DoD's Minerva Program: Why Do Pentagon/University Research Programs Conflate Nonviolent Activists With ‘Supporters Of Political Violence’?

This damned good question is posed by The Guardian's Nafeez Ahmed (H/T bobswern at Kos), along with related questions about why nonviolent activists are pigeonholed as "social contagions" and other questions aiming at Pentagon preparedness to beat the shit out of you, me and other nonviolent protesters in the coming conflict they see as both inevitable and violent. To me, it appears that's exactly what the DoD is seeking to justify in the coming decades, and it's paying universities large chunks of your tax money to study and crank out such justifications. Mr. Ahmed posed a version of my subject question to Minerva staffers and received essentially no response:

I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response.

Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.

If you think I am unduly personalizing these programs and their targets, please read carefully:

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

That's hitting pretty close to home, isn't it? (Bolds mine.)

This reminds me a great deal of another era in American history... you got it... that of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Oh, and COINTELPRO. Somewhere, Hoover's shade is grinning at us all.