Comment posted by Stephen Zunes:

This article of Mowatt's has long been discredited, so it's surprising to see it posted again.

Regarding the fanciful charges regarding Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution, these were refuted some time ago. Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Ortiz, Stephen Shalom, Frida Berrigan, David Swanson, Dan Ellsberg, and scores of other anti-imperialist scholars and activists have come to Sharp and his institute's defense. See: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5327

On some of the other points raised in this artcle:

Neither Ackerman nor ICNC has ever worked with Lawrence Livermore Labs to develop communications technologies. They had one open seminar with a UC-Berkeley institute associated with the labs to talk about the use of technology in recent nonviolent conflicts; that was it.

Like many Americans of his age, ICNC director Jack DuVall enlisted in a non-combat unit in the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s to avoid duty in Vietnam, a war he strenuously opposed. He quit two years later, as soon as he could. Referring to him as a “former air force officer” hardly defines his career.

Duvall does not and never did "direct" the Arlington Institute. He’s never had anything to do with former CIA director James Woolsey other than overlap on the board for no more than two meetings at which they never spoke. He served briefly on the board at the request of his friend John Petersen, whom he met through their involvement in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the 1980s.

DuVall's comment about Karl Rove was a derisive comment about the inability of the United States to intervene on behalf of “democracy-promotion,” not an endorsement of the idea. Similarly, Ackerman’s article in the National Catholic Reporter was arguing against U.S. military intervention.

Peter Ackerman is not a “coup expert.” If you read any of his books and articles, it’s clear he doesn’t know anything about coups or other top-down methods of regime change. His expertise is in popular grassroots unarmed insurrections. Neither he not DuVall or anybody associated with ICNC are “coup plotters” by any stretch of the imagination.

I know this because I am an anti-imperialist academic who opposed U.S. intervention in all forms and has written extensively about it. See: www.stephenzunes.org I also chair ICNC's comittee of academic advisors, along with other radical scholars. It makes it difficult to challenge real manifestations of U.S. intervention as long as people manufacture phony ones.