Comparative U.S.-Israeli Homeland Security
Abstract : This report examines the premise that there are lessons from Israeli experience that might enhance the United States' homeland security efforts. The research for this study included a literature review and field interviews with American and Israeli leaders in Washington, D.C., and Israel during the summer of 2005. The report addresses the common and unique threats facing each state and related homeland security issues and policies. It begins with the threats experienced by each nation, examining the respective homeland security organizational structures and ways of preventing attacks and responding to attacks that do occur. The report then compares each country's homeland security program. Where appropriate, personal observations derived from the authors' interviews in each country are included. The final section addresses a series of lessons the United States might consider in its efforts to improve its homeland security, as well as a discussion of where it might not be advantageous or feasible to follow the Israeli model. The United States and Israel each face a number of threats to their homeland -- some shared, some unique to each state. Some threats common to both the United States and Israel include the following: Terrorism and the Global War on Terror, State Aggression by Sovereign Powers, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Trans-Border Issues. The report discusses the organizational structures that the United States and Israel employ to respond to threats, the countries' efforts at preventing terrorist attacks, and comparative efforts to respond to an attack. The research and field interviews conducted by the authors to identify lessons from Israeli experience resulted in the following recommendations: know your adversary, interagency cooperation, tight internal security, profiling, protected spaces, barriers, information sharing, public education, offensive military action, security decision making, compromise and appeasement, and advanced technology.
Terrorism: Section by Section Analysis of the USA PATRIOT Act
Intelligence/Intelligence analysis; Intelligence/Intelligence gathering; Intelligence/Intelligence policy; Law and justice/Civil liberties; Law and justice/Freedom of information; Law and justice/Legislation; Politics and government/Intergovernmental relations; Technology/Surveillance technology; Terrorism and threats/Counterterrorism
On Fascist Ideology
Fascism is a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism and, in the German case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism, in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens as well as its colonial subjects in its search for ideological and political closure. Millions of civilians perished on a global scale during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond. In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a movement and a regime. Emilio Gentile – who, with Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse,2 is the most insightful historian of fascism – presents fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon that was nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Gentile also presents fascism as being typically organized in a militaristic party that had a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology as well as a focus on virility and anti-hedonistic mythical foundations. For Gentile a defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized in a corporativist state endowed with a war-mongering vocation that searches for a politics of national expansion, potency and conquest. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary ideology. Rather, fascism aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.3 The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the time of Italian unification.) Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its place of birth as a modern political ideology was northern Italy, the year was 1919, and its founder was Benito Mussolini. Thus, fascism as a term as well as a political movement was born on the Italian peninsula. Its ideological origins, however, predated its name. The fact that fascism was born as a concept before its explicit birth as a movement is central to any understanding of fascism. The ideology of radical nationalism that made it possible was part of a larger intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment.4 This tradition was both European and, in the Latin American case, “non-European” as well. To be sure, the original ideology behind fascism was born as a reaction to the progressive European revolutions of the long nineteenth century (from the French revolution of 1789 to the American and Latin American revolutions of 1776 and the 1810s). Fascism represented a post-revolutionary attack against equality. The ideology of the anti-Enlightenment is the major root of the longstanding ideological tradition that created fascism. Its branches constituted a reaction against liberal politics and a rejection of democracy. And yet fascism did not oppose the market economy and put forward a corporatist organization that aimed to be functional to capitalist accumulation. Equally important, fascism is a philosophy of political action that ascribes value to absolute violence in the political realm. This ascription was boosted by one radical outcome of the