Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  Brian Jenkins of the RAND Corporation, one of the nation’s most thoughtful terrorism analysts, points out that in the years since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has been remarkably free of terrorism, despite the heightened levels of fear and anxiety. “In terms of domestic terrorism, this has been the most tranquil decade since the early 1960s,” says Jenkins. Domestic radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s engaged in far more violence than the United States has experienced since 9/11, he notes.

  The post-9/11 fears that al Qaeda would somehow infiltrate America with fifth columnists turned out to be wildly exaggerated. “There are no secret armies of sleepers, no terrorist groups comparable to those of the 1960s and 1970s, no sustained bombing campaigns,” Jenkins wrote in a 2011 RAND report. “The few terrorists, would-be terrorists, and active supporters of terrorism are for the most part individuals or tiny conspiracies who connected or tried to connect with terrorist groups abroad or believed they had done so while communicating with government agents.”

  Jenkins has tried to understand why there has been such a disconnect between the reality—that terrorism is no longer a significant threat in the United States—and the nation’s heightened fears. “There is no question that 9/11 left a deep psychological scar, and it has had a long-term insidious effect,” he said. He argues that the scars have affected intelligence analysts as well as the media and public. September 11 made even the most farfetched plots seem plausible. Nothing could be dismissed, and that changed the way the nation has judged threats.

  “The object of terrorism is to use violence or the threat of violence to create fear and alarm,” says Jenkins. “And so terrorism has worked. Certainly, we have been the major contributors to that. We have scared the hell out of ourselves.”

  The threats and alarms would not resonate so strongly with the public, or have such lasting impact on the country, if they were not reinforced by the network of independent terrorism analysts that has grown up around the global war on terror. They are the most visible and vocal advocates of the war on terror, and they have worked hard to keep the American people on edge for a decade. They have made careers out of television appearances, speeches, book deals, consulting fees, and government contracts. They generate fundraising for their own organizations as well as allied anti-Muslim campaigns. They have developed personal brands, and have burnished their brands by consistently warning that America is under siege.

  They have built a cottage industry out of fear.

  None have been more influential than Steven Emerson, the founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. For years, Emerson has consistently argued that the United States has underestimated the threat from radical Islamic groups, both at home and abroad. Emerson’s credibility originally stemmed from the fact that he loudly warned, through books, documentaries, and journalism, of the looming threat from Islamist terrorism, long before 9/11.

  Emerson started as a journalist, first in print and later television. He gained prominence in the 1990s thanks in part to an award-winning PBS Frontline documentary, “Jihad in America,” which detailed the Islamic militant presence in the United States. Emerson’s work impressed Richard Clarke, who was the White House counterterrorism czar in the Clinton administration and the early months of the Bush administration. Frustrated by the FBI’s lack of useful information on Islamic groups inside the United States prior to 9/11, Clarke turned to Emerson as an outside researcher and advisor on terrorism, according to an account in Newsweek.

  But more recently, Emerson seems to have grown overly zealous in claiming to see an unending line of domestic threats from all types of Muslim organizations inside the United States. He denies that he is anti-Muslim, yet his rhetoric and dark warnings that extremists now dominate the leadership of the American Muslim community, that many Muslim organizations in the United States are nothing more than fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah, make him sound as if he thinks there is a terrorist lurking under every bed in America. Before 9/11, he issued prescient warnings; today, he doesn’t seem to want to move on.

  “In the end, the mainstream media refuses to recognize that the ‘mainstream’ Islamic groups are actually radical organizations that teach and imbue their followers with a hatred of the United States and Israel,” he wrote of American Muslim groups in 2009. “These groups front as civil-rights groups, but in fact are radical Islamic groups whose constant message disseminated to the millions of Muslim followers is that the U.S. is an evil country engaged in a war against Islam. Once that message takes hold—and after all, these groups control the mosques, the Islamic newspapers, the Islamic schools, and the Islamic leadership from which American Muslims and converts get their ideas about the world—it is not a huge leap for some of them to become committed to violent jihad. We are talking about a situation that is far more rampant than government leaders want to admit because the Islamic groups routinely throw the term ‘racist’ at anyone who claims there is radicalism in the Muslim community.”

  Emerson has been able to turn his anti-Muslim rhetoric and research into fundraising prowess. An investigation by the Nashville Tennessean in 2010 found that Emerson’s for-profit company, SAE Productions, received $3.39 million in 2008 to research connections between Muslims in the United States and foreign terrorism. The funds came from Emerson’s nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, which in turn received donations from contributors seeking to support Emerson’s anti-jihadist work. In its 2010 tax return, Emerson’s nonprofit foundation reported paying more than $3.4 million to Emerson’s SAE Productions for management services, which was more than the $2.6 million the Investigative Project received that year in annual contributions and grants.

  Today, Emerson is the godfather of the independent terrorism analytical community, and whenever he publicly takes a stance, his influence is enhanced by like-minded analysts and conservative pundits who follow his lead. He often uses his pulpit to make certain that politicians toe the line on the war on terror, chastising public figures he deems insufficiently sanguine. In 2012, for example, he went after New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie, saying that he has “an Islam problem,” and that “time and again he has sided with Islamist forces against those who worry about safeguarding American security and civilization.” Among Christie’s sins, according to Emerson, was that he had criticized the New York City Police Department after the Associated Press, as part of a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of stories, revealed that the department had been unilaterally spying on Muslims in New Jersey.

  One of the most prominent of Emerson’s protégés is Evan Kohlmann, who was so young when he got into the business that he was nicknamed the “Doogie Howser” of counterterrorism. Kohlmann worked for Emerson’s Investigative Project from 1998 until 2003, and has since set up his own firm, Flashpoint Global Partners. He has served as a consultant to the Pentagon, Justice Department, and FBI, as well as foreign governments and international institutions. Flashpoint Global Partners offers its clients “customized online monitoring packages on an array of jihadist groups,” as well as “terrorist audio/video/communiqué source retrieval and production” and “forensic analysis of seized digital media” and “custom analytical reports.”

  Kohlmann has come to prominence through his dual roles as a terrorism analyst for NBC News and an expert witness for the Justice Department in terrorism prosecutions. He has served as a witness in at least twenty-four cases in the United States and another nine in Europe and Australia. During his testimony in one case in Texas in 2011, he said that he is normally paid $300 to $400 an hour by the Justice Department as an expert witness, and that he had been paid a total of about $60,000 by the FBI for his consulting on terrorism investigations since he first began working for them in 2003.

  His critics say that Kohlmann’s role as a witness for the prosecution has raised troubling questions. The critics complain that while the government relies on him to testify as an expert on terrorism,
his knowledge comes largely from researching jihadist websites on the Internet rather than from real-world experience in the Middle East. It is hard to escape the sense that his main attraction as an expert witness for federal prosecutors is that he can be relied upon to paint the terrorist threat in the darkest terms possible to help frighten American juries into convictions. An excellent 2010 profile of Kohlmann in New York Magazine quoted one critic who described him as working in the “guilty-verdict industry.”

  Ahmed Ghappour, a clinical instructor at the University of Texas School of Law, has represented defendants in terrorism-related cases in which Kohlmann has been offered as an expert witness. Ghappour said that he and other attorneys have frequently moved in court to bar Kohlmann from testifying. By getting Kohlmann on the witness stand, prosecutors can introduce terrorism threat information into a criminal trial in a way that the actual evidence in the case might not support, Ghappour argues. ”His testimony can be the nail in the coffin, because it introduces all these prejudices,” said Ghappour. “If you are a prosecutor, all you have to do is get this guy before a jury. All the facts that you can’t prove, you get this guy to say as part of his expert analysis, and then you get the jury to hear it. That’s very different than saying the evidence will show this. So, in essence, he is a third leg to the government’s case.”

  Kohlmann has also been criticized for hyping the terrorist threat in his other role as a prominent analyst on television. In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example, when the media was being criticized for making frequent errors, Kohlmann was rebuked on air on MSNBC for engaging in loose speculation. As Politico reported, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd interrupted Kohlmann when he started describing things that one of the suspects wanted to buy on Amazon. Todd was forced to remind Kohlmann that he could not yet prove that the Amazon “wish list” was really that of the suspect.

  Politico recounted their on-air exchange:

  “I want to stress, we don’t know for sure, but it is certainly his name. . . .” Kohlmann said, before being interrupted by Todd.

  “I’ve got to stop you there,” Todd said. “Our folks—we don’t necessarily want to put this on air yet until we verify it.”

  Kohlmann then speculated on possible connections between the suspects and terrorist groups along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which prompted Todd to interrupt again, according to Politico. “I didn’t mean to cut you off, but we don’t want to draw so many conclusions,” Todd said. (Kohlmann later responded to Politico by stressing that he had not suggested any specific terrorist organization was directly responsible for the Boston bombing.)

  Now, new activists have also emerged to take advantage of the fears that have been so thoroughly hyped by Emerson, Kohlmann, and other self-styled terrorism experts. These new activists are culture warriors, rather than terrorism experts, and through their grassroots organizing, they have taken the lead in efforts to block the construction of mosques around the country and to pass state legislation banning Sharia law.

  These activists are working hard to make certain that anti-Muslim policies become part of the broader national conservative political agenda. Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese American and Christian, is one of the most prominent of these activists, a best-selling author of anti-Muslim books who now leads a group called ACT! for America, which has been involved in state-level campaigns to pass anti-Sharia legislation. Gabriel regularly makes video fundraising appeals to supporters asking for donations to ACT! for America to finance its campaign for anti-Sharia legislation. “Your commitment of $19 a month, just 63 cents a day, will give us the critical funding we need to ensure that American laws only will be used in American courts,” she said on one video seeking donations for her 2012 legislative campaign.

  Gabriel warns that secret fifth columnists working for terrorist organizations are now undermining the nation. “America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America,” she told a Tea Party conference, according to a 2011 account of her speech in the New York Times. “They have infiltrated us at the CIA, at the FBI, at the Pentagon, at the State Department. They are being radicalized in radical mosques in our cities and communities within the United States.”

  In the White House and in Congress, during both the Bush and Obama administrations, American leaders have learned that keeping the terrorist threat alive provides enormous political benefits. It lets incumbents look tough, and lends them the national attention and political glamor that comes from dealing with national security issues. As president, Barack Obama quickly abandoned many of his 2008 campaign positions on national security and worked assiduously to burnish his reputation as a warrior president, culminating with the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. He continued most of the national security policies of George W. Bush, and even intensified the use of some of the most controversial, including targeted killings with drones. Just to make certain voters got the message, the Obama White House selectively leaked classified information during the 2012 presidential campaign to make Obama look like a hawk and dispel the old image of Democrats as weak on national security.

  In Congress, no one learned the lesson of the political advantages of the war on terror better than Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican and former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

  King is an unapologetic advocate of the harshest and most controversial measures that have been employed in the war on terror, from enhanced interrogation techniques to the targeted killings of U.S. citizens overseas. King, a tough-talking Irish-American lawyer from Long Island, revels in his assaults on what he deems to be elitist liberal political correctness, and acts like an angry attack dog against the ACLU, the press, and others he perceives as too soft on terrorism.

  While he was chairman, King worked hard to make the Homeland Security Committee an advocate for an aggressive and unbending war against terrorism. In the process, he bestowed congressional legitimacy on the extreme views espoused by independent anti-Muslim pundits.

  Through a series of five hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims while he was committee chairman in 2011 and 2012, King transformed the committee into the modern equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee of the McCarthy era. One repeat witness who testified at King’s hearings was Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the narrator of The Third Jihad, a right-wing documentary that was considered so biased against Muslims that the New York City Police Department was forced to stop using it in its counterterrorism training. Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee repeatedly objected to King’s hearings, arguing that his decision to focus only on the potential threat from Islamic extremism, to the exclusion of other domestic radical groups, led to a perception that King and the committee were prejudiced against Muslim Americans. “The tone of these hearings, singling out the Muslim community, has undermined religious liberty, and has divided Muslim Americans from the rest of the country,” Rep. Hansen Clarke, a Michigan Democrat who is a Catholic of Bangladeshi descent, said during a 2012 hearing. “These hearings are an assault not only on Muslims, but all South Asians. There’s not a week that goes by when I don’t get stopped here at the Capitol and asked for my identification,” said Clarke. “Come on, let’s stop attacking religion.”

  King defended the hearings by arguing that his critics were asking him to ignore the growing threat from radicalized American Muslims. “This committee, along with the Department of Homeland Security, were set up in response to 9/11 and Islamic extremism, and that’s our priority,” said King at a 2012 hearing. “There is a Judiciary Committee that can look at other domestic threats.”

  Despite the criticism, King did not pay a political price for his handling of the hearings. As a senior member of Congress with access to top-secret information—and one of the most combative—he has remained a favorite of cable news, where breathless reports of new terrorist threats could always be counted on to help move the needle on ratings. />
  In fact, rather than dial back the anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of King’s hearings, another polarizing House Republican, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, tried to up the ante. Bachmann alleged that the Muslim Brotherhood had deeply penetrated the U.S. government and called for investigations throughout the national security community, echoing the accusations leveled by Brigitte Gabriel. In a June 2012 letter to the deputy inspector general of the State Department, Bachmann and four other conservative Republican House members wrote darkly that “information has recently come to light that raises serious questions about State Department policies and activities that appear to be a result of influence operations conducted by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

  The letter went on to warn that Huma Abedin, a close aide to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had three family members connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives or organizations. As evidence against Abedin’s family, the letter cited the work of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington group run by Frank Gaffney, a conservative who has played a prominent role in state-level campaigns to pass anti-Sharia laws and block the construction of mosques.