Steven Emerson

For other people named Steve Emerson, see Steve Emerson (disambiguation).

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Steven Emerson
Emerson at a convention in June 2008
Occupation	Journalist; Author; Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)
Nationality	U.S.
Alma mater	Brown University (B.A., 1976; M.A., 1977)
Subject	National security, terrorism, and Islamic extremism
Notable works	Jihad in America
Notable awards	1994 George Polk Award for best television documentary; top prize for best investigative report from Investigative Reporters and Editors

Steven Emerson, is an American 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. Emerson frequently testifies before Congressional committees on al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist organizations.

Education and early career

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

He went to Washington, D.C., in 1977 with the intention of putting off his law school studies for a year. 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.

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 on 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. 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".

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." The newspaper listed it as an "editors' choice" on their Best Sellers List, and cited it as a "notable book of the year".

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 how Iraq spread and increased its terror network in the 1980s with U.S. 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, filmed between 1988 and 1993 at rallies in half a dozen U.S. cities as he posed as an inquisitive journalist exploring the tenets of Islam, exposed clandestine operations of Islamist groups in the U.S. It aired as a Frontline TV broadcast in November 1994.

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 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. 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.

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, hands and limbs must be severed, and limbs and blood must be spread everywhere in order that Allah's religion can stand on its feet",

Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman

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."

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."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim organization in Washington 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".

After the film 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. According to Slate, people who visit his Washington, D.C., office are blindfolded en route, and employees call it "the bat cave."

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

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

Voiced concerns

It was Emerson's 1994 documentary Jihad in America that first linked Sami Al-Arian to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). When in February 2003 the U.S. indicted Al-Arian, accusing him of being the North American leader of PIJ and financing and helping support suicide bombings, The New York Times noted that Emerson "has complained about Mr. Al-Arian's activities in the United States for nearly a decade." However Al-Arian was acquitted on 8 of the charges against him and another 8 were dropped after he plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to help a "specially designated terrorist" organization, PIJ, and was sentenced to 57 months in prison. While Al-arian admitted in the agreement that he knew of the groups violent activities, no evidence was ever offered that connected Al-Arian to anything violent.

In testimony on March 19, 1996, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Emerson described the Holy Land Foundation as "the main fund-raising arm for Hamas in the United States." In 2007, federal prosecutors brought charges against Holy Land for funding Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations. In 2009, the founders of Holy Land were given life sentences for "funneling $12 million to Hamas."

In early 1997, Emerson told the Middle East Quarterly that the threat of terrorism "is greater now than before the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993] as the numbers of these groups and their members expands. In fact, I would say that the infrastructure now exists to carry off twenty simultaneous World Trade Center-type bombings across the United States."

Just a few months before 9/11, he wrote on May 31, 2001: "Al-Qaeda is ... planning new attacks on the US.... [It has] learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings.... Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups ... have silently declared war on the US; in turn, we must fight them as we would in a war." And just a few months before 9/11, he wrote on May 31, 2001: "Al-Qaeda is ... planning new attacks on the US.... [It has] learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings.... Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups ... have silently declared war on the US; in turn, we must fight them as we would in a war."

In January 2001 it was reported that Emerson pointed out that the U.S. had missed clues that would have allowed it to focus on al-Qaeda early on. One of the men convicted in the World Trade Center bombing, Ahmad Ajaj, returned to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1992 with a bomb manual later seized by the U.S. An English translation of the document, entered into evidence in the World Trade Center trial, said that the manual was dated 1982, that it had been published in Amman, Jordan, and that it carried a heading on the front and succeeding pages: "The Basic Rule". But those were all errors, as Emerson pointed out. The heading said "al-Qaeda"—which translates as "The Base". In addition, the document was published in 1989, a year after al-Qaeda was founded, and the place of publication was Afghanistan, not Jordan.

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. 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 many times on terrorist funding and on the operational structures of groups including al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. He has also given interviews debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, and is a contributing expert to the Counterterrorism Blog.

Richard Clarke

Emerson has been referred to by The New York Times as "an expert on intelligence", and by the New York Post as "the nation's foremost journalistic expert on terrorism".

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."

In March 2004, Newsweek ran an article entitled "How Clarke 'Outsourced' Terror Intel; the Former Counterterrorism Chief Tapped a Private Researcher to Develop Intelligence on Al-Qaeda. The Disclosure Sheds New Light on White House Frustrations with the FBI". The article detailed the high level of reliance Clarke placed on Emerson's information, in lieu of that of the FBI.

Criticism

In July 1990, the Columbia Journalism Review alleged that passages in Emerson's book The Fall of Pan Am 103 bore "a striking resemblance, in both substance and style" to reports in the Syracuse Post-Standard.

On May 19, 1991, a New York Times review by Adrienne Edgar described the 1991 book Terrorist co-authored by Emerson and Cristina del Sesto as "marred by factual errors" and marked by "a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias." Emerson and del Sesto responded: "We defy anyone to point to any passages that suggest such bias.... these characterizations of the book are wild figments of Ms. Edgar's political imagination.....

In a 1995 editorial in The Nation, Robert I. Friedman accused Emerson of "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs."

In an article for the liberal watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting John F. Sugg, a senior editor of the Weekly Planet, a Tampa Bay alternative newspaper, accused Emerson of focusing on "unrelenting attack against Arabs and Muslims," and wrote that Emerson's "lengthy list of mistakes and distortions... mar his credentials as an expert on terrorism." Examples given by Sugg include Emerson claiming that the Yugoslavians were behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and stating that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb. Sugg also criticized Emerson for his description of the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building as having "a Middle Eastern trait" because it "was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible." Emerson responded to criticism of his Oklahoma City bombing comment by saying that he was referring only to a fanatical minority in the Islamic community, and pointed out that he was one of many experts interviewed after the bombing who concluded that there were similarities between Oklahoma City and Middle Eastern terrorism.

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 presented "without much substantiation". Wines goes on to say that "They build a convincing circumstantial case against Iran and its terrorist agents."

A 1999 article in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly criticized the detention of two Saudi airplane passengers who mistakenly tried to open the cockpit door of the plane they were on, thinking it was the bathroom. The newspaper claimed Emerson was the cause of the "Islamaphobia" that led to the authorities' overreaction, as he had "turned denigrating Islam into a full-time job."

Emerson was also criticized in a 2002 review of American Jihad in Salon by Eric Boehlert. Boehlert called Emerson a "heavy-handed scaremonger who fails to grasp – or deliberately blurs – the most rudimentary distinctions between different radical groups..". Boehlert also criticizes Emerson for saying that Ghazi Ibrahim abu Mezer, a Palestinian immigrant who planned to blow up a Brooklyn, N.Y., subway station, was a member of Hamas when James Kallstrom, head of the New York FBI office, said that he wasn't.

Boehlert also criticizes Emerson for suggesting that Katherine Smith, a 49-year-old Tennessee motor vehicles inspector who died when her car exploded was the victim of assassination even though authorities denied this. Boehlert quotes a former director of counterterrorism for the CIA Vincent Cannistraro who said of Emerson's thesis:

"It's total bullshit...He's trying to say people who move to this country and set up charities and think tanks and are associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, that there's some kind of connection between them and Sept. 11, that there's a liaison or support network. He doesn't know what he's talking about."

Philip Jenkins, in his 2003 book, Images of terror: what we can and can't know about terrorism responded that certain groups criticize Emerson in order to silence and delegitimize his views.

Media and testimony

Books

• (1985), The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection, Franklin Watts, ISBN 0-531-09778-1
• (1988), Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era, Putnam, ISBN 0-399-13360-7
• (1990) The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation, with Brian Duffy, Putnam, ISBN 0-399-13521-9
• (1991), Terrorist: The Inside Story of the Highest-Ranking Iraqi Terrorist Ever to Defect to the West, Random House; ISBN 0-679-73701-4
• (1995), The worldwide Jihad movement: Militant Islam targets the West (Policy forum), Institute of the World Jewish Congress
• (2002), American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, Free Press; 2003 paperback edition, ISBN 0-7432-3435-9
• (2006), Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-59102-453-6
• (2006), Al-Qaeda in Europe: the new battleground of international jihad, with Lorenzo Vidino, Prometheus Books

Chapters

• (1997) Terrorism in the United States, Vol. 69, # 1, "The Other Fundamentalists", Editor Frank McGuckin, H.W. Wilson Co., ISBN 0-8242-0914-1
• (1998) The future of terrorism: violence in the new millennium, "Terrorism in America: The Threat of Militant Islamic Fundamentalism," Editor Harvey W. Kushner, SAGE, ISBN 0-7619-0869-2

Documentaries

• (1994), Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America
• (2005), Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West
• (2007), Radical Islam: Terror in Its Own Words

Select articles

• "Stymied Warriors", The New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1988
• "Where Have All His Spies Gone?", The New York Times, August 12, 1990
• "Get Ready for Twenty World Trade Center Bombings", Middle East Quarterly, Vol. IV, Number 2, interview with Emerson, June 1997
• "Rolling Back the Forces of Terror", with Daniel Pipes, The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2001
• "Radical Outreach; Bush coddles American apologists for radical Islam", The New Republic, June 28, 2007
• "Paper of CAIR; Glossing over Hamas ties", National Review, February 8, 2008
• "Deals With Devils; Israel's Awful Terrorist Pacts", The New York Post, July 16, 2008
• "Radicals in our Prisons; How to Stop the Muslim Extremists Recruiting Inmates to Terrorism", The New York Post, May 23, 2009
• "Screening must include religion, ethnicity", CNN, January 5, 2010

Select testimony

• "Terrorism in Buenos Aires, Panama, London", U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations and Human Rights, August 1, 1994
• "Africa and the Middle East, The Expanding Threat of Terrorism", U.S. House International Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Africa, April 6, 1995
• "Hamas, the PLO, and Terrorist Attacks Against Israel", U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, March 12, 1996
• "Foreign Terrorists in America: Five Years After the WTC Bombing", U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information, February 24, 1998
• "The Operations of Terrorist Networks in the US and Canada", U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims, January 26, 2000
• "Classified Information to Prevent the Presence of Terrorists", U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, May 23, 2000
• "The MO of Terrorist Networks in the United States", U.S. House of Representatives Government Reform Committee, Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations, October 11, 2001
• "Preserving Our Freedoms While Defending Against Terrorism", U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, December 4, 2001
• "Fundraising Methods and Procedures for Terrorist Organizations", U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, February 12, 2002
• "Terrorism, Al-Qaeda, and the Muslim World", National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, July 9, 2003
• "Money Laundering and Terror Financing Issues in the Middle East", U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, July 13, 2005
• "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror", U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary, November 8, 2005
• "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
• "Assessing the Fight Against Al-Qaeda", U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, April 9, 2008
• "State Department Outreach with Islamist Groups," U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, July 31, 2008

See also

• Jarret Brachman
• Rita Katz
• Evan Kohlmann

Further reading

• Emerson, Steven. How I made 'Jihad in America' and lived to tell about it", February 26, 2002
• Mintz, John, "The Man Who Gives Terrorism A Name" The Washington Post, November 14, 2001

External links

• Emerson's official website
• Investigative Project on Terrorism website
• Emerson profile, the International Analyst Network
• Template:Worldcat id
• Counter Terrorism blog, for which Emerson is a contributing expert
• Krantz, Matt, "Talk Today; Interact with People in the News; The bin Laden terror network: Steven Emerson", January 21, 2005, accessed January 20, 2010