit.

Adding to the war cry are congregations of fake Christians. A great number of them, organized by someone’s money under the banner, “Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran,” has written to Congress demanding sanctions against Iran that amount to an act of war. The roll call http://www.clnfi.org/ includes the “Christian” Zionist John Hagee, who, according to reports, denigrates Jesus Christ and preaches to his illiterate congregation that it is God’s will for Americans to fight and die for Israel, the oppressor of the Palestinian people.

Among the signatories of the “Christians” demanding an act of war against Iran, are Dr. Pat Robertson, president of Christian Broadcasting Network, Nixon-era criminal Chuck Colson, and Richard Land, president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Convention. Obviously, for southern baptists ethics means murdering Islamists, and religious liberty excludes everyone but “Christian” Zionists.

It is a simple matter for an educated person to make fools of these morons who profess to be Christians. However, these morons have vast constituencies numbering in the tens of millions of Americans. There are, in fact, more of them than there are intelligent, informed, moral, and real Christian Americans.

The votes of the morons will prevail.

In the second decade of the 21st century, America’s Zionist wars against Islam will expand. America’s wars in behalf of Israel’s territorial expansion will complete the bankruptcy of America. The Treasury’s bonds to finance the US government’s enormous deficits will lack for buyers. Therefore, the bonds will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. The result will be rising rates of inflation. The inflation will destroy the dollar as world reserve currency, and the US will no longer be able to pay for its imports. Shortages will appear, including food and gasoline, and “Superpower America” will find itself pressed to the wall as a third world country unable to pay its debts.

America has been brought low, both morally and economically, by its obeisance to the Israel Lobby. Even Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States and Governor of Georgia recently had to apologize to the Israel Lobby for his honest criticisms of Israel’s inhumane treatment of the occupied Palestinians in order for his grandson to be able to run for a seat in the Georgia state senate. http://www.counterpunch.org/amiri12252009.html

This should tell the macho super-power American tough guys who really runs “their” country.

US Foreign Policy and The Cult Of ‘Expertise’

Americans want our rulers to mind their own business abroad – and good luck with that!

By Justin Raimondo,
December 07, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War

The news that Americans want the U.S. government to mind its own business when it comes to foreign affairs has our Washington elite in a panic. The explanatory notes accompanying a new Pew poll [.pdf] describe the "rise in isolationist sentiment" that started during George W. Bush’s second term and continues in the age of Obama. The agonized hand-wringing is all too apparent in the use of the "isolationist" epithet and even in the way the question was asked: should the U.S. "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own"? Forty-nine percent – the highest proportion "in nearly half a century of polling" – answered yes. And that’s not all: a gob-smacking 76 percent agreed the U.S. should "concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home," as opposed to "think[ing] in international terms."

The poll took samples from two groups: common, ordinary, everyday people (i.e., you and me) and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elite group of foreign policy-oriented intellectuals, policy wonks, and high muckamucks. The elite group disagreed sharply with the general public’s view on virtually every important question: for example, none of the CFR members thought we should mind our own business – a policy that would go against the group’s history and orientation, which has always been pronouncedly interventionist.

Founded by disciples of Cecil Rhodes, who sought to reestablish the fading glory of the British empire by using the U.S. as Britain’s cat’s-paw, the CFR doesn’t just represent the views of the American Establishment – it is the Establishment. And that Establishment is committed irrevocably to the idea that America’s destiny is to inherit the mantle of world leadership: in the CFR’s view, the question is not whether we ought to police the world, but rather how to go about it. The American public, on the other hand, is sick to death of endless war – the inevitable result of assuming "world leadership" – and is increasingly diverging from elite opinion when it comes to the pressing foreign policy issues of the day.

For example, as this poll shows, when it comes to Afghanistan, the latest theater in which the interventionist drama is being played out, the gulf between the elites and the public is wide, and getting deeper: 50 percent of the CFR group support Obama’s Afghan "surge," while among the hoi polloi the number drops to 32 percent. Asked if the United States should be the "most assertive" world leader, only 19 percent of the general public agrees, but when it comes to the CFR, the numbers turn around: 62 percent want the "most assertive" role for the U.S.

None of this is really all that new. If I recall correctly, the last time this poll was taken, back in 2005, a "rising isolationism" was similarly conjured by the chattering classes, who took the opportunity to deride the "turning inward" of the American people – who were depicted as basking in their uninformed parochialism and refusing to take up their "duty" to police the world (and, yes, I wrote about it at the time). The dreaded "isolationist" wave, it seems, is always about to crash down on the heads of our busybody elites, whose penchant for interventionism has brought us such a painful harvest of bankruptcy and blowback. The elites are always looking over their shoulders and worrying that, one day, peasants with pitchforks will storm the castle, demanding their heads – and, if the Pew poll numbers are correct, it looks like that day may not be far off.

How do we account for the huge gap between the people and those who make policy in their name?

To begin with, we have an entire class of people whose jobs, social prestige, and livelihoods are directly tied to our foreign policy of global intervention. These people are naturally inclined to favor militarism and meddling in the affairs of other nations. This group, while small in numbers, wields an outsized influence when it comes to such matters, and it can successfully defy popular opinion for quite a long time.

It manages to hornswoggle the public with a number of scams, notably the cult of expertise, which Americans have traditionally been suckers for, and never more so than today, when confusion over the sheer complexity of some of the foreign policy issues being raised makes people particularly vulnerable to the argument from authority.

Will our intervention in Pakistan shore up the faltering government or quicken the destabilization already taking place? Does Iran have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons? What about the alleged threat posed by a "resurgent" Russia? Ordinary human beings throw up their hands in despair when confronted with such heady topics, but if you’re a member of the Council on Foreign Relations you likely already have a well-honed position on these and other equally weighty matters – one that is probably counterintuitive to the ordinary American. Oh, but that supposedly just proves how uninformed we plebeians are, and how wise our interventionist betters.

The cult of expertise is being used to maximum effect by the Obamaites as they prepare to bog us down in the Afghan quagmire for the next five to 10 years: that’s why it supposedly took 92 days for the One to reach a decision on the Afghan escalation issue, as he conducted an extended foreign policy seminar-and-debating-society at the highest reaches of his administration. The whole charade – as if withdrawal was ever an option! – fits in with the self-described "pragmatism" of the Obama administration, which abjures general principles and affects a brisk "just the facts" get-the-job-done air – a method and style that neatly evades the question of whether the job should be done at all.

Another trick that allows the foreign policy elite to get away with pursuing a course so out of sync with the general population is elite control of the political system. As we never cease reminding the rest of the world, America is a democracy, and the people get to vote for – or vote out – their leaders. However, when both candidates – and there are usually only two major applicants for the job – advocate variations on the same interventionist themes, then the "choice" presented to voters is strictly limited, and in fact nearly meaningless.

Remember that President Obama was supported by a great number of people who mistakenly thought he embodied an alternative to the belligerent militarism of the Bush years. Now they are confronted with a "war president" who, in escalating a conflict begun by his predecessor, says he’s determined to "finish the job."

A third method used to get around the common sense "isolationism" of the American people is interventionist control of the "mainstream" media – which can be counted on to act as a megaphone for government officials and the interests that back them. While the tendency of Americans to want to stay out of foreign entanglements might apply in most cases, in some instances people are ready to make an exception if specific grounds can be found ("weapons of mass destruction," the presence of al-Qaeda, or perhaps both of these together) to make an exception.

This is why, in the case of Iran, when asked in the Pew poll if that country posed a threat to the U.S., the non-elites were more willing to use force than the elites. The War Party has already expended a lot of time, energy, and money on demonizing the Iranians and presenting Tehran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program as a threat to the U.S. and its allies. When it comes to Pakistan, however, it is the non-elites who are more skeptical of U.S. intervention in case that country’s nukes should prove insecure, and it is the CFR types who most want to crack down on the alleged threat emanating from Islamabad. Given enough time, and a shift of focus, however, the media will construct as fearsome a narrative regarding Pakistan as any concocted in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

The portrait painted by the Pew poll is of an increasingly isolated – and anxious – elite whose foreign policy views are nearly the opposite of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Our Brahmins face a crisis of confidence, one that could very well be followed by a crisis of legitimacy – and that is what they fear most of all.

This crisis is exacerbated not only by the increasing failure of our foreign policy to do what it is supposed to do – that is, protect Americans from harm – but by a number of relatively recent developments that undermine their methods of suppressing majority "isolationist" sentiment.

The first and most obvious is the Internet, which has not only bypassed the "mainstream" media and, indeed, driven it into near-bankruptcy, but which has also delivered a body blow to the cult of the "experts." After all, who is an "expert," and why are they so called? Well, because they generally have credentials and, therefore, are given a platform by the media to expound on matters they supposedly know everything about. Yet with the advent of the Internet, the significance of this "mainstream" platform is radically reduced. Add to this the wide availability of previously obscure knowledge – thanks be to the gods of Google! – and credentialism is thrown out the window. Today, an unknown writer can take to the Internet, set up a blog, and – perhaps – become the go-to source for this or that specialized branch of knowledge. An alternative crop of experts has arisen, which rivals the old crowd and indeed seems to be fast surpassing them, at least so far as influence over the public is concerned.

Yet the elite stranglehold on our foreign policy continues, in large part due to the iron grip of the interventionists on the two-party system. Our present conundrum – a president elected to office largely on the strength of his "antiwar" stance, who is now taking us into a wider and more difficult war than his warlike predecessor ever conceived – is an eloquent testament to this cruel fact.

If the leadership of both major parties sees Afghanistan as a "war of necessity," then the War Party can relax – because the restive public will have no one to turn to even as it rejects the policies put forward by the elites. This is why the policymakers can continue to ignore the rising rebellion against interventionism roiling the American street and continue talking only to themselves.

In their view, ordinary Americans don’t matter: only politicians, lobbyists, and other policy wonks matter. But this Marie Antoinette attitude can only take them so far before they run the risk of revolution.

Read more by Justin Raimondo

• The Lap Bomber Mystery – December 27th, 2009
• The Awards! – December 22nd, 2009
• The Rising Tide – December 20th, 2009
• Calling Dr. Pangloss – December 17th, 2009
• The War Democrats – December 15th, 2009