I heard Fran Townshend, the former Homeland Security Advisor to George W. Bush, speak the other night at National Defense University at Ft. McNair.  I was fortunate enough to get an invite through my affiliation with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and their Nuclear Scholars Initiative program.  She gave a solid speech about the continued threat of terrorism and how it’s important for the government to clearly communicate threats to the American people.  People get anxious when they’re kept in the dark and only told bits and pieces of a story, she argued.  She also provided some lessons she learned navigating the sprawling national security bureaucracy both as a civil servant and a high-level political appointee.

I asked her during the Q&A whether she thought it was productive for the administration to describe terrorism as a “man-caused disaster” and refer to Islamic extremism as a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred.”  Some observers think this is purely semantics.  I think it’s important to identify threats in clear and unambiguous terms. Evidently Fran feels the same way.  She called the move by the administration “dangerous” and unproductive.  It got back to her point about keeping the American people informed.