The sham “terrorism expert” industry

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’s superb 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 generallyhopping 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 composedof “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 and incentives [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.
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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.
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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 about many 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. Thesame 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 upas 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 Exumwrote: “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 have never 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 asuperb 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 inInternational 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, andeven 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 hasdocumented 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.”
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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.

Glenn Greenwald (email:GGreenwald@salon.com) is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of threeNew York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration’s executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, an indictment of America’s two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.