August 2008 sees the publication of issue two of this excellent new journal, with extensive involvement by Naspir members:

Symposium: Critical Terrorism Studies: Foundations, Issues, Challenges
Editors' Introduction: negotiating stormy waters
Authors: Marie Breen Smyth;  Jeroen Gunning;  Richard Jackson;  George Kassimeris; Piers Robinson
The elephant in the room: a response to John Horganand Michael J. Boyle
Author: Ruth Blakeley
Terrorism and taboo: an anthropological perspective on political violence against civilians
Author: Jeffrey Sluka
Problems with the critical studies approach to the study of terrorism
Authors: Leonard Weinberg; William Eubank
Critical terrorism studies: an activist scholar perspective
Author: Eric Herring
Articles
Visualising violence: legitimacy and authority in the 'war on terror'
Author: Laura J. Shepherd 
Screening terror: Hollywood, the United States and the construction of danger
Author: Klaus Dodds
Times of terror: writing temporality into the War on Terror
Author: Lee Jarvis  
War and peace: negotiating meaning in Islam
Author: Robert P. Barnidge Jr
Research Note
Terrorists, scholars and ordinary people: confronting terrorism studies with field experiences
Author: Harmonie Toros
Conversations in Critical Studies on Terrorism
Counter-terrorism and communities: an interview with Robert Lambert
Author: Richard Jackson

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David Barstow
The New York Times
20 April 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure. The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

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Naspir's statement of purpose says: 'As what we choose to study and how we choose to study it are unavoidably political, the traditional academic pretence of neutrality is unsustainable. Scholarly standards are enhanced by explicit acknowledgement of that situation and by accounting for how one deals with it. Scholarship is a form of activism, but there is more to activism than scholarship.'

This is capable of misinterpretation or misrepresentation as meaning that scholarly standards do not exist and that activist scholars can and should distort and select deliberately to achieve political goals. That would be a travesty, and has played no part in Naspir's work. I elaborated on what I see as the relationships between activism on the one hand and scholarship and teaching on the other in an article in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35:1 (2006), 105-119. The article included the following statement:

'No one is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice'

The Guardian, 11 April 2008

Eighteen months after the UK Serious Fraud Office abandoned the BAE inquiry, two high court judges yesterday ruled the decision unlawful in a judgment that was stinging in its criticism of both the SFO and the British government for caving in to pressure from Saudi Arabia. The legal action was brought by the anti-bribery pressure group Corner House Research and the Campaign Against Arms Trade. Here are edited extracts from the summary judgment published yesterday:

"We fear for the reputation of the administration of justice if it can be perverted by a threat. How does it look if, on the one occasion in recent memory a threat is made to the administration of justice, the law buckles?"

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Challenges and Dilemmas of the Public Intellectual       
By Walden Bello

(Excerpts from acceptance speech at the Outstanding Public Scholar Award Panel, International Studies Association, 49th Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, March 27, 2008. Bello was the second recipient of the award, the first being Dr. Susan George in 2007. Members of the panel honoring Bello were George; Dr. Richard Falk, professor emeritus at Princeton University; Dr. Robin Broad, professor at American University, and Naspir member Dr.Barry Gills, professor at the University of Newcastle.)
 
... there are three key lessons I have learned:
- The first is that truths only become true through action.
- The second is that to get at the truth, one must sometimes resort to unorthodox research methods.
- And the third is that one must accept that there is an inevitable and permanent tension between theory and practice, between thought and action, between truth and power, and thinking that this tension can be eliminated is one of the worst illusions a public intellectual can fall into.

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