Yossef Bodansky

His published works "Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror" and "The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism" also do not contain any footnotes and documentation. For this reason it is difficult to separate facts from fiction, rumor and opinion in his works. For example, in Chechen Jihad he states that the November 12th, 2001 crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York was caused by a "Canadian terrorist". No authoritative citation for this claim is given.

Norman Cigar, author, contributor, current Research Fellow at the Marine Corps University, Quantico, VA, recent retiree from position of Director of Regional Studies and the Minerva Research Chair, outlined Bodansky's professional record and advisory engagements with the lawmakers, in his letter to Rep. Jim Saxton as one of principle "hostility to Islam and Muslims everywhere, who are seen to be part of a unified international conspiracy and a threat to everyone else, and he seems to feel that Serb nationalists share that outlook." Like Sells, Cigar also noted that Bodansky was in close relation with Milošević's Serbian lobby group, Serbian Unity Congress, where he was featured speaker at the group's fund raiser event in Detroit in 1996. In this context Bodansky has written on the former Yugoslavia and interpreted subsequent wars as Muslim unified international conspiracy, which Bosnians were allegedly part of, to expand into Europe. Bodansky also hyped a "mujahedin" threat by claiming that "up to 20,000" mujahedin were in Bosnia, overestimating their number by more than 10 to 1, according to US government. Cigar points that Bodansky's views "are extreme and not shared by mainstream anlaysts", regardless of some Senator's staffer, to whom Cigar spoke back in 1996, carried the Bodansky Task Force report around. In an interview with Belgrade based media on 14 May 1998, Bodansky exerted view in which he blamed Arabs, who allegedly exploited Tito's 1960s and 1970s pro-Arab policy, for Yugoslavia and Christian Serbs demise, in which Bosnian Muslims hid their agenda of "long-prepared operation for an Islamic jihad against the Christians" behind the multiethnic facade.

The work of the Congressional Task Force (which had been established in 1981) involved staff producing what they described as "ground truth" by "repeated visits to the areas they were studying and [developing] face-to-face relationships with their sources" and actively participated in supporting them. According to a compilation of Task Force reports published in 2007, "Task Force staff members went into Afghanistan and rode with the mujahideen as they fought against the Soviets. They helped the fighters secure the weapons and humanitarian aid they needed and evacuate the seriously wounded." The Task Force also contributed to related legislation, including authoring "key parts of the Diplomatic Security and Anti-Terrorism Act" (1986), allowing the FBI to investigate outside the US. Task Force reports did not generally divulge sourcing in public reports, and fully referenced versions of their reports were released only to the Task Force chairmen, and not even to other committee members.

Yossef Bodansky (May 1, 1954 – December 5, 2021) was an Israeli-American political scientist who served as Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the US House of Representatives from 1988 to 2004. He was also Director of Research of the International Strategic Studies Association and has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In the 1980s, he served as a senior consultant for the Department of Defense and the Department of State.