Roger Cressey

Roger W. Cressey (born August 9, 1965) is a former member of the United States National Security Council staff, where he held the position of Director for Transnational Threats from November 1999 through November 2001. He was until recently the president of the Good Harbor consulting group, and an adjunct Professor of counter-terrorism policy at Georgetown University.^[1] Currently he is a senior vice present at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Education and career

Cressey received his Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1987 and a Master of Arts in security policy studies from George Washington University in 1991.^[2] He has taught a graduate course on U.S. counter-terrorism policy at Georgetown University,^[3] where he is currently an adjunct professor.^[2]

Cressey worked at the Department of Defense, including as Deputy Director for War Plans. From 1991–95, he served in the Department of State, working on Middle East Security issues. He has also served overseas with the U.S. Embassy in Israel and with United Nations peacekeeping missions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.^[3]

He was Chief of Staff to the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board at the White House from November 2001 to September 2002. From November 1999 to November 2001, he was Director for Transnational Threats on the National Security Council staff, where he was responsible for coordination and implementation of US counterterrorism policy. During this period, he managed the U.S. Government's response to the Millennium terror alert, the USS Cole attack, and the September 11th attacks.^[3]

In 2002, Cressey founded the corporate security company Good Harbor Consulting.

An on-air counter-terrorism analyst for NBC News, Cressey has been awarded the State Department's Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards, and the Defense Department's Exceptional Civilian Service Award.

Cressey has been a foreign policy advisor to President Barack Obama, but not exclusively.^[4]

Views on targeted killing

Cressey said that he doesn't like the use of the term assassination to describe targeted killings, because he thinks it can be misleading. He said:

I think you should not have political assassination as a tool, and it's banned under Executive Order 12333. The issue is ... if the United States government makes a decision to go to war, to attack a transnational group, one objective of that decision is to eliminate the leadership. ... We're either going to do it through traditional military means ... or we're going to do it through covert activity. I mean, we're trying to actively hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. We're not trying to assassinate him. We're trying to kill the senior leadership of al-Qaeda ... right now. That is not assassination, in the way that we have discussed assassination in the past ... because we are at war with this entity known as al-Qaeda ... under the U.N. charter, under Article 51 of self-defense, we can attack another nation in the spirit of self-defense, and under international law that is justified as well. So the difference between launching ... trying to kill bin Laden with a Predator Hellfire missile, in the context of war, that is completely different than a political assassination....^[5]

Affiliations

• Good Harbor Consulting, President and Founder
• Liquid Machines, Director
• Council on Foreign Relations, former term member
• Richard Clarke, friend and colleague

Notes

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