The first part of CATASTROPHIC FAILURE is devoted to Coughlin’s "Red Pill Brief" which, as a recalled Army reserve officer posted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate after the attacks of September 11, 2001, he began presenting in 2002.
“The reference," writes Coughlin, "is to the popular 1999 science fiction movie The Matrix, in which the hero is given the option of taking a red pill that will enable him to see the world as it really is. He is warned, however, that if he takes the pill, he can never return to the computer-generated reality to which he is accustomed, made necessary by the requirement to hide the malevolent nature of the world in which he actually lives.” (p. 66)
Coughlin began in the fall of 2001 by researching authoritative books of Islamic law, and “found they could be mapped, with repeatable precision, to the stated doctrines and information that groups like Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood disclosed about themselves when speaking to each other.”
His work followed the protocols of “traditional threat analysis,” the military intelligence approach into which Coughlin and generations of military personnel before him had been trained.
Classic threat analysis is based on what the enemy says about himself (such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf) and maps that to the enemy’s capabilities and opportunities.
Coughlin’s briefings “easily outperformed competing explanations” — accurately predicting how perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing and Fort Hood massacre would explain why they attacked.
The Red Pill Brief tamed the chaos of politically correct “complexity” by using evidence-based arguments, meticulously documented with original sources.
But the Pentagon fired Coughlin** during the Bush Administration in 2008. His Red Pill Brief-approach was banned by the Obama White House in 2012.
Coughlin relates:
“In October 2011, elements of the American Muslim Brotherhood wrote the White House demanding an embargo or discontinuation of information and materials relating to Islamic-based terrorism — even insisting on firings, ‘re-trainings,’ and ‘purges’ of officers, analysts, special agents and decision makers who created or made such materials available.” (p. 21)
A few months later–
“…the FBI then proceeded to undertake the very purging of documents that the Brotherhood had demanded. The Department of Defense followed shortly thereafter with a Soviet-style purge of individuals along with disciplinary actions and re-education.
Not only did the Secretary of State endorse such curbs on speech, the Assistant Attorney general seemed eager to enforce them. As with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — and through it, our Middle Eastern allies — also seek to embargo all unsanctioned discussions of Islam as a matter of international law.” (p. 22)
Words such as Shariah and Jihad were mandated into oblivion.
And, shockingly, that gag order continues to hold sway over our intelligence community today, with no clear end in sight.
Coughlin believes there is an underlying philosophical reason why the forces of common sense in the U.S. intelligence community were not able to fight back, remove the blindfold, and prevail.
He points to the corrosive postmodern narrative which claims there is no objective truth, and insists on the need to “balance” arguments based on facts, like Coughlin’s, with the emotional perceptions of trendy subject-matter experts and vetted Islamic “moderates.”
Coughlin calls for the U.S. intelligence community to be guided by a “reality-based threat doctrine analysis.”
“The proposed way forward calls for holding all national security leaders and professionals accountable for what they could have known had reasonable due diligence been undertaken to know.” (p. 502)
He argues that ignorance of the exigent Islamist threat, a tragic failure of America leadership at the beginning of the 21st century, constitutes this very dereliction of duty.
Coughlin points out that it is in our power to heal this self-inflicted weakness.
Most of the struggle on the home front battle in the War on Terrorism occurs in the “information battlespace.”
Since “language is the key terrain in information warfare,” the first step is “understanding the enemy and using accurate descriptors.”
This, he writes, “is essential to exposing and countering the enemy’s ‘civilization-jihad’ ‘by our hand.’” (p. 505)
Of course, to implement this step in our country would require a sea change of political will in both political parties and in the military.
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Top reviews from other countries
Riptide
Detailed treatment on the failure to effectively deal with the War on Terror
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2018J. Richard Wakefield
Would be nice if Coughlin can make a point form version of ...
Reviewed in Canada on October 4, 2015ManFriday
A masterpiece, but not for the faint-hearted.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 19, 2016ardin
... too detailed and overly researched but is that a bad thing? Academic level reading
Reviewed in Canada on November 23, 2017
