Yossef Bodansky (born in Israel) is 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 is 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.
He is also a senior editor for the Defense and Foreign Affairs group of publications and a contributor to the International Military and Defense Encyclopedia and is on the Advisory Council of The Intelligence Summit. Bodansky's numerous articles have been published in Global Affairs, Jane's Defense Weekly, Defense and Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy and other periodicals.
Target America: Terrorism in the U.S. (1993, Shapelsky Publishers Inc.).
Crisis in Korea (1994, Shapelsky Publishers Inc.).
Terror: The Inside Story of The Terrorist Conspiracy in America (1994, Shapelsky Publishers Inc.).
Offensive in the Balkans: The Potential for a Wider War as a Result of Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995, International Media Corp./ISSA). ( Online version)
Some Call It Peace: Waiting for War In the Balkans (1996, International Media Corp./ISSA). ( Online version)
The Man Who Declared War on America (1999, 2001, Random House).
Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument (1999, 2000, ACPR Publications and Tammuz Publishers).
The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism (2002, Random House).
The Secret History of the Iraq War (2004, HarperCollins).
Chechen Jihad: Al Qaeda's Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror (2007, HarperCollins).
Articles and commentary
"Jerusalem in Context," Freeman Center for Strategic Studies Broadcast, June 7, 1995; print copy June 12, 1995 (found archived on internet).
"The Rise Of The Trans-Asian Axis: Is It The Basis Of New Confrontation?" kimsoft.com, 1997.
"Expediting the Return of Salah Al-Din," JINSA Online, June 1, 1998.
His books lack documentation. 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 do not contain footnotes.
Due to a lack of documentation it is difficult to separate facts from rumor and opinion in his book Chechen Jihad.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 event is given in his book.