Lessons in Terror at John Jay
by Abe Walker
- 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 6th 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.”
