Marc Sage­man and Charles B. Strozier at an Octo­ber Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism Seminar

In the normally-restrained world of aca­d­e­mic dis­course, the 2007 annual meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion stands out as a break with the dom­i­nant cul­ture of self-abrogation and humil­ity. Dur­ing the course of this meet­ing, a fierce and impas­sioned debate broke out over a pro­posed revi­sion to the association’s Code of Ethics that would pro­hibit secret research. The dis­puted lan­guage read, in part, “no reports should be pro­vided to spon­sors that are not also avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic and, where prac­ti­ca­ble, to the pop­u­la­tion stud­ied.” In prac­tice, this would bar Amer­i­can anthro­pol­o­gists from doing research for the US Depart­ment of Defense and its affiliates.

The pro­posed clause actu­ally wasn’t new. It was added to the Code in 1971 as sen­ti­ment against the Viet­nam War peaked, but was later excised, mir­ror­ing the ascen­dency of the right-wing on the national stage and in the acad­emy. By 2007, as George W. Bush read­ied Amer­i­can forces for the now-infamous “surge,” many anthro­pol­o­gists felt it was again time to take a stand. Anthro­pol­o­gists were attract­ing media atten­tion for their involve­ment in an ini­tia­tive called the Human Ter­rain Sys­tem — a pro­gram in which anthro­pol­o­gists worked directly for the US mil­i­tary in war zones for the pur­pose of col­lect­ing cul­tural and social data. The AAA lead­er­ship had already issued an offi­cial state­ment con­demn­ing Human Ter­rain Sys­tem, but some rank-and-file mem­bers felt it hadn’t gone far enough. The pro­posed change to the code of ethics would go much fur­ther, chastis­ing not only those anthro­pol­o­gists who work directly in the the­ater of war, but also those who con­duct mil­i­tary research from the com­fort of their ivory tower offices.

The AAA lead­er­ship even­tu­ally man­aged to defeat the pro­posal by means of a deft pro­ce­dural maneu­ver, but the events of the meet­ing reignited a long­stand­ing debate about the mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the acad­emy. To what extent should aca­d­e­mics col­lab­o­rate with the mil­i­tary? Are research projects that fur­ther a mil­i­tary cam­paign inher­ently uneth­i­cal? Is war­mak­ing com­pat­i­ble with the social mis­sion of the uni­ver­sity? Clearly, opin­ions on these ques­tions are sharply divided along ide­o­log­i­cal lines. But like the AAA’s code of ethics, this debate has its roots in the 1970s.

At 4:00 AM on August 24, 1970, a bomb ripped through the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin – Madi­son cam­pus result­ing in over $2 mil­lion worth of dam­age. The incen­di­ary device was a stolen Ford Econo­line van filled with 2,000 pounds of explo­sives. The tar­get: the Army Math­e­mat­ics Research Cen­ter (ARMC), which had become a mag­net for stu­dent protests because of its per­ceived involve­ment with coun­terin­sur­gency oper­a­tions in Viet­nam. A lone sci­en­tist, work­ing on an unre­lated research project through the night in his physics lab, was killed. Four UW stu­dents were even­tu­ally charged with the bomb­ing; two later served jail time and one remains at large.

For some, this event defin­i­tively marked the shift from a decade of peace, love and under­stand­ing to a decade of anger, vio­lence, and cyn­i­cism. For oth­ers, it marked a strate­gic shift in the anti­war move­ment: rather than march on Wash­ing­ton, stu­dents would now fight the mil­i­tary pres­ence in their own back­yards. Chants of “US out of Viet­nam!” turned to “ROTC Off Cam­pus!” The military-industrial com­plex was recast as the Military-Industrial-University Com­plex. While all but the most fringe ele­ments con­demned the bombers at UW and lamented the tragic loss of life, most anti­war activists agreed that the strat­egy of tar­get­ing campus-military con­nec­tions was essen­tially cor­rect. What fol­lowed was a rash of stu­dent protests that were gen­er­ally less vio­lent, but no less dis­rup­tive. Research facil­i­ties receiv­ing mil­i­tary fund­ing were pick­eted, pro­fes­sors con­duct­ing research for the mil­i­tary were sin­gled out and harassed. These events cul­mi­nated in the largest stu­dent strike and occu­pa­tion wave of Amer­i­can his­tory in the spring of 1972, prompt­ing Nixon to estab­lish the Com­mis­sion on Cam­pus Unrest.

Forty years later, the Global War on Ter­ror — now rebranded the “Over­seas Con­tin­gency Oper­a­tion” by the Barack Obama admin­is­tra­tion — has ben­e­fited from a dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal cli­mate. The New York Times recently ran a fea­ture explor­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of lift­ing many elite col­leges’ long­stand­ing bans on ROTC pro­grams. The Times reported that at Har­vard, 62 per­cent of respon­dents to an infor­mal sur­vey of under­grad­u­ates favored bring­ing the ROTC back on cam­pus, and vir­tu­ally no pro­test­ers showed up to chal­lenge US Cen­tral Com­mand Gen­eral David Petraeus when he deliv­ered an address in Har­vard Yard at a ROTC com­mis­sion­ing cer­e­mony. The anti­war move­ment, already run­ning out of steam in the clos­ing years of Bush’s regime, slowed to a sput­ter when a friend­lier face took over the high­est office. The country’s largest anti­war orga­ni­za­tion gave Obama a free ride through the early months of his pres­i­dency, and is only now begin­ning to regroup. What remains of the Left has mainly con­cerned itself with protest­ing the excesses of the bailouts, and protest­ing cuts to edu­ca­tion and social services.

On today’s col­lege cam­puses, the still-open-ended war on ter­ror never man­aged to spawn much of an anti­war move­ment. Instead, the war has man­i­fest itself mainly through the emer­gence of ter­ror­ism research cen­ters. There are already at least half a dozen campus-based cen­ters ded­i­cated exclu­sively to the study of ter­ror, and many more that count ter­ror­ism among their foci. Cam­puses as var­ied as Duke and the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land now house spe­cial­ized anti-terrorism pro­grams. As a rule, most of these cen­ters are not par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal of US for­eign pol­icy. Some are run by known right-wing ide­o­logues, and a few are scarcely-concealed neo­con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks.

From the out­set, CUNY’s Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism (COT) has been an anom­aly among this crowd. Undoubt­edly, the founder and direc­tor of the cen­ter, Charles Strozier, is no neo­con hawk. A self-described for­mer “Six­ties rad­i­cal”, Strozier claims his cen­ter is paving new ground by defin­ing “a pro­gres­sive, intel­li­gent approach to coun­tert­er­ror­ism.” In a tele­phone inter­view, Strozier crit­i­cized coun­tert­er­ror­ism pol­icy under Bush with­out prompt­ing, para­phras­ing Obama’s catch­phrase: “Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Later, he noted with dis­gust that Bush had mil­i­ta­rized coun­tert­er­ror­ism oper­a­tions. (Strozier argues with caveats that ter­ror­ism is a prob­lem to be dealt with by police. But this is no longer a par­tic­u­larly con­tro­ver­sial thing to say. In con­trast, Strozier still expresses admi­ra­tion for Obama, describ­ing him as “mov­ing in the right direc­tion.” When pressed, Strozier described the pres­i­dent as hav­ing the “right ideas and right goals” but being “slow in imple­ment­ing them.” (At press time, Obama had not yet made a deci­sion on Gen­eral William McChyrstal’s request for as many as 45,000 addi­tional troops in Afghanistan).

The Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism is located on the 6^th floor of an unas­sum­ing office build­ing on the far west side of Man­hat­tan with a BMW deal­er­ship on the ground floor. The center’s research staff con­sists of a com­bi­na­tion of locally-based schol­ars with CUNY appoint­ments and far-flung experts with­out other local affil­i­a­tions. Although a sim­i­lar pro­gram existed under a dif­fer­ent name prior to 2001, the cen­ter rein­vented itself in the after­math of 9/11, and ded­i­cated itself exclu­sively to ter­ror­ism research.

CUNY pro­vides the cen­ter with office space and essen­tial sup­port, but the pro­gram reports that the “vast major­ity” of its fund­ing comes from out­side sources. Chief among these is the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, which spon­sors the cen­ter both through one-off grants and through the ongo­ing Grad­u­ate Assist­ant­ship in Home­land Secu­rity. The assist­ant­ships offer a $2300 monthly stipend in addi­tion to tuition reim­burse­ment, stu­dent fees and health insur­ance. While the pro­gram reports that its DHS-funded grad­u­ate assis­tants go on to pur­sue var­ied careers, the appli­ca­tion for the pro­gram includes a 1,000 word essay on “how this assist­ant­ship will help advance your career objec­tives in the field of home­land secu­rity.” In addi­tion, the cen­ter offers a cer­tifi­cate in Ter­ror­ism Stud­ies — one of the only of its kind, and works closely with John Jay’s Crim­i­nal Jus­tice PhD stu­dents who choose to spe­cial­ize in coun­tert­er­ror­ism. Last year, John Jay reported that its fac­ulty had received over $580,000 in DHS grant money.

The COT is not the only CUNY-based research cen­ter that accepts mil­i­tary fund­ing. “The Cen­ter for Advanced Tech­nol­ogy in Pho­ton­ics Appli­ca­tions,” with offices at CCNY and Queens reports on its web­site hav­ing received more than $6 mil­lion over the last five years from the US mil­i­tary sources, includ­ing $600,000 from the Navy for “under­wa­ter tar­get imaging.”

Aside from pass­ing men­tions in a few online pub­li­ca­tions, the Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism and other CUNY-based research ini­ti­atves with con­nec­tions to the mil­i­tary have largely escaped the notice of the anti­war move­ment. To be sure, the Cen­ter on Terrorism’s pol­i­tics defy sim­ple cat­e­go­riza­tion. Unlike many of its com­pan­ion insti­tu­tions, CUNY’s cen­ter takes pains to include a range of view­points and per­spec­tives on its ros­ter, includ­ing a hand­ful of unabashed lib­er­als. The center’s direc­tor is quick to point out that it spon­sored a con­fer­ence on tor­ture before Abu Ghraib. At its con­fer­ences, the cen­ter has hosted a num­ber of out­spo­ken left­ists, from crit­i­cal geo­g­ra­pher Cindi Katz to fem­i­nist thinker Mar­nia Lazreg, anti-nuclear activist Jonathan Schell, and the direc­tor of Human Rights Watch, among oth­ers. The center’s most recent con­fer­ence was called “Sur­veil­lance Soci­ety: At What Price Secu­rity” and listed “recon­sid­er­a­tions of Fou­cault and Orwell” among top­ics to be covered.

Social sci­ence fig­ures promi­nently in the center’s research. While many of its affil­i­ated fac­ulty are trained as crim­i­nol­o­gists, the cen­ter claims psy­chol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, soci­ol­o­gists, and human­i­ties schol­ars within its ranks. To the extent that the war on ter­ror is a socio-psychological war, the social sci­ences have found their mod­el­ing meth­ods are sud­denly in huge demand. The watch­words of the day are ‘cul­tural knowl­edge,’ ‘ethno­graphic intel­li­gence,’ and ‘social networks’ — all con­cepts derived from the social sci­ences, espe­cially soci­ol­ogy and anthro­pol­ogy. Mod­ern mil­i­tary tac­tics depend on deter­min­ing the like­li­hood that res­i­dents of a par­tic­u­lar Afghan vil­lage might become rad­i­cal­ized. Sean O’Brien, a senior employee at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Pentagon’s research and devel­op­ment wing) charged with run­ning the agency’s “com­pu­ta­tion social sci­ence” pro­gram, recently spoke glow­ingly of the social sci­ences. In a series of pub­lic remarks he claimed that “increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of agent based social sim­u­la­tions” would make it pos­si­ble for researchers to effec­tively pre­dict future human behav­ior — for exam­ple, who might join a ter­ror­ist cell. More omi­nously, O’Brien argued “we may rev­o­lu­tion­ize the social sci­ences along the way.”

Some cen­ter fac­ulty mem­bers have direct con­nec­tions to US intel­li­gence. The cen­ter counts among its affil­i­ated fac­ulty former-CIA oper­a­tive Marc Sage­men, whose resume includes three years run­ning “US uni­lat­eral pro­grams with the Afghan Muja­hedin.” Sageman’s most recent book, Unmask­ing Ter­ror fea­tures a glow­ing review from for­mer Sec­re­tary of Home­land Secu­rity Tom Ridge on the book­jacket. In his Octo­ber 7, 2009 tes­ti­mony to the Sen­ate For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee, Sage­man read a series of pre­pared remarks enti­tiled “Con­fronting Al-Qeda: Under­stand­ing the Ter­ror­ist Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond,” which reads in part, “counter-terrorism works and is doing well against the global neo-jihadi ter­ror­ist threat.”

But the COT doesn’t only con­cern itself with right-wing ter­ror­ist groups. Another Cen­ter affil­i­ate, Joshua Freilich, runs a project known as the United States Extrem­ist Crime Data­base (ECDB), a “large-scale data-collection effort that is build­ing the first-of-its-kind rela­tional data­base of crimes com­mit­ted by far-right, Jihadist, and ani­mal rights and envi­ron­men­tal rights extrem­ists in the United States.” While some might object to the con­fla­tion of Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists with “ecoter­rror­ist” arson­ists, the term “ter­ror­ist” is increas­ingly being applied to domes­tic radicals.

Strozier is keen to point out that “pro­gres­sive crit­i­cal thinkers tend to shy away from deal­ing with sub­jects that involve police and mil­i­tary intel­li­gence.” Nowhere has this been clearer than at the AAA. After the Code of Ethics revi­sion was defeated, a group call­ing itself the Net­work of Con­cerned Anthro­pol­o­gists drafted a peti­tion which offered an even stronger ver­sion of the anti-military lan­guage. The peti­tion reads in part, “We believe that anthro­pol­o­gists should not engage in research and other activ­i­ties that con­tribute to counter-insurgency oper­a­tions in Iraq or in related the­aters in the ‘war on ter­ror.’ … [This work] con­tributes instead to a bru­tal war of occu­pa­tion which has entailed mas­sive casu­al­ties.” For these rad­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gists, to con­duct research for the mil­i­tary is to fur­ther the neoim­pe­ri­al­ist project. But for Strozier, this sep­a­ra­tion between the aca­d­e­mic Left and mil­i­taryn­tel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ties is “arti­fi­cial and dan­ger­ous.” Strozier openly acknowl­edges that the field of ter­ror­ism stud­ies is “dom­i­nated by right wing fanat­ics and main­stream cheer­lead­ers,” but describes his cen­ter as “a bea­con of hope in defin­ing an alter­na­tive approach.”