My number of posts show how impressed I am by Cori Dauber. Here is her CV:
Cori Dauber is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies (and of Peace, War, and Defense) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also a Research Fellow at the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. Her area of scholarship is the way the media represents war and the military. She has published in journals such as Armed Forces and Society, Strategic Studies, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and has presented her work in a variety of public and academic forums, particularly since September 11th.
ANOTHER MYTH BITES THE DUST
By Cori Dauber - Ranting Profs
One of the arguments made against the war in Iraq was that creating divisions with our Western allies would hurt efforts to coordinate counterterrorism policy. But that was never going to happen. The truth of the matter is that the Europeans always understood, at the level of the intelligence guy, the counterterrorism guy, that this war was real. For them it was real before it was real for us. And however testy relations got at the upper levels of government, that never interrupted what was going on cop-to-cop because those guys couldn't afford to let it.
And in the wake of Madrid, it appears, that is even more the case: it looks like Madrid shook them. Badly.
Europe's new counterterrorism coordinator, Gijs de Vries, is scheduled to meet with Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, in Washington on Monday to assure the United States that Europe is toughening its counterterrorism practices and to ask for closer cooperation between the United States and the European Union in combating terrorists.
Mr. de Vries's job was created by European Union leaders in the wake of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people and signaled that Europe was a target for the kind of large attacks that have hit countries from the United States to Indonesia. His job is to accelerate a range of European Union-level counterterrorism initiatives meant to consolidate intelligence and integrate responses to threats to the union's 25 members.
When you add Madrid to the constant drumbeat of events over the past two years, clearly the Europeans have decided it's time to shake up the way they day do business.
Europe has intensified its focus as activity by Islamic militants here has increased, spreading anxiety that another major attack on a European Union member is in the works. On Sunday, the Italian antiterrorist police arrested five men suspected of membership in a militant Islamic group on suspicion of recruiting suicide bombers to attack in Iraq.
Italian officials told Italy's Ansa news agency that the men, an Algerian cleric and four Tunisians, were detained in a yearlong investigation into what they suspect are terrorist cells in Genoa, Italy. Italian officials said 71 people were arrested last year on suspicion of having links to international terrorist groups. |
