1.22.2009

Chipping away at the Bush legacy

President Obama will close America's torture gulags, according to a New York Times report.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How the Obama Administration handles closing Guantanamo is a major part of how they will address the issue of terrorism as a whole. President Obama and the rest of his Cabinet have serious decisions to make not only confronting the threat of terrorism, but how to communicate the threats to the American public.

Currently, the American Security Project's Senior Fellow Bernard Finel is taking part in an online discussion that is addressing this very issue in a forum hosted by the Cato Institute. I thought you might be interested in the essays that are have been posted. You can read them here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/

Matt Hager
press@americansecurityproject.org

Unknown said...

Thanks for providing the link

One point I wish to make: Addressing risk with respect to terrorism, as the authors at the CATO blog did, is not as vexing as it would have been if they had discussed the risks Americans face because of the economic crisis. The reason for this is a simple one: There is a small probability that any given American would directly suffer or would die because of a terrorist attack; but it is highly likely that any given American would need to endure the effects of the economic crisis, could know that he or she would need to suffer these effects but must manage the situation without clear knowledge of the future apart from knowing a serious crisis exists and will alter his or her life in some way. It is difficult to communicate effectively about something which is known but which is also known to be obscure in its details.

Perhaps the authors will take this up at another time.

Anyway, thanks again.