Adam L. Silverman, PhD*
"Phares obtained a fellowship at the conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a teaching position at National Defense University. He became a trainer at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, a nongovernmental organization that claims to have "trained over 75,000 Intelligence Community, Military, Law Enforcement, Homeland Security, Government and Corporate employees over the past 14 years." Phares has testified before Congress and advised the Department of Homeland Security." and ""[Phares] is telling people to suspect all Muslims Americans as something other than how they portray to themselves," says Thomas Cincotta, one of the authors of a report titled "Manufacturing the Muslim Menace," published by the liberal group Political Research Associates. But it's not just anyone Phares is preaching his ideas to. "He's addressing the intelligence community, he's addressing policymakers, military personnel," Cincotta notes." (hat tip to a commenter named Alex at Stiftung Leo Strauss: The Bunker)
Click on over and read the whole thing. I first met Dr. Phares in person in 2004 at a Florida Political Science Association conference. I was coordinating the panels on terrorism and political violence (and was one of the presenters). Every so often we'd cross paths. While I was a post-doc at UF we did some Florida Public Radio segments together by three way telecon on events related to 9-11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I knew he was a Lebanese Christian, somewhat conservative, and had been involved with the Maronite militias. What I did not know was just how involved. From listening to his conference papers, reading his articles on conflict resolution, and doing one or two radio segments together you would have thought he was a center-right, pretty main stream, professor at a tier 2 university. Apparently when you make the jump to a neo-Con funded outfit originally backed by Frank Gaffney and run by one of his proteges, you can really let your freak flag fly! The frightening thing with this is not just that he provides expert testimony for the prosecution in counter-terrorism prosecutions (as we've detailed here before), while admitting he doesn't know a whole lot about Islam or that he's training law enforcement and intelligence personnel (as the Mother Jones' reporting indicates), but that he is now advising the GOP candidate that is considered to be the most likely to gain the nomination at this time. Have to give the neo-Cons credit, they do know how to play the long game.
*Adam L. Silverman
