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*[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/magazine/stymied-warriors.html?pagewanted=1 "Stymied Warriors",] ''[[The New York Times Magazine]]'', November 13, 1988
*[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/13/magazine/stymied-warriors.html?pagewanted=1 "Stymied Warriors",] ''[[The New York Times Magazine]]'', November 13, 1988
*[http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/12/magazine/where-have-all-his-spies-gone.html?pagewanted=1 "Where Have All His Spies Gone?"], ''The New York Times'', August 12, 1990
*[http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/12/magazine/where-have-all-his-spies-gone.html?pagewanted=1 "Where Have All His Spies Gone?"], ''The New York Times'', August 12, 1990

===Select testimony===
*[http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/324.pdf "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror"], Senate Committee on Judiciary, November 8, 2005
*[http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/20.pdf "The Homeland Security Implications of Radicalization"], U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment, September 20, 2006
*[http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/350.pdf "Assessing the Fight Against Al Qaeda"], U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, April 9, 2008
*[http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/357.pdf "State Department Outreach with Islamist Groups]," U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, July 31, 2008


==References==
==References==

Revision as of 09:40, 29 January 2010

For other people named Steve Emerson, see Steve Emerson (disambiguation).
Steven Emerson
Emerson at a convention in June 2008
Emerson at a convention in June 2008
OccupationJournalist; Author; Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)
NationalityU.S.
Alma materBrown University (B.A., 1976; M.A., 1977)
SubjectNational security, terrorism, and Islamic extremism
Notable worksJihad in America
Notable awards1994 George Polk Award for best television documentary; top prize for best investigative report from Investigative Reporters and Editors Organization

Steven Emerson, an American former staff member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been referred to by The New York Times as "an expert on intelligence".[1] He is a journalist and author, who writes about national security, terrorism, and Islamic extremism.

Emerson is the author of six books, and co-author of two more. His television documentary Jihad in America won the 1994 George Polk Award for best Television Documentary, and top prize for best investigative reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He is also the Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a data-gathering center on Islamist groups.[2][3]

Education and early career

Emerson received a Bachelors of Arts from Brown University in 1976, and a Master of Arts in sociology in 1977.[3]

He went to Washington, D.C., in 1977 with the intention of putting off his law school studies for a year.[3] He worked on staff as an investigator for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee until 1982, and as an executive assistant to Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho.[4][5]

Journalist and commentator

Emerson was a freelance writer for The New Republic, for whom he wrote a series of articles in 1982 on the influence of Saudi Arabia in U.S. corporations, law firms, public-relations outfits, and educational institutions. In their pursuit of large contracts with Saudi Arabia, he argued, U.S. businesses became unofficial, unregistered lobbyists for Saudi interests.

He expanded this material in 1985 in his first book, The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection.

U.S. News and World Report and CNN

From 1986 to 1989 he worked for U.S. News and World Report as a senior editor specializing in national security issues.[4][6] In 1988, he published Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era, a strongly critical review of Ronald Reagan-era efforts to strengthen U.S. covert capabilities. Reviewing the book, The New York Times wrote: "Among the grace notes of Mr. Emerson's fine book are many small, well-told stories".[7]

Wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103

In 1990, he co-authored The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation, which argued for the alternate theory that Iran was behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Reviewing the book, The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Emerson and Mr. Duffy have put together a surpassing account of the investigation to date, rich with drama and studded with the sort of anecdotal details that give the story the appearance of depth and weight."[8] The newspaper listed it as an "editors' choice" on their Best Sellers List, and cited it as a "notable book of the year".[9][10] Libya accepted responsibility for that air crash, and paid each of the victim's families $10 million apiece.[11]

In 1990, he joined CNN as an investigative correspondent and continued to write about terrorism. In 1991, he published Terrorist: The Inside Story of the Highest-Ranking Iraqi Terrorist Ever to Defect to the West, detailing his account of how Iraq had spread and increased its terror network in the 1980s with United States support.

Jihad in America

Emerson left CNN in 1993 to work on a documentary, Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America, for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The documentary exposed clandestine operations of Islamist groups in the U.S.

In the documentary, which aired as a Frontline TV broadcast in November 1994, he stood in front of the Twin Towers and warned:

"The survivors of the explosion at the World Trade Center in 1993 are still suffering from the trauma, but as far as everyone else is concerned, all this was a spectacular news event that is over. Is it indeed over? The answer is: apparently not. A network of Muslim extremists is committed to a jihad against America. Their ultimate aim is to establish a Muslim empire."[3]

He documented meetings in American hotels at which Muslims called for a holy war, raised funds for terror organizations, and predicted that terror would ultimately come to the U.S.[3] He also filmed Muslim-American youth training with weapons in summer camps, and interviewed supporters of terror who operated under the cover of charitable organizations.[3]

Emerson noted at the outset that "the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not members of militant groups." But the message of the documentary was that seemingly respectable Muslim organizations have ties with militants who preach violence against moderate Muslims, as well as against Christians and Jews, and that charitable contributions to those organizations make their way to extremists. He showed videos of Muslim fundamentalist speakers such as Abdullah Azzam in Brooklyn urging his audience to wage jihad in America (which Azzam explains "means fighting only, fighting with the sword"), Fayiz Azzam (a cousin of Abdullah) telling an Atlanta audience: "Blood must flow. There must be widows; there must be orphans," and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in Detroit (later convicted of conspiring to blow up several New York City landmarks, and sentenced to life in prison) calling for jihad against the infidel. Sheik Mohammed Al-Asi of Chicago said: "If the Americans are placing their forces in the Persian Gulf, we should be creating another war front for the Americans in the Muslim world," and at a November 1993 Hamas rally in New Jersey hundreds chanted: "We buy paradise with the blood of the Jews."[12] The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim organization in Washington later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, complained that PBS denied requests by Arab and Muslim journalists to screen the program before its showing, and that Emerson was promoting "a wild theory about an Islamic terrorist network in America." The New York Times opined that CAIR's concerns "prove understandable (which is not to say the pressure to change or cancel the documentary was justified), since 'Jihad in America' is likely to awaken viewers' unease over what some some Muslim groups here may be up to".[13]

Near the program's end, Emerson prophetically said: "As the activities of Muslim radicals expand in the United States, future attacks seem inevitable. Combating these groups within the boundaries of the Constitution will be the greatest challenge to law enforcement since the war on organized crime."[14]

He received the 1994 George Polk Award for best Television Documentary.[15][16] He also received the top prize for best investigative report from the Investigative Reporters and Editors Organization (IRE).[17]

Emerson elaborated on this subject in his 2006 book, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.[18]

The Investigative Project

Emerson is also the founder and executive director of The Investigative Project, a large intelligence archive on Islamist groups around the world.[3] He started the Project in 1995, after the broadcast of Jihad in America. Since September 2001, Emerson has testified before committees of both houses of Congress dozens of times on terrorist funding and on the operational structures of groups including al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.[3] He has also given interviews debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, and is a contributing expert to the Counterterrorism Blog.[19]

Richard Clarke, former head of counter-terrorism for the United States National Security Council, said of Emerson: "I think of Steve as the Paul Revere of terrorism ... We'd always learn things [from him] we weren’t hearing from the FBI or CIA, things which almost always proved to be true."[20]

Death threat

After his film Jihad in America aired in South Africa, Emerson said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informed him that a South African Muslim group had dispatched a team to the U.S. to assassinate him. Emerson says he uses a collapsible mirror to check that there are no bombs underneath his car, stays away from windows, varies his routine, does occasional U-turns when driving to make sure no one is following him, wears inconspicuous clothing, and changes his routes and the times he leaves his home. He requires security when speaking at universities, and a police guard when addressing the Senate. According to Slate, people who visit his Washington, D.C., office are blindfolded en route, and employees call it "the bat cave." [21]

Criticism

Emerson has been accused of claiming an alleged plot by Pakistan to launch a nuclear first strike against India and claiming that Yugoslavians were behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.[22] In its criticism of his coverage of the Pan Am 103 bombing, the liberal watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting said a Columbia Journalism Review alleged that passages in Emerson's book The Fall of Pan Am 103, "bear a striking resemblance, in both substance and style" to reports in the Syracuse Post-Standard. FAIR claimed that reporters from the newspaper "cornered Emerson at a conference of the Investigative Reporters and Editors and demanded that he apologize for plagiarizing their work."[22] FAIR said that a New York Times review (5/19/91) of his 1991 book Terrorist "chided that it was "'marred by factual errors…and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias,'" and that "Jihad in America was faulted for bigotry and misrepresentations". In the same article, FAIR says that "veteran reporter Robert Friedman accused Emerson of 'creating mass hysteria against American Arabs.'"[22] The FAIR article said that Emerson, in his commentary on the Oklahoma City bombing said it showed "a Middle Eastern trait" because it "was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible."[22] These type of comments by Emerson, and others were seen as having led to "a backlash against the American Muslim community during the first few days after the explosion" according to the American Journalism Review.[23]

A review by Michael Wines in The New York Times of The Fall of Pan Am 103, while noting that the authors were "respected journalists" and "not to be lightly dismissed," and that they "talked to 250 people, including senior law enforcement and intelligence officials in seven nations", opined that charges of Iranian complicity were "without much substantiation".[24]

Media

Books

Chapters

Documentaries

Select articles

Select testimony

References

  1. ^ Martin Tolchin and Richard Halloran, "Washington Talk Briefing; Undercover Talk," The New York Times, June 1, 1988, accessed January 28, 2010
  2. ^ "Biography", Steveemerson.com.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Landau, Benny (December 26, 2009). "Foresight, hindsight". Haaretz. Retrieved January 28, 2010.
  4. ^ a b Emerson, Steven. Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1988 (see bio on back flap).
  5. ^ "How Saudis manipulated to win the sale of AWACS, The Miami News, Feb 17, 1982, accessed January 28, 2010
  6. ^ Mink, Eric, "Fitting 'Iran-Contra' Into U.S. History," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 30, 1989, accessed January 28, 2010
  7. ^ Powers, Thomas, "Solderies of Misfortune," The New York Times, June 26, 1988, accessed January 28, 2010
  8. ^ Wines, Michael, "On the Trail of the Terrorists," The New York Times, April 29, 1990, accessed January 28, 2010
  9. ^ "Best Sellers", The New York Times, May 6, 1990, accessed January 28, 2010
  10. ^ "Notable Books of the Year," The New York Times, December 2, 1990, accessed January 28, 2010
  11. ^ "Bloc of Lockerbie Families Urges End to Libya Penalties" June 16, 2004, The New York Times
  12. ^ Emerson, Steven, "Islamic Extremists Are Active in U.S.," The New York Times, February 18, 1995, accessed January 29, 2010
  13. ^ Goodman, Walter, "Television Review; In 'Jihad in America,' Food for Uneasiness," The New York Times, November 21, 1994, accessed January 21, 2010
  14. ^ Mink, Eric, "Was 'Jihad' Extremely Prophetic?," The New York Daily News, April 21, 1995, accessed January 28, 2010
  15. ^ George Polk Award
  16. ^ Perez-Pena, Richard, "Report on Nicotine Levels Wins Polk Award," The New York Times, March 7, 1995, accessed January 28, 2010
  17. ^ Steven Emerson's biography at speakers' bureau Web site.
  18. ^ Jihad Incorporated, interview with Steve Emerson, FrontPageMagazine, October 16, 2006
  19. ^ Steven Emerson, Counterterrorism Blog.
  20. ^ Brown Alumni Magazine, November-December 2002.
  21. ^ The Slate field guide to Iraq Pundits
  22. ^ a b c d Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Steven Emerson's Crusade
  23. ^ Penny Bender Fuchs, American Journalism Review Jumping to Conclusions in Oklahoma City? June 1995
  24. ^ Michael Wines, NY Times Books, On the Trail of the Terrorists April 29, 1990

Further reading

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