Hi, I thought before we embark on this course together I'd tell you a little about my biography and a bit about my career, so you can get a sense of how I came to be studying and teaching about terrorism and homeland security and why it's important to me. So I grew up in Port Washington, New York, which is a bedroom community of Manhattan. You can see not too far from the World Trade Center site itself. And I consider myself a New Yorker, even though I've spent time in Boston, Washington, and now in North Carolina. So I attended Harvard College starting in 1981. And then after spending a year abroad I went on to study law at Harvard Law School. A year behind Michelle Obama and couple year ahead of Barack Obama but I never came across either of them there. And after finishing my law degree, I went on to be a clerk in the Office of the Solicitor General in the United States Justice Department. And then also clerking for a federal judge out of Philadelphia. But my first real legal job was as a trial attorney in the Department of Justice. And in that capacity, I was representing a variety of different federal agencies. Department of Agriculture, the FBI, the Department of Defense. In variety matters, either they were being sued by a individual or a company, interest group, and somebody was challenging something that the agency was doing a policy, a failure to give over a document, an employment decision. And these cases came up to a federal court, and I represented, the agencies represented their cases in the courts. So I did this for about two and a half years, but then decided that I did like the law, but I wanted to be involved in shaping policy, involved in politics, rather than just trying to defend how other people were implementing the law and programs. So as many young people do, I made the move to Capitol Hill, became a staff person. And the first senator I had the opportunity to work for was Senator Bill Cohen, and I worked on his committee staff, in the Committee on Governmental Affairs. And it's an interesting time because this was 1994, and the Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress for the first time in a number of decades. And Senator Cohen was in the moderate wing of his party and Newt Gingrich was in the ascendency in the House. So the House was passing a lot of new legislation, and it came over to the Senate, where some of it was approved, some of it was rejected, some of it was modified. And being with Senator Cohen during this time was a really fascinating and my first taste of working in both politics and in a legislative system. He decided not to run for reelection in 1996, and so I needed a new job, and I was fortunate to be able to land a position with Senator Joe Biden on the Senate judiciary committee. It's interesting, because I did cross party aisles to do this, and that probably a lot more infrequent today, because of the partisanship. It was still a pretty partisan time then, but less so, and indeed, Senator Cohen and Senator Biden were good friends. So for Senator Biden who of course as you all know, has become the Vice President of the United States. For Senator Biden I handled crime, constitutional law and other issues that came before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And a couple things the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was in front of the Foreign Relations Committee on which Senator Biden sat on as well. So I worked in the Senate until 1998 when in the second Clinton administration, Senator Cohen had retired but he was appointed to become the Secretary of Defense by President Clinton. So I was able to get a position, I was a special counsel to the general counsel of the entire Pentagon. And had the opportunity to work with all different parts of the Pentagon, the different military services, the army, air force, navy, marines, different sub agencies, the defence intelligence agency, the natural security agency, other parts of the Pentagon that make it operate and function. So this was a tremendous opportunity in education for me working with both civilians and other members of the military, lawyers, program operators in this huge endeavour we called Department of Defense. So, it's a tremendous honor and education for me to spend time working in the Pentagon. I think this picture is interesting, because you can see the green space right by the building is the ceremonial grounds for the Pentagon. This is right outside the secretary's office. This side of the building faces east, towards the Potomac River, towards the Washington Monument, of course, the Pentagon is actually in Virginia, not an addition to Columbia. And if you look on the opposite side from where this ceremonial grounds is, you'll see a highway on the right-hand side of the picture. And it's over that highway that the flight that was hijacked after leaving Dulles Airport looped around, came back and hit the Pentagon on its western side. So I worked at the pentagon until 2001. And that was right after the contested election between George W Bush, then the Governor of Texas, and Al Gore, the Vice President. We all know how that turned out and President Bush was inaugurated in January, 2001. There was another interesting election that went on in November, and that was for the Senate seat in Missouri and it affected my career. I'll tell the story quickly as I can, but it was it was an interesting one. Governor Mel Carnahan of Missouri was challenging the incumbent Senator John Ashcroft for the Senate seat in November of 2000. And tragically, four weeks before the election was to take place, an airplane that was being piloted by his son and a good friend of the family in which Governor Carnahan was a passenger on his way to a campaign stop on a rainy night and the plane crashed. All three occupants were killed, a personal tragedy for the Carnahan family of course. But also an electoral quandary, because under Missouri law the governor's name could not be removed from the ballot so close to the election, so his name would stay on the ticket. His wife, widow Jean, announced a couple weeks after that if by chance her husband was still to prevail in this election, which was considered neck and neck at the time of the accident, that she would be willing to accept an appointment for the seat. And the new governor, who had been the lieutenant governor, announced that indeed if she won, excuse me, if the governor won, that he would appoint Jean to the new seat. And that's exactly what happened. The campaign slogan was, Keep the Fire Going, and indeed Governor Carnahan was elected posthumously to the seat. The new governor appointed his wife Jean, to essentially fill the vacancy. And she was seated in the United States Senate in January, 2001. I went on to become her legislative director, which meant that I supervised her staff in providing research assistance, advice in all aspects of her job as senator, which is a great honor and great opportunity. But what made it especially compelling was of course the 9/11 attack, which took place nine months into her term. We'll talk about that a lot more in our next week's lecture, but what happened after 9/11 in terms of being in Congress was that there was a raft of legislative activity. Everything from the authorization of use of military force, which took place the week of the attack. The USA Patriot Act, which changed the powers of our domestic law enforcement intelligence agencies. Aviation Security Act, which created the TSA, which does airport security. And a whole variety of other measures relating to border biosecurity preparedness initiatives, all of which took place in the next 15 months, really, in the United States congress. And as legislative director for Senator Carnahan, I had a ringside seat to both participate in and observe all these legislation going forward and that personal experience has inspired a lot of this course. So following my time in senate when Senator Carnahan lost her bid for re-election 2002. I made another move, and what happened was after the election of 2002, Congress enacted the Homeland Security Act, which created the Department of Homeland Security. That department opened its doors in 2003, that was in the executive branch, but the Congress then needed structures to oversee and due legislation relating to the new department. And so, that's what I did. And I went to this new committee called the Committee on Homeland Security, which is in the House of Representatives, the other chamber, where I had been working. I joined as the Democratic Staff Director, working closely with the majority Republican Committee and committee staff and of course members in doing work to oversee the new department. Helping it to get its feet on the ground. Working on new legislation to deal with Homeland Security programs. And most importantly, doing oversight of the new department's activities. And this was a cover of a report that our committee, staff, and members worked on called America at Risk. And we've had, I put out a whole series of reports that highlighted gaps that we saw in our Homeland Security and made recommendations for new programs that ought to go forward. So I was in this position until 2005 but my family and I decided it was time to do something different. We picked up from Washington, left politics and came to the world of academia. And I was lucky enough to start a new position, first as a visiting professor and then as an associate professor at Duke University at the Sanford School of public policy. And here I teach, including this course, 9/11 and it's aftermath, I do research, writing, and public commentary on these issues that are subject matter of this course. A couple of the details of the things I've been doing here at Duke since I arrived in 2005. First, I'm the director of the Triangle Center on Homeland Security, which is a collaborative endeavor between Duke, our friend UNC Chapel Hill, 12 miles down the road, and RTI International, which is a not for profit reasearch organization in our famous reasearch triangle park in North Carolina. And together we do research, promote education, do public outreach issues, a wide variety of matters relating to Terrorism and Homeland Security. But principally a lot of studies on homegrown terrorism, radicalization, how Muslim-American communities are responding to 9/11 and help prevent terrorism are a couple of the focuses of the Triangle Center. Another big initiative has been the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions, which I work on cooperatively with RTI International. And we do specific social science research projects. To advance the Homeland Security mission. Things relating again to radicalization, cyber security, transportation security, and baggage screening, a variety of things in that area. You can Google and look at the websites for both of these institutions to get a better feel for the types of work that we're doing there. Besides running these research organizations, I've done a lot of writing. The report for the Triangle Center I mentioned before, Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans, which came out in 2010. And describes a lot of the activities that Muslim-American communities had been doing to try to prevent home grown terrorism in the years after 9/11. I also do some punditry written about over 25, 30 op ed columns, some of them the Huffington Post, some in newspapers seen around the United States, and appeared on TV, radio, commenting on public issues. And allow the issues that we've discussed in this course. If you're interested, I don't assign my own writings, but my publications would be available on this link. And you can read them and tell me about what you think about them. So in sum, that's a little bit about my career. I'm really excited about teaching this course, it's the next new exciting thing, I'm going to be doing. And I look forward to interacting with you over the course of the next seven weeks.
