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Mark Gobell
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 Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2007 7:16 pm Post subject: RAND and Terrorism |
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Did the RAND Corporation Pen the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act?
Did the RAND Corporation write the Terrorism Act 2000?
| Quote: | The RAND-St Andrews nexus skews understandings of ‘terrorism’, especially through its pivotal role in the peer review and publishing of research. Members of the Centre and of RAND hold key editorial positions on the two foremost academic journals in the field: Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence. Those journals emphasise political violence directed against states, while largely ignoring violence by states, except those not allied to US or Western European countries – i.e., those described as ‘rogue states’ by the US government (Burnett and Whyte, 2005).
Embedded experts define ‘terrorism’ selectively, with a bias towards US-led alliances and against any resistance. According to Prof. Paul Wilkinson, Director of the CSTPV, extra-judicial assassinations by Israel are ‘ruthless acts of counter-terror’, i.e. self defence (Wilkinson, 2002 : 68 ). Within this perspective the USA, the UK and their client states never carry out ‘terrorism’.
In a mid-1990s government inquiry on terrorism, Wilkinson emphasised violence by oppressed groups, while ignoring state violence against them. In particular he problematised trans-national support for ‘the weak’:
… almost any prolonged and significant terrorist campaign is likely to have an international dimension: almost every terrorist group tends to look across the borders of the state where it is based, and further afield, not only for weapons, funds, training and safe-haven, but for any ideological, political or diplomatic support it can manage to obtain; sub-state terrorism is typically the weapon of the weak (Wilkinson, 1996 : 4).
Such diagnoses justified permanent anti-terrorist legislation to target the weak.
That report led to the Terrorism Act 2000, which broadened the definition of terrorism. |
See also on Dr Hoffman founder of the CSTPV at St Andrews Uni, Rep. Jane Harman and Prof. Paul Wilkinson, Director of the CSTPV at St Andrews Uni.
You can read the RAND report, Trends in Terrorism, co-authored by the ubiquitous Dr Hoffman here (PDF)
The St Andrews / RAND nexus known as the CSTPV is here
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QuitTheirClogs
Trustworthy Freedom Fighter
Joined: 09 Feb 2007
Posts: 630
Location: Manchester
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:29 pm Post subject: |
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Baltimore Sun
Here come the thought police
By Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson
November 19, 2007
With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman's "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act" passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain.
Not since the "Patriot Act" of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.
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Mark Gobell
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:56 pm Post subject: |
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Ex RAF chap Professor Paul Wilkinson's CSTPV at St Andrews Uni was founded back in 2002 with a £250,000 research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Professor Wilkinson's initial ESRC funding was matched by a $300,000 grant from Washington Policy and Analysis Inc. whose chairman and co-founder William F. Martin is also Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations Energy Security Group and was the 1997 author of the Trilateral Commission report, Maintaining Energy Security in a Global Context.
He was Deputy Secretary of Energy and Executive Secretary of the National Security Council under Reagan and was senior advisor for the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign.
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Mark Gobell
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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Dr Bruce Hoffman's bio from Georgetown University.
| Quote: | Terrorism Expert Bruce Hoffman Joins Faculty
Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service announced that pre-eminent terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman has joined the faculty of the Security Studies Program as Professor. Beginning in Fall 2006, he will teach graduate courses in terrorism and counter terrorism and insurgency and counterinsurgency, as well as other international security subjects.
“Bruce Hoffman is one of the world’s most renowned scholars on terrorism,” said Robert L. Gallucci, dean of the School of Foreign Service. “He brings great expertise on a critical issue of our time and I look forward to his contributions to our community.”
Hoffman comes to Georgetown from RAND Corporation where he was most recently Corporate Chair in Counter terrorism and Counterinsurgency as well as Director of the Washington office and Senior International Policy Analyst. Prior to that, he served as acting director at RAND’s Center for Middle East Public Policy and from 2001-2004 as Vice President for External Affairs.
Prior to working at RAND in Washington, Hoffman served as Reader in International Relations, Founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence and Chairman of the Department of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Before that he served in various positions including Director of the Strategy and Doctrine Research Program and Senior Social Scientist at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.
"I am honored to join the School of Foreign Service and its Security Studies Program," Hoffman said. "Both are world-renowned and I very much welcome the opportunity to work with the distinguished faculty and equally impressive students and staff."
Hoffman is author of the first and second editions of Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 1998 and 2006). He has also published numerous chapters in books and articles in magazines and scholarly journals such as "The Atlantic Monthly," “Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,” “Terrorism and Political Violence,” and “Non-Proliferation Review.”
Hoffman received his B.A. with honors in Government and History from Connecticut College, Master’s in International Relations from New College at the University of Oxford and Ph.D. in International Relations from St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. The recipient of numerous awards, he was the first holder of the Santiago Grisolia Chair and Prize for Excellence in the Study of Violence, awarded by the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Valencia, Spain. He also received the U.S. Intelligence Community Award Medallion and served as a Fellow of the World Economic Forum in Geneva between 2003 and 2005.
Hoffman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and the Royal United Service Institute, also in London. He is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, a Senior Fellow at the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa in Haifa, Israel, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a Senior Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. |
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Mark Gobell
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 3:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Prof. Paul Wilkinson served as Adviser to Lord Lloyd of Berwick's Inquiry into Legislation Against Terrorism, and authored vol. two, the Research Report for the Inquiry (1996). |
Lord Lloyd of Berwick, a retired judge was commissioned in 1995 by the tories to set up an enquiry into new terrorism legislation.
The Lloyd report prompted a government consultation paper which then led to the Terrorism Act 2000.
Prior to this the Prevention of Terrorism Act legislation required an annual review.
TACT2000, was the first time that terrorism legislation was enacted on a permanent, statutory basis in the UK.
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Mark Gobell
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 5:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Embedded Academics and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq
Jonny Burnett and Dave Whyte, 7 December 2005
In January 2005 a British and an Iraqi civilian were killed just north of Baghdad whilst working for security contractors Janusian Security Risk Management Ltd. The employees were apparently riding in a convoy near to the power station they worked at when they were ambushed.
Janusian is one firm amongst multitude of private military companies providing armed guard and escort services in Iraq who, according the US Department of Defence, now employ around 25,000 people. It was apparently the first Western private military outfit to have an operational office and manager stationed permanently in Iraq.
The firm grew out of the network of interests that spans the risk management/private military industry and academic ‘terrorology.’
David Claridge, the managing director of Janusian is one of the founder members, and an Honorary Fellow of, the Centre for Studies in Terrorism and Political Violence in the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Janusian and the St Andrews Centre pool ‘expertise’ and share information. The following statement boasts of this relationship on the company’s website:
The new company has created a number of proprietary tools to identify and evaluate the terrorist, criminal and other physical threats facing businesses around the world. The first of these, a unique collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, includes shared access to research, intelligence sources and databases, and the expertise of the Centre’s staff, as well as the development of sector-specific studies into areas of political risk
The close links between the St Andrews Centre and the security industry is typical of the ‘embedded nature’ of academic expertise in terrorism. In the same way that much of our information regarding the nature of the ‘insurgency’ in Iraq remains largely dominated by misinformation drawn from embedded journalism, so much expertise on contemporary terrorism originates from a pool of embedded academics with close links to the military industry. In other words, the academic study of terrorism is dominated by embedded academics.
A description of the St Andrews Centre as ‘embedded’ in the military industry is supported by its close ties to RAND Corporation. RAND Corporation has been perhaps the most influential military strategy think-tank in the US for almost 60 years. Its list of former staff and associates reads like a who’s who of Bush regime apparatchiks. Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld for example are both former staff members at RAND. Collaboration between the two institutions is most obvious in their conference and seminar programme. In one such joint venture in May 2004 St Andrews Centre academics made the key note speeches to a conference co-organised with Janusian and RAND Corporation. The conference brought together representatives from 88 corporations to discuss the importance of corporate counter-terrorism strategies.
Close institutional links are maintained by inter-locking positions held by two key individuals. Founder member of the St Andrew Centre, Bruce Hoffman, is a long-standing senior researcher with RAND Corporation. Hoffman was seconded by RAND to the Centre when is was set up in the early 1990s. Together with senior RAND analyst, Brian Jenkins, he remains a member of the St Andrews Centre’s Advisory Council. Both of those RAND employees are also Honorary Senior Research Associates at the Centre. Amongst a host of impressive government appointments, Bruce Hoffman has served as a member of the U.S. Department of Defense Counterterrorism Advisory Board and in November 1994, the CIA awarded Hoffman the US Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest level of commendation given by the agency to a non-government employee.
Brian Jenkins is currently recognised by the US government as one of the foremost world experts on terrorism for his work at RAND. He is a former Green Beret in US Army Special Forces and his previous ‘anti-terror’ research is distinguished by his advocacy of a ‘low intensity’ dirty war intervention by the US in Guatemala in the 1970s and the suggested use of a proxy army against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government in 1984.
In 2004, Hoffman was given the role of senior advisor on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency to the Constitutional Provisional Authority, the US imposed government of occupation in Iraq. In this capacity, Hoffman followed a long line of St Andrews Centre associates through the revolving doors between military strategy and academic expertise.
Major General Richard Clutterbuck, one of the seminal counter-insurgency theorists of the 1960s and early 1970s is closely associated with the St Andrews Centre. Clutterbuck’s ideas on counter-insurgency were developed through his military experience in 13 post-war UK colonial conflicts. He was a member of the Advisory Council at the St Andrews Centre from its inception until his death in 1998. After Clutterbuck’s demise, his archive was left to the St Andrews Centre and his lasting influence on the Centre has been noted by senior members. In his introduction to British Perspectives on Terrorism, Director of the St Andrews Centre, Paul Wilkinson recognizes this intellectual lineage, paying tribute to the work of both Clutterbuck, and Frank Kitson, yet another British Army commander turned counter-insurgency theorist.
The counter-insurgency school is best known for its promotion of ‘dirty war’ tactics which involve covert infiltration of local populations and violent targeting of opposition sympathisers. In counter-insurgency theory, terrorism and popular protest are viewed as part of the same ‘spectrum of political violence’. In this analysis peaceful forms of dissent warrant the acquisition by law enforcement agencies of emergency powers to prevent an inevitable spiral into violent public disorder. The basic thesis is that military techniques of order management are necessary to prevent a further spiral into terrorism. Counter-insurgency theory legitimates strategies that range from the covert infiltration of ‘suspect populations’ to the assassination of key insurgents. It articulates a coercive model of power which views political settlement or negotiation as a sop to insurgency. The thorny question of why populations may wish to resist colonial rule in the first place doesn’t tend to feature in the counter-insurgency manuals.
After leaving the armed forces and taking up an academic career, Clutterbuck quickly established a commercial use for his theories. As director of Control Risks in the early 1970s he set up the Control Risks Information Service, a division of the firm which specialised in advising and dealing with the ‘political risks’ to businesses operating in insecure environments. Control Risks Group is now reported to be one of the largest providers of armed security in post-war Iraq. At least 3 civilian employees of the company have lost their lives in active service during the occupation. There remains a strong link between the St Andrews Centre and Control Risks: the company regularly donates its archive to be used by the Centre for research purposes.
St Andrews Centre associates such as Claridge and Hoffman continue the long tradition of putting counter-insurgency theory into practice. Bruce Hoffman’s term of office in the Coalition Provisional Authority has been most distinguished by his advancement of a new counter-insurgency theory and practice in Iraq. In a briefing paper written as adviser to the occupation regime, Hoffman pays tribute to Frank Kitson’s “magisterial” Low Intensity Operations, the text which set out a rationale for conducting hidden warfare against dissenting colonised populations, promoting the use of psychological operations against counter-insurgency. In doing so he articulates a newly revised version of counter-insurgency theory as a means of continuing the US occupation and defeating the insurgency. The revival of counter-insurgency theory will encourage the US to continue to use forms of torture, psyops and covert infiltration of Iraqi communities. Despite its highly dubious past, counter-insurgency theory is being put into practice in Iraq with the intellectual support of embedded academics who carry a torch for the long discredited theorists of colonial warfare.
This article is not written as an exercise in moral condemnation. Nor is there any implication that the individual terrorologists that we mention here are making financial gains from their work. Academics are relatively well off, but there are few who get very rich from consultancy work. We are merely arguing that in order to interpret a piece of research or a press comment, then it helps the reader to be informed of the author’s professional ties and affiliations. We are academic researchers who both supported the anti-war movement and marched against the attack on Iraq along with 2 million other British people. We oppose the violence that continues in Iraq and we oppose the US and Britain having any continuing part of it. Now we have declared our affiliation, it is time for some of our embedded colleagues to come clean about theirs. |
Spinwatch
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TmcMistress
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 10:47 am Post subject: |
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Just a quick question, then I promise I won't derail the topic any further... I know RAND itself is just an acronym, but I'm curious as to whether anyone knows if the Corporation has any connection to those Objectivist nuts who've read Atlas Shrugged one too many times and wander around in some sort of Nietzschian, uber-mensch daze...
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Mark Gobell
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 11:59 am Post subject: |
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Translation please?
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TmcMistress
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| Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2007 5:28 am Post subject: |
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Objectivism wiki
Ayn Rand Institute home page
The current leader of the institute is fond of saying such charming things as our armies shouldn't be restrained by silly things like not shooting at civilians; and should, in fact, mow through them quickly in order to cow the populace and win whatever war...
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TonyGosling
Editor
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Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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| Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2009 11:48 pm Post subject: |
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Ayn Rand was a Russian right-wing Science Fiction writer who moved to the US in the twenties and justified 'free market economics' in 'philosophical' terms. Her ideas influenced the Star Trek Sci-Fi series.
http://www.atlassociety.org/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Starship_Forum/
Still widely read today by the authoritarian right in the US. Neo-Cons, Neo-Libs etc.
She was against the Vietnam War but against withdrawing troops as that would look bad.
Well, if she had been FOR the Vietnam war absolutely nobody would have listened to her.
Great new article here about the connection sbetween her and the RAND Corporation.
| Quote: | The Architecture of Ideas -- RAND and Ayn Rand
By Jeremy Rosenberg
February 18, 2009 9:24 PM
RAND Garden brett van ortbody.jpg
You can't judge an enterprise by its building.
Or, can you?
Or, again, can you?
Today, TTLA takes a look at the interiors and exteriors of two Southland think tanks -- but don't call at least one of them by that term, please -- RAND Corporation and the Ayn Rand Institute.
RAND is of course the Rose Bowl game of west coast smart orgs.
RAND's Santa Monica h.q. has ocean views, is Gold LEED Certified, situated along on bus routes, prominently features bicycle racks in its underground parking garage, and most significantly, is bunched in a civic stretch of buildings that also includes Santa Monica City Hall, the Los Angeles County Courthouse, and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium -- where My Bloody Valentine plays.............
http://kcet.org/local/blogs/think_tank_la/2009/02/the-architecture-of- ideas----rand-and-ayn-rand-institute.html
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| Quote: | War
While Rand often criticized conventional motivations for U.S. involvement in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, she approved American action when strictly justified in response to an attack, as in World War II.[40] She strongly denounced pacifism: "When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to fight for—and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense."
Rand opposed the Vietnam War, but also believed that unilateral American withdrawal would be a mistake of appeasement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#War
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| TmcMistress wrote: | Objectivism wiki
Ayn Rand Institute home page
The current leader of the institute is fond of saying such charming things as our armies shouldn't be restrained by silly things like not shooting at civilians; and should, in fact, mow through them quickly in order to cow the populace and win whatever war... |
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TonyGosling
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Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
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