Pierre Ghazal Bio

Pierre Ghazal is the founder and director of the Rhode Island Center for Mid-East Studies.

Mr Ghazal is a Reserve Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force. He is the Middle East and Arabic resident expert at the National Defense Intelligence College (NDIC)-Executive Program, Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC. Colonel Ghazal is responsible for directing the graduate program on the Middle East and lectures in a variety of other courses including: US National Security Structure & Policy, Counter-terrorism, and International Security in the 21^st Century. Colonel Ghazal is a guest lecturer at Fort Bragg, JFK Special Warfare Center & School, and the US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute.

Colonel Ghazal developed a graduate colloquium on predictive intelligence in 2002. This course uses the case study method to assess the intelligence community’s performance in predicting the terrorist attacks of 2001. Similarly, it conducts a comparative analysis of the predictive capability of the national security think tanks. He crowned his career in 2007 by developing the discipline of Cultural Forensics, a new methodology to derive intelligence from cultural patterns.

Colonel Ghazal was commissioned in the United States Air Force in 1978. He served for six years on active duty as an Intelligence Officer directing the Middle East Orientation Program for the USAF Special Operations School. He joined the Rhode Island Air National Guard in 1987 as the Operations Officer for the 281^st Combat Communications Group, responsible for joint field deployments to the Middle East. In 1990, he served as the senior CENTCOM interrogator during Operation Desert Storm in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. After the liberation of Kuwait, he led the Coalition Forces Document Exploitation (DOCEX) efforts in Kuwait City. Prior to assuming his NDIC duties in 1997, Colonel Ghazal was selected as the first US Air Attaché to Damascus, Syria, eventually, serving in several diplomatic posts in the Middle East. In 2003, Colonel Ghazal advised the MIT Iraq Working Group for DoD. In 2007, he directed the Post-US Iraq Study Group of the Black Sea National Security Program for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Mr Ghazal is a native speaker of Arabic and Aramaic.

EDUCATION:

1972 Baccalaureate Degree in Arabic Literature, Lycee Franco-Arabe, Beirut, Lebanon

1978 Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political Science, University of Rhode Island, RI

1980 Officer Intelligence Course, Armed Forces Air Intelligence School, Lowry AFB, CO

1981 Middle East & North Africa Seminar, Foreign Service Institute, Washington, DC

1982 Master of Science degree in International Relations, Troy State University, FL

1988 Communications-Electronics, USAF Tech Training Center, Keesler AFB, MS

1992 Reserve Military Attaché Program, Defense Attaché School, Washington, DC

1996 Air Command & Staff College, Hanscom Air Force Base Seminar, MA

2000 National Senior Intelligence Course, Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC

2002 US Intelligence Community Officer Program, CIA University, Washington, DC

"If we are not evolving, then we are static. If we are static then we are dead."

- Chris Ghannam

Remembering those brave

professionals who gave their

lives for the safety of others.

INSTRUCTORS INSURED BY

LEECH BRIDGES

"It is not the strongest of the

species that survives, nor the

most intelligent; it is the one that

is most adaptable to change."

- Charles Darwin

Medal of Honor

Recipients