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Confronting global terrorism

Tom Farer is dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, a school whose best-known alumna is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and which was founded by the father of her predecessor, Madeline Albright. Farer’s career has been diverse, and much of it was passed far from academia. He trained an African police force in Karate, wrote about military strategy (Warclouds on the Horn of Africa, and served in a war zone (Somalia ‘93). Farer served in the Defense Department and the State Department when Kissinger was Secretary of State, and was nominated by the Ford White House to the OAS Human Rights Commission. Starting with a series of lectures he delivered in Florence, Dean Farer undertook to formulate a grand strategy for American national security policy with traditional liberal values. The book critiques Bush Administration policies, but it presents an entirely different structure for counterterrorism policies, addressing the core questions surrounding the use of force (including preemptive force), interrogation techniques, the role of human rights law, and what combination of military and police tools can be used most effectively in a war against terrorists. His book Confronting Global Terrorism is just out from Oxford University Press.

Read the Q & A with Scott Horton, as published on Harper's Magazine, here.

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