Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?