I was just flipping through christs4sale's copy of Nafeez Ahmed's "The War on Truth" and learned about this important history/analysis. The article below provides an excellent overview.
It's also interesting in light of JCIT founder Benjamin Netanyahu's recent comments:
Report: Netanyahu says 9/11 terror attacks good for Israel
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/975574.html
"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."
Whatever did happen to Philip Paull, who wrote his 1982 master's thesis, "International Terrorismâ€: The Propaganda War, that seems to be one of the first records of this analysis?
Also, this looks like a great timeline of documentation:
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:kVAjrKsCCCkJ:...
America Declassified: Chronicling the Official History of US Conflict Dependence
By Brian Bogart
"Fear! Fear!": Birth of the War on Terror
The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism
By Brian Bogart
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID...
Upon taking office in January 1981, Reagan outlined his new foreign policy in a speech by Alexander Haig, which boiled down to: "International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern."[5]
The state of global affairs from the US perspective can be summed up in one statement from a lengthy essay, Constant Conflict, by Major Ralph Peters: "There will be no peace. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy, and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."[8]
A recent example came from the wife of Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, "We're not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We're there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil."[9]
Between July 2 and July 5, 1979, in Nafeez Ahmed's words from The War on Truth, citing Philip Paull's brilliant 1982 thesis on the organized reinvention of international terrorism,
"a group of powerful elites from various countries gathered at an international conference in Jerusalem to promote and exploit the idea of 'international terrorism.' The (Jerusalem) conference (on International Terrorism, or JCIT) established the ideological foundations for the 'war on terror.' JCIT's defining theme was that international terrorism constituted an organized political movement whose ultimate origin was in the Soviet Union. All terrorist groups were ultimately products of, and could be traced back to, this single source, which-according to the JCIT-provided financial, military, and logistical assistance to disparate terrorist movements around the globe. The mortal danger to Western security and democracy posed by the worldwide scope of this international terrorist movement required an appropriate worldwide anti-terrorism offensive, consisting of the mutual coordination of Western military intelligence services."[12]
Importantly, Paull's thesis includes the entire list of the JCIT participants, many of them intimately connected to the 1976 "Team B" assault on National Intelligence Estimates and to CPD. Participants from the United States at this conference, arranged by Benjamin Netanyahu and George Bush Sr., were neoconservative organizers Norman Podhoretz (CPD) and his wife Midge Decter (CPD), Senator John Danforth, Professor Joseph Bishop (CPD), General George Keegan (Team B), Ray Cline (CPD, former CIA deputy director who had assisted with Operation Northwoods, and director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Jack Kemp (CPD), Lane Kirkland (CPD's connection to the AFL-CIO), journalist George Will, nuclear physicist and staunch Cold War hawk Edward Teller (CPD), Richard Pipes (Team B, CPD), Bayard Rustin (CPD's connection to the A. Philip Randolph Institute), Professor Thomas Schelling (RAND), Ben Wattenberg (CPD), Claire Sterling, and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Participants also came from Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany, Canada, Ireland, and the largest contingency was comprised of Israeli military, government, and intelligence service personnel. The bulk of the international representatives not from Israel and the US were media propagandists long connected to covert operations.[15]