Northern California based award winning investigative journalist and has an uncanny ability to mine reportable nuggets of graft and corruption out of mountains of government and corporate records Peter Burns' recent pieces included busted breast cancer money in the media also going postal u.s. Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband sells post offices to his friends cheap Peter Byrne has won many awards over the years for his fantastic reporting including one a few years ago from Project Censored on today's program we're going to talk about the anatomy of terror what makes normal people become extremists that will be the foreign element of our conversation but we'll also bring it domestic by talking about the origins of white nationalism Peter Byrne Welcome back to the Project Censored show making So Peter Byrne You've as usual been very busy writing about fascinating things and today we're going to focus on a couple of articles that you did one from summer of 2017 and another very recent both in the New Scientist or New Scientist dot com the one from August 27000 you know you've been writing about this topic for a while this is called Anatomy of terror or roots of terror as it is in the print edition what makes normal people become extremists and then the tagline for this to give listeners an idea where you're going it takes more than religious fanaticism or hatred to make someone take innocent lives but recognize the true roots of ISIS inspired terror and they can be addressed what brought you into writing about this specific topic and again you have a background to as a science writer I was reading The New York Times of all thing which I never subscribed to I always use Tor so I can get it for free and I was reporting on ISIS in Iraq and Syria this is about 2 and a half 3 years ago and I noticed that the character of the that ISIS was controlling tended to flow along the Tigris and Euphrates River and major roadways through which reminded me of a. Network and in network science you talk about how certain nodes are more powerfully connected then than other nodes for example and they're connected by edges which in this case would be the rivers and the roads and I was thinking well since ISIS is obviously such a bunch of bad guys why aren't we like cutting these edges and isolating them and I know the answer so I remembered after 911 I had interviewed this man at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey about terrorist networks I mean named John Arquilla and he had now risen up to be the chair of the Department of Defense analyses a really connected dude in the Pentagon No I kind of stuff so I went down to Monterey and spent a couple days there talking to these people that teach special operations people like seals and Rangers and Green Berets how to hunt terrorists and it turns out that they use complex adaptive systems theory to try and figure out what to do which is basically people it may be used to know it is chaos theory it's attempt to kind of find patterns in any kind of turbulent data stream so that you can make some kinds of predictions on it and what these guys who are really embedded inside the military academic industrial science complex war of terror complex were telling me was we totally messed up the war on terror off from the stake we shouldn't even be attacking ISIS we should not be bombing Mosul it's going to all turn bad and they of course turned out to be correct the name Mosul is completely destroyed so I started looking at it from a science point of view and what I discovered was that there's a whole range of Sciences from neurobiology in epidemiology and psychology and linguistics and physics and chemistry literally almost every science you can think of there's terrorism focus somewhere in academia or in the private sector or in military type organizations and you don't read about this in The New York Times or anywhere by. Inside this huge terrorism studies industry which is just exponentially grown after $911.00 this literally billions of dollars funneled into studying terrorism one way or another you've got 2 kinds of focuses you've got a kind of a linear focus which is like we should they're bad people we should just go kill them which reverberates back to creating more terrorists of course which is provable ISIS was not in Iraq prior to the invasion in 2003 is ISIS is a direct result of the destruction of the Iraqi its social economic infrastructure so this approach is create bad guys get the bad guys create more bad guys and keep throwing money that's a lot of money to be like right now Brown University's study shows that upwards of $60.00 cruelly and dollars which is bigger than a gross national product of the United States has been spent on this war on terror which is the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and all the counterterrorism so-called efforts to go whether including drone strikes and paying scientists others to study the phenomena so what happened to me was I began to see that there was all this scientific analytics around this there wasn't much data because most of the data that is used for these studies remarkably tends to be drawn from English only media sources it turns out that most of the data you know you would think that we have this vast n.s.a. Satellite you know spying infrastructure which we do of course but what that infrastructure is focused on is trying to find quote unquote bad guys and kill him there's no focus whatsoever inside that apparatus on looking at the root causes of what we call terrorism which is actually really a tactic used by insurgencies there's no such thing as a terrorist is no such thing as a terrorist philosophy it's not a strategy it's a tactic that is used from time to time by people that are generally fighting for an invasion is and the repression of local civil rights that's a pretty significant definition that you're giving us here there are officially almost $150.00 definitions of terrorism in the academic watch the contests. So were all of them pretty much invented by institutions that are devoted to fighting terrorism my own personal definition is that it is violence directed against civilians for political purposes which includes of course States but probably 99.9 percent of the definitions in used deliberately excluded States and focus only what they call non-state terrorism as if it's a thing when it's actually just expedient tactic that is used from time to time by people that are generally fighting to redress what they perceive to be grievances you know and generally those grievances are real even though in the academic lexicon they always qualify it by saying perceived grievance because you know nobody really wants to solve this issue of the exponential growth of terrorism since since 911 so back to the database situation you've got all these people who are analyzing incident rate data numbers of attacks based on English only media reports they don't check out the Russian media or the Arab press or anything that's not in English and they build these databases and they confuse insurgent actions with terrorist type attacks and they have no database for counterterrorism there is no database about the numbers of terroristic attacks on civilian populations mounted by the United States and its so-called coalition in Iraq in Afghanistan Somalia and about 60 countries around the world where we have special operations forces now working in fact you quote Martha Crenshaw in your article roots of terror just as we don't even know what success might look like in this war on terror and he likens it to a game of Whack a Mole Yes she says they pop up we had among that had and then we wait for the next one to pop up but what I found was I talked to people like Wayne porter who used to be the Chief of Naval Intelligence for the Middle East and then was the science advisor to the joint cheap. The staff who is really into complexity theory type analyses and in he was saying that if we don't address the root causes of terrorism we're going to end up not only bankrupting the United States economy but we're going to annihilate our democratic values such as they are and I was being told time and time again that the official wind that ISIS is evil and we must root them out is $180.00 degrees wrong that actually we'd be much better off and and this is actually I think proven by what happened in Mosul Iraq leaving a group like ISIS to evolve on its own these horrible beheading public relations stunts that they pulled evil as they are were not their mode of operation public opinion polls actually showed that before and after ISIS was in charge of Mosul they were popular and large segments of the population in fact they didn't seize Mosul in a day it was over a year as they built up a kind of presence and then one day the Iraqi army ran away and they took over so it didn't rate as a journalist I decided that if I was going to write about this I needed to go talk to some people that were in the field and asked my new friends in the military how I could get to Mosul the military itself was not allowing reporters to embed anymore not that I wanted to embed but I wanted to not get killed either and I figured Mosul without an armed guard handy was pilot suicide and I'm not into that but what I did do was I found a young behavioral economist out of Harvard named Vera Mira Nova who happens to be a Russian American and she was embedded with Iraqi special forces in Mosul the so-called golden division which was leading the fight against ISIS in Mosul So I went to northern Iraq to Kurdistan to I flew into or be all and met up with Vera and. We drove to Mosul in January 2017 through numerous checkpoints which she just flashed and pieces of paper she had from the Iraqi military in their letter through and we ended up arriving in Mosul right as the prime minister of Iraq was declaring that Easter Mosul was liberated from ISIS east of the Tigris River as it were the west was the Old City which took another year for ISIS to be driven out of mostly by pulverizing the city and tens of thousands of civilians that live there so I hung out with Vera and these Iraqi soldiers and their Humvee and with their guns and most of them didn't speak English so I used my smartphone so-called news juggle translating we had some pretty hilarious conversations and we had some pretty hilarious meals at one point they asked me if I would like to have Pasha for breakfast and we went to this restaurant in Mosul which is about the only one open at that point and they all were pizzas and they were Mia Pocho which happens to have been cheap brains and intestines stuffed with god knows what and it was a very an appetizing although probably in the Downs would be equally inept ties and you know rocky point of view and I ate it and all these guys were staring I mean they were kind of disappointed they said oh you must be special forces actually wasn't that bad it was kind of tasty the intestines were actually stuff with rice so about 2 days later that suicide bomber went in and blew up the whole restaurant but hanging out with Vero we would go into ISIS houses that had been recently had been in I was Doris's Cardew were either dead or captured and the soldiers were look for intelligence material you know phone numbers things like that because they want to be able to track more people down and kill them Vera was looking for anthropological stuff you know we were gathering up food wrappers. Turns out to ISIS likes Johnny Walker Red a whole lot and they smoked Marlboros. We also found diaries that Russian women who had married ISIS fighters that kept that were actually quite moving and one of them in particular this woman had written a letter to her husband who was in the Isis front line talking about how they were going to meet in heaven after they were martyred and then she scrawled the recipe type of cake that can only be made with a special kind of milk that you can get in Russia and was hoping that she could find some in and out of Mosul you know with a terrorist dream of comfort food to turns out at any rate all sorts of interesting if a political stuff with was gathered and after that I left and got back into the United States just in time to see all the demonstrators in San Francisco International Airport protesting tromped telling the Iraq is that they could no longer come here and you know the Muslim countries were banned from America and stuff like that actually that started when I was in the refugee camps interviewing people or outside of Mosul and they were really like horrified that we would destroy their country and then tell them they couldn't come here to escape and there's already been 5 plus 1000000 refugees coming out of Iraq Yeah and there was like a you know close to a 1000000 coming out of the Mosul area there are still living in these horrible refugee camps you know partially run by the u.n. Partially run by the family that owns Kurdistan and a lot of them can't go back to Mosul one family that I interviewed in particular ISIS had come to their house and they said we're going to live in your house you can live on the top floor we're going to live in the bottom floor and you'd think I was a Walter you have to weld stuff for us like prison bars and things like that metal plate for suicide vehicles and the guy did he had 3 young kids right which didn't mean that he was a geological in tune with them but during the battle he managed to escape and then it up in this camp to my knowledge he's still there but they can't go back because his neighbors thinks that he's an ISIS person and when you people think you're a nice person and those type circumstances generally some kind of visual any. Terrorism is executed upon you so I wrote this article the roots of terror the United Way of terror New Scientist New Scientist actually sent me to Mosul to do this there are a wonderful organization based in the United Kingdom and they have an American staff as well paying you to do actual investigative journalism on the ground where there are no other reporters national There were corporate media I mean it's just in New York Times photographer isn't and people like that they tend to be freelancers and stringers there was some people from the mainstream media they were doing some pretty good stuff in fact I had my little video camera with me and I sold a bunch of clips to Fox news of all people and I remember that that Fox News was one of the places that had published something others didn't bite that's funny because they're below is actually full of all sorts of freelance journalists you know and the trick is to get to the front line so I happen to be in a great position because Vera was so thoroughly embedded and had always documents that we could get through all these checkpoints but a lot of reporters you know little freelancers that were selling their wares for pittances to c.n.n. Or whatever were just flocking around dead bodies trying to get the same story you know but nobody at all was looking at the context and at the roots of terror or as I know you know if you look at the stuff that was coming out The New York Times of The New Yorker you know they love to talk about ISIS people throwing gay guys off the towers and had chopping and evil this an evil that nobody talks about why they're doing it you know The New Yorker of this like 20 page article on our trustees but no context whatsoever so that's my goal is to provide context and in this particular case you provide context by gathering data that actually is true and then you analyze it and you can use science to analyze it we're speaking with investigative journalist Peter Byrne We're talking about an article that was published last year in New Scientist New Scientist dot com The article is called roots of terror and we will continue that conversation. With Peter Byrne after this brief musical break stay with us. Welcome back to the Project Censored show I'm your host Mickey huff and studio with Chase ball Mary we're joined today by award winning investigative journalist Peter Byrne We're talking about an article he did last year called roots of terror in a little while we're going to talk about a more recent article that you did in sort of connect things abroad with some of the things may be happening here domestically but let's cut to the chase here literally what are the roots of the terror that you saw when you were there so what is it that the corporate media we're missing I've talked to any number of people in Erbil which is the sister city to Mosul which is it was not captured by says and they would tell me we were happier under Saddam Hussein you came in and you completely destroyed our country and turned it into a wasteland and our economy tanked and we can't even sell oil anymore because your companies came in here and took all these production sharing contracts which were unfair so the roots are social economic the military types that actually do look at root causes will tell you time and time again that the major causes people fighting insurgencies against foreign invasion and people reacting to the repression of civil rights at all local levels local local local So when the United States went in there and installed a Shiite government to take over from the previous Sunni oriented regime of Saddam Hussein the Shiites started to exterminate Sunni's and to make our story short they fought back and. ISIS a gradually emerged from that and completely liquidated the idea of national boundaries that had been instituted after World War one by the 6 pick or agreement and moved into Syria you know saying they were having a caliphate we're not going to abide by these kind of imperialist mandated boundaries anymore and that excite a lot of people not just in the region but obviously in Europe and even in America where something operates of 40000 foreign fighters came there a lot of the foreign fighters were ideologically driven I think that a lot of the people in Iraq in Syria that ended up joining not just ice but on news run a bunch of insurgent groups with Islamicist bent were more looking to have regular income even if it was looted and to escape enemies you know if you're a Sunni and you're being pursued by the Shia you want to join a gang right there's another element too I mean the Crenshaw who I talked to is kind of the 1st person to really study terrorism starting back in the 70s it from a scientific point of view and she's famous for saying that terrorists are rational actors which was a break with the previous conception which was that all terrorists are psychopaths crazy people she was saying that they actually have valid Social economic grievances even if you don't agree with their methods of addressing them which you know it's pretty hard to agree with somebody blowing up a bunch of school kids but the United States does that with bombs all the time anyway right so what's the difference actually I found something that went beyond Crenshaw's analysis which is it was good at the time but the more that the phenomena is studied the more we see from a psychological point of view that even though the organizations themselves might be rational actors they might be launching terrorist attacks against point x. Or point y. Or this mosque or that army unit or that police station for tactical purposes in an insurgency and that's rational kind of military thinking that people that actually blow themselves up or that go on and. Mass murder you know people with bombs and automatic weapons or or even trucks are not like really normal Give me a break killing people isn't like really same thing to do you know you're a terrorist or a counterterrorist or a Navy Seal or an ISIS member you know so I began to think you know what is it really going on here psychologically Now the thing with the Islamize variety of insurgent slash terrorists is that th