The revelation last week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC by President Obama’s principal advisor on counterterrorism, former career CIA official John Brennan, that the administration is dropping its use of the term “war on terrorism” and how it uses the term “jihadist,” has raised concerns on the part of not just a few veteran counterterrorists and Islamic scholars and academicians.

Brennan - a former CIA analyst, Saudi Arabia station chief, the Agency's daily intelligence briefer to the White House in 1994 and 1995, deputy executive director and chief of staff to former DCI George Tenet - stated that the “President’s [new] approach” is “a clear, more precise definition of” the battle against fundamentalist Muslim terrorists.

Brennan announced that the US is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism,” nor is it any longer battling "jihadists" or engaged in a "global war." The only terminology Brennan said the administration is now using is that the US is "at war with Al Qaeda … We are at war with Al Qaeda. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on Al Qaeda's murderous agenda."

This new approach by the Obama administration, however, isn’t much different from the tact that the Bush administration announced the government should assume in a memo that was issued in March of last year.

The memo was prepared by the Extremist Messaging Branch of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in March 2008. Titled, Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication, it deemed the terms “jihadist" and "Mujahedeen” should be verboten. 

Only months earlier, in January 2008, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ report, Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims, discouraged government officials from using any vocabulary about Islam and jihad.

“What terrorists fear most is irrelevance; what they need most is for large numbers of people to rally ro their cause,” stated the DHS report. “There was a consensus that the USG should avoid unintentionally portraying terrorists, who lack moral and religious legitimacy, as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers, or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims. Therefore, the experts counseled caution in using terms such as, ‘jihadist,’ ‘Islamic terrorist,’ ‘Islamist’ and ‘holy warrior’ as grandiose descriptions.”

Continuing, the DHS report stated that, “regarding jihad, even if it is accurate to reference the term (putting aside polemics on its true nature), it may not be strategic because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have, and damages relations with Muslims around the globe … The consensus is that we must carefully avoid giving [Usama] bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders the legitimacy they crave, but do not possess, by characterizing them as religious figures, or in terms that may make them seem to be noble in the eyes of some.”

“In the eyes of the feds, the use of such terminology boosts support for radicals by giving them an air of religious credibility, and turning off moderate Muslims who might otherwise sympathize with our anti-terror cause,” wrote Tawfik Hamid in an op-ed shortly after the memo’s disclosure.

Senior Fellow and Chair for the Study of Islamic Radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, president of Global Movement Against Radical Islam and author of, Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam, Hamid was at one time an Islamist extremist from Egypt who studied under Al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman Al Zawahiri.

[Editor's note: This reporter had the opportunity to talk at length with Hamid, a physician, at an intelligence symposium several years ago. Hamid told HSToday.us at that time that Islamist jihadists are incapable of critical throught because they have been indoctrinated into the extremist fundamentalist Muslim ideology of jihad]

But Brennan said in his speech last week that “how you define a problem shapes how you address it … This is critically important. As many have noted, the President does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism.’ That is because ‘terrorism’ is but a tactic - a means to an end, which in Al Qaeda’s case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate. Confusing ends and means is dangerous, because by focusing on the tactic, we risk floundering among the terrorist trees while missing the growth of the extremist forest. And ultimately, confusing ends and means is self-defeating, because you can never fully defeat a tactic like terrorism any more than you can defeat the tactic of war itself.”

“Likewise, the President does not describe this as a ‘global war,’" Brennan continued. “Yes, Al Qaeda and other terrorists groups operate in many corners of the world and continue to launch attacks in different nations, as we saw most recently in Jakarta. And yes, the United States will confront Al Qaeda aggressively wherever it exists so that it enjoys no safe haven. But describing our efforts as a ‘global war’ only plays into the warped narrative that Al Qaeda propagates. It plays into the misleading and dangerous notion that the US is somehow in conflict with the rest of the world. It risks setting our nation apart from the world, rather than emphasizing the interests we share. And perhaps most dangerously, portraying this as a ‘global' war risks reinforcing the very image that Al Qaeda seeks to project of itself - that it is a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate. And nothing could be further from the truth.

“Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against ‘jihadists,’" Brennan explained in defining the administration’s new terminology for the Islamist terrorist threat.

Brennan said “describing terrorists in this way - using a legitimate term, ‘jihad,’ meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal - risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this perception directly and forcefully in his speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is not and never will be at war with Islam.”

The positions regarding how to describe terrorists – Muslim terrorists in particular – by both the Bush and now the Obama administration, “are evidence to strategic mistakes being made now by the administration at the heart of US defense and national security,” Walid Phares told HSToday.us.

Director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Walid is an Islamic scholar and author of, Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West, and The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy. Phares said in a lengthy interview that “as we read [Brennan’s speech], we realize that the administration is going backward in understanding the threat and explaining it to the public.

Author of the November 2006 Homeland Security Today cover feature, Education versus Jihad, Phares told HSToday.us “they say the doctrine is ‘to safeguard the American people from the transnational challenge that poses one of the greatest threats to our national security -- the scourge of violent extremists who would use terrorism to slaughter Americans abroad and at home.’ What does that mean? Nothing. It is as if they speak in abstract. Which ‘transnational challenge is posing the greatest threat to US national security?’ It is the global jihadist threat, with its two networks, the Salafists and the Khomeinists, not the Nazis, the Soviet Communists or militaristic regimes. Why is the Obama administration regressing into a level way below what most educated Americans understand?”

Phares said “the administration criticizes the narrative of its predecessor and we do as well, but instead they propose something weaker and in some aspects dangerous to US national security. After eight years of confrontation with a world web of jihadists, both Salafists and Khomeinists, on two major battlefields in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in various regions of the world such as Pakistan, Somalia, Indonesia, the Levant, the Maghreb, and as the threat penetrates the West with homegrown cells, the administration's doctrine on the threat understanding is entirely disconnected from reality.