Glenn Greenwald misses target, hits good guys
[ by Charles Cameron — I pretty much follow the people I follow because I learn from them, and that builds trust and friendship ]
.
I mean, I can well imagine there are some phony “experts” on terrorism out there, but Glenn Greenwald hasn’t done his homework and misfires. Let me explain.
**
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes think the words that someone ends a book with are kinda significant. They’re the ones that give you the impression the author wants to leave you with. That’s partly why I go on and on at such length about the final hundred pages of Abu Musab al-Suri‘s Treatise being devoted to an exposition of apocalyptic hadith with strategic application.
So when Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes an entire book arguing that al-Qaida’s strategy is to defeat the US by draining its economy – fair enough, given that bin Laden himself said he was continuing a policy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” – it should come as no surprise when Gartenstein-Ross closes his book with the following words:
When we are facing a crushing national debt, the interest payments for which are projected to eclipse our current defense budget by 2019, we cannot afford to overreact to every terrorist threat and to intervene in every conflict.
The course to maintaining American power in the twenty-first century begins with conserving our resources. And this must be as true of our counterterrorism and military efforts as it is of any other segment of the federal budget.
Likewise, when someone writes a 30-page analysis of the FBI’s infiltration of the Patriot movement, as JM Berger did in his report on PATCON for the New America Foundation, it’s hard to imagine that he’s solely concerned with Islamic terror. Indeed, Berger was researching the “Aryan Republican Army” at least as far back as 2006, when he posted Richard Guthrie’s Suicide: New Details Of ‘Aryan’ Bank Robber And OKBOMB Suspect’s Death In Prison; more recently, he published a piece about the Turner Diaries and today’s Patriot movement in the Daily Beast in June of this year.
**
It’s curious, then, and sad, that these are the two people that Glenn Greenwald specifically picks out by name and photograph to attack in his final, ill-informed piece for Salon, The sham “terrorism expert” industry, writing:
Gartenstein-Ross’ entire lucrative career as a “terrorism expert” desperately depends on the perpetuation of the Islamic Terror threat.
of the fellow who wrote:
we cannot afford to overreact to every terrorist threat
and similarly:
he spends his time doing things like shrieking about the Towering Menace of Anwar al-Awlaki and generally hopping on whatever Muslim-Terrorism-is-a-Grave-Danger train that comes along.
about the fellow who has been tracking many forms of US native terror – including all those mentioned in his piece, A Nation of Spies and Snitches in Foreign Policy in May of this year:
Page 1 of 2 | Next page