Transcript
MR. JAMES B. STEINBERG: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Brookings. It's a great pleasure to have such a large and enthusiastic crowd in our first days back in the September season.
I'm pleased to welcome you here for a very important discussion today on homeland security. We're privileged to have as our principal speaker today Richard Falkenrath who is the special Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Senior Director for Policy and Plans in the Office of Homeland Security. It's obviously an extremely important position and a very timely topic that he's come here to discuss.
We're particularly pleased to have him here because he is the model of what we like to think of ourselves here as being scholars and practitioners. His career is really a model example of that.
He joined the Office of Homeland Security in October 2001, but prior to that he served as the Director for Proliferation Strategy in the National Security Council, a very distinguished body in its own right.
Before joining the Bush Administration he was at the Kennedy School where he was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and he remains on leave from the Kennedy School at this time.
From 1995 to 1998 he was the Executive Director of the Belford Center for Science and International Affairs which is one of the premier centers for the study of international security in the United States.
He has a very distinguished academic background with a suma cum laude degree, undergraduate degree from Occidental College and a PhD from the Department of War Studies at Kings College in London.
Rich is going to begin the study with a presentation about the Administration's policy and some of the issues that we're now facing in the public debate and the debate up in Congress and following that we'll have a panel discussion. I will introduce the panelists after Rich is finished with his talk.
I just want to also announce that this event will be archived on the Brookings web site and we'll be providing streaming audio and video of the event to users who click where indicated on the main Brookings homepage which is "www.brookings.edu", and there will also be a full transcript of the event posted on the Brookings web site shortly after today's talk.
First let me ask you to join me in welcoming Rich Falkenrath.
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