What if Al Qaeda found this? Credit: The Justified Sinner/Flickr
The New York Post is quivering in fear and outrage over a graduate level course for intelligence analysts that requires students to write a fake terrorism plot, complete with methods of execution, sources of funding, number of operatives needed and the target government’s reaction.
Students, who are training for intelligence and counterterrorism careers, must take into account the “goals, capabilities, tactical profile, targeting pattern and operational area,” the syllabus states — according to the Post‘s harrowing story Monday.
The Post‘s crack investigative team uncovered the covert training of terrorists by obtaining the syllabus of the class offered by NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs.
I know you apologists will say such an exercise is intended to train analysts to know how to think like their adversaries, and be able to understand how to detect and disrupt attacks. But that’s just fancy intellectualizing.
You need only to read the outraged quote from one of the Post’s anonymous sources to see what evil is transpiring here under the tutelage of former Navy criminal investigator Marie-Helen Maras:
“I’m disgusted,” said the source. “What is this, we have our students do the work for the terrorists?”
But we need to do more than keep our students from drawing up plots for terrorists and then e-mailing their homework to them.
We need to rein in Hollywood and put export controls on — or even better — ban terrorist-communications-masquerading-as-entertainment like “Live Free or Die,” “Homeland,” and “24“. We should even consider controls on well-intentioned fare like the “Red Dawn” and “Rambo” movies from the 1980s.
The only way to keep the terrorists in the Dark Ages is to keep them in the dark, even if we have to sacrifice by living there too. Our bright future depends on it.