Right Web

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The Manhattan-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) says on its website that it "monitors and exposes the enemies of freedom and their modus operandi, and explores pragmatic ways to counteract their methods." Its objective, says ACD, is to "supplement government efforts to defend democratic institutions from the global threat of radical Islam and terrorism." The ACD was founded in 2003 by Rachel Ehrenfeld and includes the Center for the Study of Corruption and the Rule of Law (CSC), which Ehrenfeld founded in 2001. Ehrenfeld is a controversial writer associated with a number of neoconservative outfits like the American Enterprise Institute. Her work, which often focuses on terrorism financing, has been criticized for having an overt bias toward U.S. and Israeli interests and for being sensationalist (see, for example, Michael Massing Replies to Rachel Ehrenfeld, "Evil Money," New York Review of Books, March 4, 1993).

The working assumption that underlies ACD's analysis of terrorism is that private and public corruption permits international organized crime to flourish, providing a nesting place for terrorist networks. The ACD focuses largely on Islamic terrorism. One of the ACD's projects on "Economic Jihad" is described as "an ongoing effort to expose the radical Muslim Economic and Financial jihad against the United States and the West." The project's work is published on the ACD website and on the "Terror Finance blog," which is edited by ACD fellow Ilan Weinglass.

The ACD's "Foreign Influence Peddling" project "focuses on the investments of radical Muslim states, organizations, and individuals in U.S. and other Western media; academia; PR; lobbying; and vital strategic industries—such as high tech, banking, and basic infrastructure." The center's third project, Anti-Corruption, seems to be in the proposal stages. Its plan offers a "new method to fight political corruption," through an ACD "Integrity Index," which the center describes as "different from and complementary to anti-corruption/good governance programs such as the World Bank's diagnostic surveys, the OECD's monitoring groups, Freedom House's "Nations in Transition" survey, and others. The ACD focuses on the implementation mechanisms of existing legislation regarding anti-terrorism legislation, public integrity, good governance, procurement, liberalization and privatization, and laws governing the financial sector, as referred to in the ACD Integrity Index."

After the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict, ACD Director Ehrenfeld appeared on Fox News to make the case that Hezbollah had South American coffers. "A lot of money is finding its way from Hezbollah in the tri-border region [where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet] in Latin America and also in Panama to Lebanon—to Hezbollah in Lebanon," Ehrenfeld said (August 6, 2006).

Ehrenfeld has long argued that Islamic radicals and South American leftist terrorists have close working relations, including in her 1992 book Evil Money. When challenged to prove her claims, however, Ehrenfeld has said that she can't reveal her sources because they are classified, as Michael Massing pointed out in a review of the book for the New York Review of Books and a subsequent exchange of letters. He wrote: "In Evil Money, Ms. Ehrenfeld makes a series of sensational claims—that Sierra Leone has become 'an international terrorist center,' that BCCI 'cemented the symbiotic relationship between Peruvian terrorists and drug traffickers,' that Abu Nidal trained Shining Path members in urban guerrilla warfare, helping to set up a 'dormant terrorist infrastructure' in the United States. In my review, I noted how little evidence Ms. Ehrenfeld offered to back up these claims. She does no better in her letter, preferring to take cover behind the claim of confidentiality" (Michael Massing Replies to Rachel Ehrenfeld, "Evil Money," New York Review of Books, March 4, 1993).

Ehrenfeld has authored two other books related to the international funding of terrorism: Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It (2003) and Narcoterrorism (1990). She is a member of the third reincarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger and has a doctorate in criminology from the Hebrew University School of Law. Born in Israel, Ehrenfeld is a U.S. citizen. She serves on the International Advisory Council of the Intelligence Summit, which provides a forum for intelligence and military officials interested in "fighting terrorism" and is a program of the Intelligence and Homeland Education Center (IHEC), which before 9/11 was known as the International Holocaust Education Center. Two other Intelligence Summit advisory board members also sit on ACD's Advisory Board—Lt. Gen. (ret.) Tom McInerney and Maj. Gen. (ret.) Paul Vallely. McInerney is the advisory council chairman of the Iran Policy Committee (IPC) and a military commentator for Fox News; Vallely is IPC military committee cochairman and Center for Security Policy committee member.

Ehrenfeld was a speaker at the March 2007 Intelligence Summit Conference. Her two presentations were entitled "How Terrorism is Financed" and "The Muslim Brotherhood," and her co-presenter for both occasions was retired Col. Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, an ACD fellow.

From 1998 to 2002, Halevi directed the Palestinian Research Branch in the Intelligence Unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), after which he became head of the information branch in the IDF Spokesperson Unit, according to his ACD bio. He then moved over to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he was senior adviser for policy planning. In addition to being an ACD fellow, Halevi serves as director of research at the Orient Research Group and is a board member of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Halevi also consults on Middle East and Arab affairs for the Wall Street Journal.

Other ACD fellows include Alyssa A. Lappen, a freelance journalist who has written for the neoconservative FrontPageMag.com, and Marc Shulman, "who prepared the initial research for the trillion dollar lawsuit against the Saudi royal family on behalf of the families of 9/11 victims" and is a "specialist in Islamist financing and investments." Other members of ACD's advisory board include neoconservative strategists Richard Perle, William Van Cleave, and James Woolsey, Ana Palacio, (former Spanish foreign minister), Dmitry Radyshevsky (CEO of the Jerusalem Summit), Nina Rosenwald (chair of the Middle East Media Research Institute and vice president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), Leonard Shaykin, (chairman/CEO of Tapestry Pharmaceuticals), and Harvey Stone (managing partner of Schlam Stone & Dolan).

The ACD links to various other institutes, organizations, and sites from its website, including the Ariel Center for Policy Research, the Center for Advanced Middle East Studies, the Islam Quest Blog, and One Jerusalem.

Funding. The ACD provides little information about its sources of funding on its website, and the organization does not turn up on searches of publicly available databases that track funding of 501(c)(3) organizations, like Guidestar.org. Clicking on the "make a donation" button on ACD's website directs visitors to a PayPal site for Ehrenfeld's related organization, the Center for the Study of Corruption. According to CSC's 2005 Form 990, which is available from Guidestar.org, it received some $170,000 in "direct public support" that year, although it had a net operating budget of $200,000.