Our Team
The ACD/EWI team specializes in economic warfare, purposeful interference in civilian infrastructure, including the financial markets, transnational criminal and terrorist organizations and their links, and more. We provide knowledge based analysis and risk assessment in articles, white papers, Blog posts special briefings and scenario/war gaming. We identify methods and strategies used by radical regimes and groups and criminal gangs to subvert Western political and economic systems.
Founder & President
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is Founder and President of the New York-based American Center for Democracy, and the Economic Warfare Institute.
Dr. Ehrenfeld’s work encompasses economic warfare, including cyber-warfare, Weapons of Mass Effect (WME), corruption, lawfare, terrorist financing, the links between global networks of criminal and terrorist groups, disinformation, corruption and jihadist movements. Dr. Ehrenfeld focuses on recognizing patterns of seemingly unrelated foreign and domestic events as they link to threaten the U.S. political, social. economic and financial systems and other issues related to its national security. She lectured in and organized international conferences/workshops and specialized briefings and war gaming in the U.S. and elsewhere. She testified on terrorist financing before Congressional Committees, the Canadian and European Parliaments, and provided evidence to the British Parliament, and consulted the governments of Bulgaria and Indonesia on good governance. She also consulted U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Justice, State, Treasury and Homeland Security, and provided expert testimony in U.S. courts.
Dr. Ehrenfeld has initiated the anti-libel tourism legislations in the United States. “Rachel’s Law” passed in 2008 unanimously in New York State (New York Libel Terrorism Protection Act 2008). At least 10 other U.S. states had passed similar legislation.
The “Speech Act“, Public Law 111-223: Securing and Protecting our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act, passed unanimously by the U.S. Congress ans signed into law by President Obama in 2010.
The laws protect all American journalists, publishers, and writers in print and on the Internet in the U.S. from the enforcement of foreign libel judgments.
Dr. Ehrenfeld was a visiting scholar at Columbia University Institute of War and Peace Studies, a research scholar at the New York University School of Law, a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Jesus College at Cambridge University. She has a Ph.D. in Criminology from the Hebrew University School of Law. Dr. Ehrenfeld is the recipient of the American Jewish Historical Society’s “Public Service Award” (2008), and the “Sappho Award” from the Free Press Society (2011).
Dr. Ehrenfeld has authored academic and policy papers and more than one thousand articles. Her books include FUNDING EVIL: How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop Ii (2011) • EVIL MONEY (HarperCollins, 1992,1994). Her latest book project is on The Economic Warfare against the U.S. from Within and Without. • NARCOTERRORISM (Basic Books, 1990, 1992).
ACD & EWI FELLOWS
J. Millard Burr – Senior Fellow, worked for many years in the Department of State. In his last assignment, he served as logistics advisor for the Operation Lifeline Sudan program, U.S. Agency for International Development. Dr. Burr has a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Oregon, and he has served as Special Assistant to The Geographer, U. S. Department of State. In a career that spanned more than three decades, he had numerous assignments in Latin America, the Middle-East, and Asia. With collaborator Dr. Robert O. Collins, he is the author of four books dealing with the emergence of Islamist movements. The Terrorist Internationale is the capstone of that work.
Dr. Stephen Bryen – is the author of the new book, “Technology Security and National Power: Winners and Losers” (Transaction Publishers). Dr. Stephen Bryen has 40 years of leadership in government and industry. He has served as a senior staff director of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Trade Security Policy, as the founder and first director of the Defense Technology Security Administration, as the President of Delta Tech Inc., as the President of Finmeccanica North America, and as a Commissioner of the U.S. China Security Review Commission. Dr. Bryen’s expertise and high effectiveness has earned him the highest civilian awards of the U.S. Defense Department on two occasions and established him as a proven government, civic and business leader in Washington D.C. and internationally. Dr. Bryen is regarded as a thought leader on technology security policy.
Thomas L. Cranmer has been writing political, economic and technical analyses for decades. For 30 years he was a planner and a treasurer with Mobil Oil, negotiating projects in a wide range of countries, especially in almost all Muslim-counties. He was Mobil’s representative to the nuclear energy and electrical industries. Part of his negotiating time was spent in Europe and South America, and he wrote extensively about the risks of doing business in Venezuela, Brazil and other Latin American countries. He was VP of the U.S. Business Council for SE Europe. While with the State Department in India before Mobil, he studied Arabic, Farsi (Persian) and Urdu in the Imam’s office in the largest mosque in India. His regular duty was to develop and finance projects. He also has studied French, Spanish and Portuguese. Oxford Press (India) published his book that was the first to analyze the economics of farming and the methods of food distribution system in India, and the success of free-enterprise in agriculture.
After Mobil, he was a manager of Iraqi oil, gas, and electricity reconstruction operations, based in Baghdad for the State Department. He was also a business consultant in a wide range of countries, including Outer Mongolia and Eastern Europe. He identified cases of Russian money laundering and Chinese violations of trade agreements. Mr.Cranmer is an editor and writer for the Fairfax Free Citizen in Virginia. He covers foreign, national and local issues, especially topics relating to threats from Islamic fascism, electricity interruption, and climate change fanatics. He studied geology, engineering, and political science at Yale and has an MBA in finance and economics from Columbia. His security clearance is Top Secret.
Ganesh Sahathevan, a Fellow at the ACD’s Economic Warfare Institute, is a researcher and reporter from Sydney, Australia who focuses on South East Asian business, economic and politics. This work has led him to research into structures that support terrorist and jihadist activities in the region,and their links to similar structures in other parts of the world. Ganesh investigated financial mismanagement in Malaysia prior to the financial crisis in the 1990s. He obtained the degrees Bachelor of Economics (majoring in Accounting), and LLB from Monash University, and LLM from the University of Sydney.
Col. Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, IDF (Ret.), is the director of research in the Orient Research Group Ltd. and a Board member of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs headed by Dr. Dore Gold. Mr. Halevi consults on Middle-East and Arab affairs to the Wall Street Journal and is a special consultant to the Linde vs. Arab Bank lawsuit.
• 1998 – 2002 Head of the Palestinian Research Branch in the IDF Intelligence Unit. • 2002 – 2003 Head of the Information Branch in the IDF Spokesperson Unit. • 2003 – 2004 Senior Advisor for policy planning in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Mr. Halevi has written many articles for both Hebrew and English publications including “Al-Qaeda’s Intellectual Legacy: New Radical Islamic Thinking Justifying the Genocide of Infidels”.
William B. Scott serves as a flight-testing and aerospace business development consultant and is currently writing fiction and nonfiction books.
He retired as the Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, based in Colorado Springs, CO. In 22 years with Aviation Week, he also served as Senior National Editor in Washington, and in Avionics and Senior Engineering Editor positions in Los Angeles. He focused primarily on advanced aerospace and weapons technology, business, flight-testing and military operations, wrote more than 2,500 stories for the magazine, and received 17 editorial awards. He is a coauthor of three books: “Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III,” its sequel, “Counterspace: The Next Hours of World War III,” and “Inside the Stealth Bomber: The B-2 Story.” During a nine-year Air Force career, Scott served as aircrew on classified nuclear sampling missions; an electronics engineering officer at the National Security Agency, working space communication security programs; and an instrumentation and flight test engineer. He was also a civilian FTE/program manager and proposal group manager for three aerospace companies: General Dynamics (F-16 Full Scale Development program), Falcon Jet Corp. (Coast Guard HU-25A development and certification), and Tracor Flight Systems Inc. (Canadair Challenger development and certification, plus numerous fighter, transport and helicopter test programs).
Scott is a six-time Royal Aeronautical Society “Journalist of the Year” finalist. He won the Society’s 1998 Lockheed Martin Award for the “Best Defense Submission,” and received both the 2006 and 2007 Messier-Dowty awards for “Best Airshow Submission.” He also was part of an Aviation Week team that won a 2004 Neal Award for its coverage of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy. A Neal award is the business-to-business magazine equivalent of a newspaper Pulitzer Prize.
Scott is a Flight Test Engineer (FTE) graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (Masters equivalent) and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from California State University-Sacramento.
Leslie Lebl is principal at Lebl Associates and a writer,a lecturer, and consultant on political, security and military matters. She is a former Foreign Service Officer with particular expertise in European political, defense and counter-terrorism issues, radical Islam in Europe, Balkan peacekeeping, and Russian politics and economy. Her publications have appeared in the Policy Analysis series of the Cato Institute, Policy Review, Orbis, City Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Hartford Courant, EuroFuture and Atlantic Perspective. A monograph, Advancing U.S. Interests with the European Union, was published by the Atlantic Council of the United States.
A graduate of Swarthmore College (B.A. in history, 1972), Ms. Lebl received an M.A. in foreign affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1979.
Kim Johnson, a Fellow at ACD, is the author, educator and speaker on US-Israel Relations and Politics; as well as an authority in Jewish Christian relations. Kim graduated magna cum laude from Florida Atlantic University and received her Masters degree from Haifa University, Israel in National Security studies. She is currently working on preliminary PhD thesis while writing two new books, “Zionism Embattled” and “The Global End Game.” She also hosts a Facebook and YouTube broadcast OurVoice, by the people for the people that examines current issues challenging the United States and Israel. Kim resides in Florida and Israel.
