Malcolm Nance

Malcolm Wrightson Nance (born 1961 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a retired United States Navy senior chief petty officer in naval cyptology and author, scholar and media commentator on international terrorism, intelligence, insurgency and torture.

Nance is an expert in the history, personalities and organization of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL); jihadi radicalization, Islamic extremism in Middle East, Southwest Asian and African terror groups, as well as counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare. He is active in the field of national security policy particularly in anti- and counter-terrorism intelligence, terrorist strategy and tactics, torture and counter-ideology in combating Islamic extremism. In 2014 he became the executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI), a Hudson, New York-based think tank.

Early years

Nance is a graduate of West Catholic Boys High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Military career

A former U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer in Naval Cryptology he says he was involved in numerous counter-terrorism, intelligence and combat operations. He received military decorations and learned Arabic while in the Navy. He became an instructor in wartime and peacetime SERE where he trained Navy and Marine Corps flyers, both pilots and aircrew to survive captivity as prisoner of war.^[1][2] He conceptualized and spearheaded the Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival school (ATAHS), a special survival program designed to train Special Mission Units, Navy SEALS and members of the U.S. Intelligence Community in resisting torture, exploitation and escaping terrorist captivity by al-Qaeda. At ATAHS, he led an al-Qaeda simulation group to expose high risk of capture trainees to the Al Qaeda organization and its abduction and attack tactics.

Post-military career

In early 2001, Nance founded Special Readiness Services International (SRSI) an intelligence support company. On the morning of 9/11, driving to Arlington he witnessed the crash of American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. He acted as a first responder at the helipad crash site where he helped organize the rescue and recovery of victims. Nance served as an intelligence and security contractor in Iraq, Afghanistan, the UAE and North Africa.^[3][4]

Academia and security industry

Between 2005–2007 Nance was a visiting lecturer on counterterrorism in Sydney, Australia at Macquarie University's Centre on Policing, Intelligence and Counter-terrorism (PICT) and at Victoria University of Wellington in Christchurch, New Zealand.^[5] Nance has been a guest lecturer on al-Qaeda and counter-ideology at the Defense Intelligence University and international law enforcement colleges. Nance is a keynote speaker in the security industry on mitigating terrorist strategies and tactics including for the American Society of Industrial Security (ASIS), the Austral-Asian industrial security industry and the International Air Transport Authority (IATA).

Small Wars Journal and torture controversy

In 2007 Nance wrote an article for the counterinsurgency blog Small Wars Journal entitled "Waterboarding is Torture... period." Republished in the Pentagon Early Bird, it set off a firestorm as the first credible description of the torture technique as used in SERE. The article strongly swayed the Pentagon against the use of the waterboard and how its misuse would damage the American honor worldwide. Nance claimed using the torture techniques of America's former enemies dishonors the memory of US servicemembers that died in captivity through torture and that it does not produce credible intelligence.^[1][2] Nance was called to testify before the U.S. Congress about the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques".^[1][2] He told the House Judiciary Committee that:

Journalism and media appearances

Nance is often a guest policy analyst on television frequently for BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Al Jazeera America and radio on BBC World Service, London Broadcasting and WAMC in New York and Western Massachusetts.

Nance was a frequent guest analyst on terrorist strategy on Fox News with Tony Snow, who would later become the Press Secretary of President Bush.^[6] He was featured on numerous international political talk shows including PBS's NewsHour, BBC's Hardtalk and World Have Your Say, Australian Broadcasting's Dateline, German TV's ZDF Frontier 21, TV 5, France 24 and others.

In 2016, Nance urged readers to be skeptical of Podesta emails leaked by WikiLeaks, writing that the documents were "riddled with obvious forgeries" and were black propaganda "not even professionally done"^[7] and arguing that the even if all the emails were authentic, WikiLeaks' excerpts of the emails were posted to Twitter in a way that distorted their meaning.^[8]

Nance's position is consistent with concerns expressed by a bipartisan group of national security experts at the Aspen Institute, who warned that it was possible that Russian state-sponsored hackers, to whom the Podesta email theft was attributed, would "salt the files they release with plausible forgeries" for maximum impact.^[8] Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept, however, harshly criticized Nance's position.^[9] Ultimately, the authenticity of the bulk of the leaked emails is unclear, with most being neither proven authentic nor proven false.^[8]

Select bibliography

Books and edited works

• Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe. Skyhorse Publishing. 2016. ISBN 978-1-510-71184-6. .
• The Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activity. CRC Press. 2013. ISBN 978-1-466-55457-3.  (1st Edition 2004, 2nd Edition 2008, 3rd Edition 2013).
• The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003–2014, Second Edition. CRC Press. 2014. ISBN 978-1-498-70689-6.  (1st Edition 2007,2nd Edition 2014)
• An End to al-Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden's Jihad and Restoring America's Honor. St. Martin's. 2010. ISBN 978-0-312-59249-3. 

Selected journalism and news articles

• "Malcolm Nance Archives"

Selected journal articles

Movies and documentaries

• Dirty Wars
• Torturing Democracy
• Torture in America

References

External links

• "Expert Sheds Light on Waterboarding"