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Reuel Marc Gerecht (born 1949) is an American writer and political analyst focused on the Middle East. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing primarily on the Middle East, Islamic militancy, counterterrorism, and intelligence. He is a former director of the Project for the New American Century's Middle East Initiative and a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Earlier in his career Gerecht was a case officer at the CIA, primarily working on Middle Eastern targets.
In the 1990s, while Gerecht was living abroad, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of Edward Shirley.
He writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , and The Washington Post , and many other publications. A contributing editor at The Weekly Standard , Mr Gerecht has been a foreign-affairs columnist for The New Republic magazine's foreign-affairs blog and a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly .
An expert in counterterrorism and the Middle East, Gerecht was prescient in a July 2001 article for The Atlantic when he criticized the intelligence community for their collective overconfidence towards Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, reporting that U.S. officials claimed they were "picking apart" bin Laden's terrorist network "limb by limb" just a few months before the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. [1]
Gerecht has advocated the re-establishment of diplomatic relationships with Tehran before any military action is taken. [2] According to journalist Andrew Sullivan, Gerecht also defends the use of physically coercive interrogation techniques in the ticking time bomb scenario. [3]
Gerecht has been associated with the neoconservative movement in foreign affairs, which advocates an active and interventionist American foreign policy. He was a strong proponent of military strikes against the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan in the 1990s, a backer of both the Afghan and Iraq wars (authoring, among other pieces, the article "An Iraq War Won't Destabilize the Mideast", written in 2002 as part of pro war opinion-making that would culminate in the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and has repeatedly urged a hawkish approach toward Iran, including preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear sites and military retaliation for the alleged Iranian assassination plot against the Saudi ambassador in the United States. Gerecht was a harsh critic of the Central Intelligence Agency's performance in the 1990s against the Islamic terrorist target, and has often written about the difficulties of reforming the American intelligence establishment. A disciple and friend of the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, Gerecht has nevertheless argued that Islamic fundamentalists, not Muslim liberals, will be the engine of political reform and democratization in the Middle East. His views have often been condensed into the remark, "No Thomas Jefferson without Martin Luther".
Counterterrorism, also known as anti-terrorism, relates to the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, businesses, and intelligence agencies use to combat or eliminate terrorism and violent extremism.
Michael F. Scheuer, is an American former intelligence officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, blogger, author, commentator and former adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. One assignment during his 22-year career was serving as Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station from 1996 to 1999. He also served as Special Advisor to the Chief of Alec Station from September 2001 to November 2004.
The Salman Pak, or al-Salman, facility is an Iraqi military facility near Baghdad. It was falsely assessed by United States military intelligence to be a key center of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs. The facility came under American control in early April 2003 when it was captured by U.S. Marines. The facility was then referred to as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Carpenter.
The Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations were based on false claims by the United States government alleging that a secretive relationship existed between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda between 1992 and 2003. U.S. president George W. Bush used it as a main reason for invading Iraq in 2003.
Gary Berntsen is an American former Central Intelligence Agency career officer. During his time at the CIA, he served as a Station Chief on three occasions and led several counterterrorism deployments including the United States’ response to the East Africa Embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks. He was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal in 2000 and the Intelligence Star in 2004.
Robert "Bob" Dreyfuss is an American investigative journalist and contributing editor for The Nation magazine. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Diplomat, Mother Jones, The American Prospect, TomPaine.com, and other progressive publications.
The Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad is a multivolume encyclopedia describing diverse weapons in Arabic. It was first published in Pakistan in late 1992 or early 1993. The encyclopedia consists of more than 8,000 pages—an abridged version has been reduced to approximately 1,000 pages—and has been divided into 11 volumes.
Paul R. Pillar is an academic and 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), serving from 1977 to 2005. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, as well as a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. He was a visiting professor at Georgetown University from 2005 to 2012. He is a contributor to The National Interest.
This article is a chronological listing of allegations of meetings between members of al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to conspiracy theories involving Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
The Iranian Directorate or Directorate for Iran is an intelligence unit of The Pentagon founded in 2006 involved with general information on Iran as regards to diplomatic and military tensions between the United States and Iran. Opponents to the unit have criticised it for its similarities to the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which dealt with controversial intelligence reports in relation to Iraq, having been housed in an area that previously served the OSP, likewise with amongst those staffed three veteran officials of the OSP that share similar interests, according to a private investigator.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, born Ahmad Fadeel Nazal al-Khalayleh, was a Jordanian militant jihadist who ran a training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings, and attacks during the Iraq War, reportedly "turning an insurgency against US troops" in Iraq "into a Shia–Sunni civil war". He was sometimes known by his supporters as the "Sheikh of the slaughterers".
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Mission Center forCounterterrorism is a division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, established in 1986. It was renamed during an agency restructuring in 2015 and is distinct from the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is a separate entity. The most recent publicly known Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Mission Center was Chris Wood who led the organization from 2015 to 2017.
After the Central Intelligence Agency lost its role as the coordinator of the entire United States Intelligence Community (IC), special coordinating structures were created by each president to fit his administrative style and the perceived level of threat from terrorists during his term.
Bruce O. Riedel is an American expert on U.S. security, the Middle East, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and an instructor at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.
Vincent Cannistraro was Director of Intelligence Programs for the United States National Security Council (NSC) from 1984 to 1987; Special assistant for Intelligence in the Office of the Secretary of Defense until 1988; and Chief of Operations and Analysis at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Counterterrorist Center until 1991.
The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first operation, code-named Operation Cyclone, began in mid-1979, during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It financed and eventually supplied weapons to the anti-communist mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan following an April 1978 coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and throughout the nearly ten-year military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, supported an expansion of the Reagan Doctrine, which aided the mujahideen along with several other anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world.
FDD's Long War Journal (LWJ) is an American news website, also described as a blog, which reports on the War on terror. The site is operated by Public Multimedia Incorporated (PMI), a non-profit media organization established in 2007. PMI is run by Paul Hanusz and Bill Roggio. Roggio is the managing editor of the journal and Thomas Joscelyn is senior editor. The site is a project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where both Roggio and Joscelyn are senior fellows.
Bill Roggio is an American commentator on military affairs, and the managing editor of The Long War Journal. Prior to leading a team of online commentators, Roggio published the online weblog The Fourth Rail. Roggio was an active duty soldier in the United States Army in the 1990s.
Michael D'Andrea is a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer who played an instrumental role in American counterterrorism efforts during the War on Terror. He served nine years as director of Counterterrorism Center (CTC), and held a major role in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden. His 42-year career has been described as among the most consequential in the recent history of the CIA, and he has been called the most lethal leader in the U.S. government for his tenure. He is widely credited with revolutionizing the CIA's terrorist-hunting efforts, and vastly expanding the program of targeted killings by drone strike used heavily against Al-Qaeda. "If he was a combatant commander, he would have been sitting in the gallery for the State of the Union, he would have had all the accolades, and then some, that David Petraeus ever had," said one former senior CIA official. "He ran that war."
Nada Glass Bakos is an American former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and targeting officer who was involved in a number of notable counterterrorism operations during her career. She was part of a group of CIA analysts studying Al Qaeda and its leader, as portrayed in the 2013 HBO documentary, Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden. She also served as the Chief Targeting Officer in the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and predecessor of ISIS. After 10 years, she left the CIA.