Excerpt
SUMMARY: President Barack Obama tried to reframe America's approach to the war on terror in an address on foreign policy. Jeffrey Brown examines the president's remarks with Pardiss Kebriaei from the Center for Constitutional Rights, former State Department official Harold Koh and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The president used a wide-ranging speech today to try to reframe America's approach to fighting terrorism. In so doing, he tackled some of the most controversial elements of his administration's national security policy.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation and world that we leave to our children.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The president aimed to redefine not just the tactics, but the overall approach to countering terrorists, at the National Defense University in Washington.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror.
What we can do -- what we must do -- is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.
We must define our effort not as a boundless global war on terror, but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.
President Obama's full (59:42) speech
A longer (18:45) historical opinion:
MSNBC 5/23/2013
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