Obama Gets Weekly Tutorials in Terrorism
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For Obama, the meetings are an opportunity not only to get updates on threats and the latest prevention tactics, several participants said, but also for discussing broader anti-terrorism strategies. The president often raises questions about what causes someone to become a terrorist. That topic was especially relevant this week, with the news that a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Pakistan, with no previous history of extremist tendencies, was implicated in the Times Square incident.
Even before this week, Obama had brought up the subject of radicalization on several occasions, regular participants in the meetings said, in part because it is a complex problem that falls under no single agency's jurisdiction. "We don't have a Department to Dry Up Pools of Candidates Who Want to Kill Themselves," one senior administration official said.
Eight administration officials who have attended the meetings agreed to describe them on the condition of anonymity.
Referred to by staff members during the Bush years as "Terror Tuesdays," the meetings began as an outgrowth of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Once a daily occurrence, they originally lasted 20 to 30 minutes and were added on at the end of the presidential daily briefing -- the security update that the president receives from the CIA each morning -- and focused largely on threats and incidents.
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