ATHENS, Ohio -- Daniel Benjamin, a senior counterterrorism official on the National Security Council (NSC) during the President Clinton administration, will give a public lecture at 4:10 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 15, in the Brown House seminar room.

The lecture, "The War on Terror: A Status Report," is sponsored by Ohio University's Contemporary History Institute and is free and open to the public.

Benjamin served on the NSC from 1994 to 2001 where he worked on coordinating U.S. counterterrorism policy, programs and budgets. He was the NSC's director of transitional threats for one year and from 1994 to 1997, worked as special assistant to the president and director for speechwriting.

He co-wrote "The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America" with Steven Simon of the International Center for Strategic Studies. Selected as a "Notable Book of 2002" by The New York Times and the Washington Post, it outlines the rise of Al Qaeda and the Clinton administration's attempts to thwart its threat pre-9/11.

A former foreign correspondent and staff writer for Time, Benjamin has recently been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, New York Review of Books and Survival.

Benjamin is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

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Media Contact: Media Specialist George Mauzy, (740) 597-1794 or mauzy@ohio.edu