"Ignorance is Strength" - New Short Video Summarizes 9/11 "Conspiracy Theory"

This new video uses sarcasm and irony to point out the absurdity of the mainstream government narrative on 9/11. Like the JFK assassination which most people believe -- Stephen King and Tom Hanks, notwithstanding -- was a high-level conspiracy that made Lee Harvey Oswald (as Oswald himself described it) a "patsy," the events surrounding 9/11 have already entered the folk history of America, the only place left where government crimes and the true purpose of U.S. foreign policy can be discussed, it seems.

The video comes complete with transcript over at The Corbett Report. One thing the video leaves out is the recent reportage on the suppression and cover-up of a military intelligence unit attached to Joint Forces Command in the months before 9/11. This unit, part of Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC) had been tracking Bin Laden and others, and also providing intel on terrorist targets inside the U.S. Briefings on likely attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were given to top military leaders and intelligence officials at least six months or more before 9/11, as these recent reports document. Evidence of this was censored and kept from the eyes of Congressional investigators in 2002, and later from the 9/11 Commission itself.

H/T for this to Naomi Wolf's Facebook page.

"One Killer Killing Another": Allan Nairn on the Bin Laden Hit

From Democracy Now!, some necessary and important commentary from journalist Allan Nairn on what the death of Osama bin Laden means, and doesn't mean.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Allan Nairn into this conversation. Your response to the news and what you think this could mean? Could this mean the end of the U.S. war with Afghanistan?

ALLAN NAIRN: I don’t think it will. It should. It definitely should be an occasion for rethinking everything on a much bigger scale than Afghanistan.

The first thing that struck me was seeing the Americans out in the streets celebrating outside the White House, outside the old World Trade Center site, people cheering, people exultant. And while some of that may come from bloodlust, I think a lot of it comes from a sense of justice. People like justice. They want to see it. And in this case, I think many people have the feeling, well, he got what he deserved. This was a man who had massacred civilians; he got what he deserved. And there’s a lot of truth to that. But if we recognize that someone who is willing to kill civilians en masse, someone who is willing to send young people out with weapons and bombs to, as President Obama put it, see to it that a family doesn’t have a loved one sitting at the dinner table anymore, see to it that a child and a parent never meet again, if we say that someone like that deserves to die, then we have to follow through on that idea, and we have to recognize, OK, if these things really are so enormous, we have to stop them. Killing bin Laden does not stop them. Bin Laden is dead, but the world is still governed by bin Ladens. People cheer because they thought they saw justice, but this was not justice delivered by—a kind of rough justice delivered by victims. This was one killer killing another, a big killer, the United States government, killing another, someone who’s actually a smaller one, bin Laden. And the bin Laden doctrine that, to take out the CIA office that was at the World Trade Center, it’s OK to blow up the whole World Trade Center, to teach Americans a lesson, it’s OK to slaughter thousands of Americans—that doctrine lives on in the American White House, in the American Pentagon. You know, every day—and in seats of authority all over the world.

Every day, the U.S., directly with its own forces, or indirectly through its proxy forces, its clients, is killing, at a minimum, dozens of people. I mean, just since Obama came in, in the one limited area of drone strikes in Pakistan, something like 1,900 have been killed just under Obama. And that started decades before 9/11. We have to stop these people, these powerful people like Obama, like Bush, like those who run the Pentagon, and who think it’s OK to take civilian life. And it doesn’t seem that they can be stopped by normal, routine politics, because under the American system, as in most other systems, people don’t even know this is happening. People know the face of bin Laden. They know the evil deeds that he’s done. They see that he is dead, and they say, "Oh, great, we killed bin Laden." But they don’t see the other 20, 30, 50, 100 people who the U.S. killed that day, many of them children, many of them civilians. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be out in the street cheering about those deaths.

We’ve got to stop this practice. And Americans aren’t doing it. Egyptians, Tunisians are doing their part. They’ve risen up against the repression they face. I think we need an American uprising, if we’re to put a stop to this kind of killing of innocent people. And we need an American Romero, someone like Archbishop Romero of Salvador, who, in the face of massacres, of daily massacres of what in the end was more than 70,000 Salvadorans, stood up and said to the army of his country, "Stop the repression. Defy your orders to kill, because there’s a higher principle." About a little more than a week ago, I was in El Salvador and visited Romero’s old home, which I had never been to before, and saw that on his bookshelf he had Why Not the Best?, a campaign book by Jimmy Carter, which he had apparently been reading. Romero wrote to Jimmy Carter in his capacity as the archbishop in 1980, asking Carter to stop supporting the Salvadoran military that was slaughtering his people. And from what I know of Romero, he probably really believed that Carter would respond. He didn’t. Carter kept sending the aid. And within weeks, Romero himself was assassinated by death squad, that had originated from U.S. backing. Writing letters didn’t work in that case. And it doesn’t work here. You know, we’ve got to put a stop to this. Bin Laden is dead. And bin-Ladenism, if you want to call it that, should die also.

Video stream of the interview here

Psychologizing Bruce Ivins: Who are the Amerithrax Behavioral Analysis Experts?

The investigation by the "Amerithrax Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel" on "the mental health issues" of accused anthrax mailer Dr. Bruce Ivins purports to have been undertaken with "no predispositions regarding Dr. Ivin's guilt or innocence." Yet the report (PDF here of the released partial redacted version) says the Panel's review of sealed psychiatric records "does support the Department of Justice's (DOJ's) determination that he was responsible.

In a separate article by Marcy Wheeler earlier today, she points out that the report totally accepts the allegation that the anthrax spores originated from flask RMR-1029, and that therefore Ivins had "the motivation and the means" to carry out the attack. Of course, as Wheeler notes, the National Academy of Sciences recently said that there is insufficient scientific evidence to back up DOJ's conclusion regarding this. (Jim White also wrote about the NAS report when it first came out.) Wheeler's article also points out other inconsistencies and illogical aspects of the Panel's report.

I wish to concentrate a bit more on the idea this panel had no "predispositions." Unfortunately, just as the released summary leaves out over 250 pages of the report, including its case narrative and "behavioral analysis and interpretation", that unreleased portion also leaves out the biographies included about the Panel's members. As a result, the lack of presented evidence makes it extremely difficult to comment about the conclusions noted in the Executive Summary regarding Ivins' supposed penchant for "revenge", his purported tendencies towards exploitation and manipulation (as they allege), his being "skilled in deceit", his "obsessions," his "strange and traumatic childhood," and "his desperate need for personal validation," among other post hoc conclusions made by the Panel's authors.

While the lack of evidence makes it difficult to swallow what sounds like character assassination, we do at least have the list of panel members by which to examine the neutral disinterest the forensic psychiatric examination should demand of those who are investigating the background of Dr. Ivins. Instead, what a brief review of the panel's bona fides reveals is an overwhelming stacking of this "expert" panel by doctors and others who are deeply beholden to government interests, and in particular to security agencies, including those involved in bioterrorism security. For such individuals, it is difficult to see that they would buck the position of the FBI and DOJ that Ivins was guilty.

Who are the Behavioral Experts?

As an article at the Los Angeles Times points out, without further elaborating, they weren't all behavioral experts:

The behavioral panel was formed in late 2009 at the suggestion of Saathoff, people familiar with the matter said. Saathoff appointed the remaining panelists: five other psychiatrists, two officials from the American Red Cross and a physician-toxicologist.

The addition of the Red Cross members is curious, especially since Ivins is accused of joining the Red Cross at the time of the anthrax mailings to gain self-importance as an anthrax expert, and to appear "as a prophet and as a defender of the nation" to a woman he was reportedly obsessed with. Indeed, the report has a nine-page appendix dedicated to Ivins and the Red Cross, which has not been published publicly.

In any case, one of the Red Cross personnel is in fact the vice-chair of the Panel, Gerald DeFrancisco, listed as President, Humanitarian Services, American National Red Cross. DeFrancisco is also on the Board of Directors of Research Strategies Network (RSN), the 2008-founded “professional services organization... whose missions support the national security of the United States and its allies.” RSN is the publisher and copyright holder of the Expert Panel's report. The Panel Chair is Dr. Gregory Saathoff, who is also President of RSN, while the Chairman of RSN is former Reagan-era Attorney General Edward Meese.

Saathoff specifically cites "guidance" by Meese in the making of the Ivins report, as well as that of another RSN board member, former U.S. senator Chuck Robb. Among other things, Robb is former President Bush, Jr.'s co-chairman to the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. He is also on the board of Defense Department-DARPA-linked Mitre Corporation. Other RSN board members are also linked to the military. As far as DeFrancisco goes, it's hard to know what expertise he brings to the Panel, as formerly he worked at AT&T as Vice President of Business Innovation, and Executive Vice President of Broadband & Internet Services, as well as CEO at AT&T Alascom, a $300 million AT&T subsidiary.

The other Red Cross member of the panel is Joseph C. White, listed as Senior Vice President, Chapter Operations, American National Red Cross. White is a banker, the former Chairman and CEO of Boatmen’s Bancshares, and Vice President in Investor Relations at Fleishman-Hillard. He retired from Bank of America. But he was also "chief executive officer of the St. Louis Area Chapter of the Red Cross," when he "was sworn in January 10 [2008] as a member of the Emergency Response Senior Advisory Committee. The committee is one of five panels that advise the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), which provides recommendations to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff on homeland security."

Among the actual doctors, we have Dr. Sally C. Johnson, listed as Professor, Department of Psychiatry at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She may be best known as one of the forensic psychiatric examiners of Theodore Kaczynski, but more recently, she testified regarding the fitness of supposed Al Qaeda-linked suspect Dr. Aafia Siddique to stand trial for attempted murder. In her written report on Siddique, "Johnson left a warning... saying that in spite of Siddiqui’s frail and timid appearance – she has weighed as little as 90 pounds – ‘her potential for aggression towards herself or others might be underestimated.’"

Then there is Dr. David Benedek, listed as Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University School of Medicine. Dr. Benedek has served at Guantanamo, although we don't know in what capacity. He was also acting as an army psychiatrist on the panel which consulted with others about Nidal Hasan in Spring 2008. Apparently, they failed to find him dangerous at that time, for which I can't fault Dr. Benedek, as it is a notorious fact that forensic evaluations of dangerousness are terribly unreliable, eliciting high levels of false positives, and a failure to distinguish who will or won't be dangerous. Unfortunately, the panel's executive summary never refers to this poor forensic record in determining who is or isn't dangerous while they put forth their certain but "circumstantial" evidence regarding the state of mind of the late Dr. Ivins.

Interestingly, Dr. Benedek was on a 2003 panel presentation on "Psychological Reactions to Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Events" at the Annual Meeting of Psychiatry and the Law, along with another military psychiatrist, who was at Guantanamo, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, who was Psychiatry Consultant to the US Army Surgeon General, and involved in psychiatric examinations for the government of at least a few of the detainees to come before the military commissions, including Salim Hamden.

Another panel member, Dr. Ronald Schouten (MD and JD) is listed as Director of the Law and Psychiatry Service, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University School of Medicine. A forensic psychitrist, Dr. Schouten also "served as a subject matter expert for the Biological Threat Classification Program of the Department of Homeland Security and has testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack.

And yet another panel member has government connections, as Dr. Anita Everett, listed as Section Director, Community and General Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is a senior medical advisor on psychiatric issues at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Rockland, Maryland.

The chair of the Expert Panel is Gregory Saathoff MD, who is listed as Executive Director of the Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG) at the University of Virginia. An entire article could be spent on Dr. Saathoff and the CIAG, which was founded in the wake of the Waco events. I found it kind of interesting that CIAG's Spring 2001 conference was entitled "Public Responsibility and Mass Destruction: Facing the Threat of Bioterrorism," and considered among the various terrorist possiblities "potential anthrax attack."

But probably most apposite for the point of this article is Dr. Saathoff's links to the FBI.

In 1996 he was appointed to a Commission charged with developing a methodology to enable the FBI to better access non-governmental expertise during times of crisis. In that regard, Dr. Saathoff has since 1996 served as the Conflict Resolution Specialist to the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. In this role, he consults with the Crisis Negotiation Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

I believe I have set out more than enough information here to challenge the supposed disinterest and lack of "predispositions" that supposedly animated this group of "behavioral experts." In fact, it's hard to believe that any group thus constituted could have or would have challenged the conclusions of the DOJ. Reading the Executive Summary, it's apparent how their case is built on a flimsy and prejudiced analysis, as they consistently refer to "circumstantial" evidence, as they construct a dire portrait of a man who is portrayed as "clever," who "cultivated" a benign presence, while masking his "criminal thoughts."

Since someone saw fit to show the entire report to the L.A. Times, perhaps the government would want to have this report examined by peer-review. It wouldn't be so hard to find individuals not linked to the government, but capable of the requisite security clearances. But then, the government hasn't taken the anthrax terrorism really seriously, leading many to conclude, rightly or wrongly, they have something to cover up. In any case, this latest "expert behavioral analysis" isn't going to convince anyone, as it is stacked with government-linked authorities, many of them to DoJ, DHS, or the Pentagon.

U.S.-backed Yemen Govt Massacres Three Dozen Demonstrators, Hundreds Wounded

In news coming out of Yemen, the UK Guardian is reporting that "soldiers and plain-clothed government loyalists opened fired on protesters trying to march through the Yemeni capital" Sana'a earlier today, killing "at least" 35 people, including a child, and wounding hundreds.

Witnesses say the first shots were fired by security forces trying to disperse the protesters and they were joined by plain-clothed men who fired on the demonstrators with Kalashnikovs from the roofs of nearby houses....

"They shot people in the back of the head as they were running away," said Mohammed al-Jamil, an Indian doctor treating the wounded. "Whoever did this wanted these people to die."

The violent attack on demonstrators, who have been protesting the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, is not the first, but it is the most deadly in recent weeks in this country which fought a bloody civil war in the 1990s. The opposition is a disparate group of Islamists, socialists, Houthi, tribalists, and southern secessionists who seek a return to the days when South Yemen ruled itself. Al Qaeda has pledged support to the opposition, but has not been welcomed by the latter.

Just a week ago, the U.S. gave strong support to a supposed "reform" initiative proposed by Saleh (emphasis added):

“The idea of the president’s downfall is not a real solution to the country’s woes,” U.S. Ambassador Gerald Feierstein said in an interview with the state daily al-Syasiah....

Meanwhile, EU called for all Yemeni political parties to positively respond to the Thursday’s reform initiative of President Saleh, urging them to engage in an open and constructive dialogue....

The government said that while security forces are busy protecting the protests, al-Qaida wing on Friday gunned down four more policemen on a patrol vehicle in southeast province of Hadramout, bringing the death toll of security and army personnel targeted by the terrorist group to 20 since Feb. 11.

US President Barack Obama’s top anti-terror advisor John Brennan on Friday called Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh to welcome his pledge to devolve power and urged the opposition to support the plan.

The Saleh government's lies about protecting protesters has been met by the truth of many dead. Xinhua is reporting this morning 41 dead, including a child, and more than 200 wounded.

This blood is partly on the hands of U.S. and EU leaders who are propping up a murderous, corrupt dictator -- including by drone assassinations -- while claiming the mantle of justice while attacking another dictator in Libya. The main difference? Libya has a lot of oil, while Yemen is running out of oil.

The cynicism of the Obama administration knows no bounds. Will the American press, which follows the rulers of America like a puppy dog, raise a fuss over this atrocity? Not while U.S. forces are operating in Yemen, and the administration screams about terrorists. While Al Qaeda is present in Yemen, the vast majority of the protesters have legitimate grievances, if not at times at odds with each other, as the opposition is quite fractious.

So while the eyes of the world are on Libya and the Japanese nuclear reactors, U.S. ally Saleh is given the green light to shoot protesters down in the street.

Where is the conscience of this country? Has militarism and fear completely taken hold so that, as I imagine the Pentagon and intelligence community believe at this point, the U.S. Executive Branch can do whatever they want, that there are no real consequences?

Cross-posted from MyFDL/Firedoglake

Feds Entrap Teen into "Terrorism", Provided Fake Bomb, Drove Him to "Terror" Site, Paid Him Thousands

What an excellent post by Glenn Greenwald on the utterly outrageous set-up of a youth by the FBI, so they can get their "war on terror" candy. This kid was no threat, though after cozening whatever disgruntled adolescent angst he had into "terrorist" expression, they just might have succeeded in birthing a new jihadist. Here's Glenn rationally setting out the case that 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud was set-up:

All of the information about this episode -- all of it -- comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud.  As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims -- as here -- are uncorroborated and unexamined.  That's why we have what we call "trials" before assuming guilt or even before believing that we know what happened:  because the government doesn't always tell the complete truth, because they often skew reality, because things often look much different once the accused is permitted to present his own facts and subject the government's claims to scrutiny.  The FBI affidavit -- as well as whatever its agents are whispering into the ears of reporters -- contains only those facts the FBI chose to include, but omits the ones it chose to exclude.  And even the "facts" that are included are merely assertions at this point and thus may not be facts at all.

It may very well be that the FBI successfully and within legal limits arrested a dangerous criminal intent on carrying out a serious Terrorist plot that would have killed many innocent people, in which case they deserve praise.  Court-approved surveillance and use of undercover agents to infiltrate terrorist plots are legitimate tactics when used in accordance with the law.

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a "Terrorist plot" which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.  Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts -- and an uncritical media amplifies -- its "success" to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government's vast surveillance powers -- current and future new ones -- are necessary.

There are numerous claims here that merit further scrutiny and questioning.  First, the FBI was monitoring the email communications of this American citizen on U.S. soil for months (at least) with what appears to be the flimsiest basis: namely, that he was in email communication with someone in Northwest Pakistan, "an area known to harbor terrorists" (para. 5 of the FBI Affidavit).  Is that enough to obtain court approval to eavesdrop on someone's calls and emails?  I'm glad the FBI is only eavesdropping with court approval, if that's true, but certainly more should be required for judicial authorization than that.  Communicating with someone in Northwest Pakistan is hardly reasonable grounds for suspicion.

Second, in order not to be found to have entrapped someone into committing a crime, law enforcement agents want to be able to prove that, in the 1992 words of the Supreme Court, the accused was "was independently predisposed to commit the crime for which he was arrested."  To prove that, undercover agents are often careful to stress that the accused has multiple choices, and they then induce him into choosing with his own volition to commit the crime.  In this case, that was achieved by the undercover FBI agent's allegedly advising Mohamud that there were at least five ways he could serve the cause of Islam (including by praying, studying engineering, raising funds to send overseas, or becoming "operational"), and Mohamud replied he wanted to "be operational" by using exploding a bomb (para. 35-37).

But strangely, while all other conversations with Mohamud which the FBI summarizes were (according to the affidavit) recorded by numerous recording devices, this conversation -- the crucial one for negating Mohamud's entrapment defense -- was not.  That's because, according to the FBI, the undercover agent "was equipped with audio equipment to record the meeting.  However, due to technical problems, the meeting was not recorded" (para. 37).

Hm, a missing tape, just when they were to nail down the evidence. What a coincidence! The FBI must think this is a country of morons. Maybe it is. But I'd like to believe that they will get their political comeuppance one of these days.

An entire country needs to wake up and smell the coffee. The FBI and the rest of the government agents drank some evil kool-aid, and, eager to serve their masters, they will do anything to justify their love of police-state tactics. They even think, I believe, they are saving America. That's what makes them so dangerous. How odd that in fighting the "true believers," they became the same themselves, and now threaten to bring us all down to the level of a police state.

Racist Article in Spy Journal Calls for Killing 100,000 Muslim “Zealots”

[I had originally posted this article at Firedoglake in August 2009, but just recently realized I failed to crosspost it here at Invictus. With all the racist hullaballoo and anti-Muslim propaganda around the supposed "Ground Zero Mosque" these days, I thought it worth reposting now.]

This story reports on an extraordinary 2004 article by a Harvard lecturer and former Chief of Neuropsychiatry at Guantanamo Bay, which made the shocking claim that "hard-core zealots" had "brains that are structurally and functionally different from us." Furthermore, the article stated, 100,000 "zealots" within the Muslim body politic would have to be eliminated, the way "malignant [cancer] cells" are removed from a healthy body.

The author of the article, "Terrorism – The Underlying Causes," in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue of the Intelligencer, Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies (PDF), house organ for the American Federation of Intelligence Officers (AFIO), was William Henry Anderson, M.D. Anderson’s piece received a stinging protest letter to the editor from psychologist and military ethics expert, Jean Maria Arrigo, but I’m not aware of any other complaint regarding this racist, fascistic article in the pages of a major intelligence services journal.

In fact, when, during her stint on the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force of the American Psychological Association (APA), Dr. Arrigo tried to get the TF membership, stacked with military psychologists from Special Forces, SERE, and the CIA, to discuss the significance of the Anderson article, she was met with indifference and assurances that the matter was of no consequence, since Anderson had by then retired. The record of this can be seen by perusing the PENS listserv, posted by ProPublica a few months back.

The text of Anderson’s article is not online, as Intelligencer does not post its articles on the Internet. However, I have obtained a copy, and can report what I read.

The article starts out as a bloviating howler. Anderson quotes Sun Tzu, recapitulates the Aristotlean causal categories, and fulminates about "credulous enablers" and "useful idiots" that sabotage U.S. efforts to mount an effective defense against its enemies. Anderson regrets that the enablers and idiots will be with us for a long time, as they represent unfortunate but necessary aspects of human nature.
It is only when we get to the "zealots" that we, supposedly, enter new territory. The zealots are "a pathological departure" from "human nature" (emphasis added to quote below).

No, the zealots are another kind of person. They may be thought of as cells of a social body that have undergone malignant change.

Let us consider terrorism with an analogy from medicine — that of terrorism as a cancer. There are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. Embedded withing this healthy body are, perhaps, 100,000 people who are eager and active in pursuit of the goal of killing us. Just as successful treatment of cancer requires killing of the malignant cells, we will need to kill this small minority, since we have no evidence that they can be induced to change their minds.

Dr. Anderson is not content with making proclamations. He has an entire section of his article devoted to pseudo-scientific justifications for his claim that the "zealots" minds cannot be literally changed.

My hypothesis is that they, or some of them, at least have brains that are structurally and functionally different than ours. Their single-minded purpose is made possible by an underlying dysregulation of the brain.

Only fair use limitations prevent me from fully deconstructing Anderson’s strange neuroscience, where "overvalued ideas" arise from damage to the brain’s amygdala and frontal cortex. The damage is ostensibly due to hereditary factors (made worse by all those Muslim "consanguineous marriages," don’t you know), poor nutrition and environmental toxins found in Muslim countries, and possible birth injuries.

Anderson’s scientific racism calls to mind the similarly medicalized racism of the Nazis, as psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described it over 20 years ago. In his book, The Nazi Doctors, Lifton quoted Nazi doctor Fritz Klein, in words not too different from Harvard lecturer and Massachusetts General Hospital Senior Psychiatrist Anderson:

Of course I am a doctor and I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.

Dr. Arrigo caught this whiff of racist ideology in a letter to the Intelligencer published in Winter/Spring 2005. Note: the text at the link is not perfect. I have taken my quote from the original publication, which is not online.

William Henry Anderson’s essay… appears to me invalid and unsuitable for publication in this journal. I write to you as an AFIO member and a social psychologist who studies ethics of intelligence….

… in proposing direct extermination of Middle East terrorist zealots, Anderson adopts the infamous racist metaphor used by the Nazis — "tumors as Jews, Jews as tumors" in the body politic…. Anderson’s argument may be valuable historically as a sample of the thinking of the military authorities at Guantanamo Bay, but publication without editorial reservations appears to make The Intelligencer complicit with Anderson’s unsupported racism.

Dr. Anderson had a rejoinder to Arrigo’s criticism. He unrepentantly claimed "a robust scientific literature" that supposedly supports him, and dismissed Arrigo’s criticisms as "gratuitous name-calling," which failed to understand "the necessity, without delay, to focus on the danger at hand: to eliminate the cancer of terrorism."

Even more incredible was an accompanying editorial note from the Intelligencer editor, who reminded the AFIO audience that the journal is a forum for discussion, "as well as projections of future possibilities and theories." The editor assured the reader the journal will "remain open to a wide range of views," including "provocative views," and then adds:

What sounds politically incorrect today, might be the very thing that ensures our survival, tomorrow.

What is frightening about the Anderson article is that it so clearly represents a respected point of view within the intelligence services. It may not be the majority view, but it clearly has influence. Anderson himself was a featured commentator in the Joint Military Intelligence College 2005 publication, The Sources of Islamic Revolutionary Conduct. The JMIC is part of the Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, itself a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

As politicians and the punditry argue over whether or not there will be any accountability for torture or other war crimes committed by the Bush administration, the rot has spread much deeper, as evidenced by the AFIO article and its response. It will take a committed and determined cleansing of the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies to root out the evil that has insinuated itself there. It seems unlikely the current administration and political configuration is up to that immense task. But wishful thinking will not make racist ideologues like Anderson go away.

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