By Joan C. McKinney, director of university communications
CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. - Has America changed since the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001? The worst attack from foreign sources on American soil will be discussed at Campbellsville University Sept. 12.
Campbellsville University's Kentucky Heartland Institute on Public Policy will hold a special event titled “9/11 - Five Years Later” Tuesday, Sept. 12 at 6:30 p,m. in the Little Auditorium.
The public is invited to the free session which will explore what has happened to the world since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with Flight 93 which landed in a field in Pennsylvania.
“Our September 12 forum, sponsored by the Kentucky Heartland Institute on Public Policy, is being held five years following the terrorist attacks that shocked our nation on September 11, 2001. Since that day five years ago, many things in our world have changed dramatically,” said John Chowning, vice president for church and external relations at CU and founder of KHIPP.
“Our nation has found itself engaged in a different type of military conflict. There are those who think that at least some of our basic civil liberties are endangered by certain actions of our government,” he said, “and we've lost a number of young men and women serving in our military in the War on Terror.
“Recently foiled terrorist plots in Great Britain and elsewhere are a stark reminder of the fact that even five years after Sept. 11, we live in a dangerous world.”
Chowning said the university's KHIPP panel is composed of “a very distinguished panel of academicians and public officials at the state and federal levels, involved in homeland security and intelligence, who will be discussing these and related issues.”
“It has been said that our world will never be the same following Sept. 11 - one of our goals is to assess the impact of Sept. 11 five years later and to project those future trends and impacts - both here in the Untied States and internationally.”
Invited guests include: Dr. Harry Mason, adjunct professor at The Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky; Jason Keller, Kentucky Office of Homeland Security;
Andrew H. Cline, director of protective medicine for the University of Louisville's School of Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine and a member of the State Emergency Response Commission; and Max Wise, FBI Lexington Join Terrorism Task Force. Wise is a 1997 graduate of Campbellsville University and son of Donna Wise, women's basketball coach and her husband, George.
Mason came to the Patterson School in 2004. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and the University of Maryland.
Prior to joining the Patterson School faculty, he was a consultant and president of a national security firm since retiring from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1997.
His 35-year federal government career included domestic and overseas positions with the CIA, the U.S. Department of State and as deputy director for Programs and Budget for the Intelligence Community.
His awards include the CIA Intelligence Medal of Merit and the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement.
He specializes in foreign intelligence and homeland security.
Keller serves as the deputy director of external affairs for the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security. In this capacity, Keller is responsible for policy development and oversight of the agency's communications initiatives.
Before joining the state's homeland security office, Keller served as deputy press secretary for Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher and in the same position on the Fletcher/Pence gubernatorial campaign.
Keller is a graduate of Georgetown College where he served as senior class president.
Cline serves as director of protective medicine for the University of Louisville School of Medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine. He is an adjunct faculty member with the Louisiana State University Center for Biomedical Research and Training Center and is serving a two-year term as a member of the Kentucky Emergency Response Commission.
Before coming to the university, Cline completed a gubernatorial appointment as deputy executive director of Homeland Security for the Commonwealth of Kentucky managing the preparedness division within the Office of Homeland Security; responsible for the state's homeland security training, exercise, national incident management system implementation and citizen corps programs.
When first arriving to state government, Cline worked at the State Department for Public Health as the Strategic National Stockpile/Chempack coordinator in conjunction with the Center's for Disease Control and Prevention and served as the State CSEPP Medical Director in conjunction with the Department of Army and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
After completing his bachelor's in education and a master's in public health at the University of Kentucky, Cline started his preparedness career as an epidemiologist and medical coordinator for the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program (CSEPP) in Madison County, Ky. He is also a licensed athletic trainer.
Cline has served on numerous national committees regarding medical preparedness and responder safety, as operations chief for a county emergency operations center, instructor of multiple first responder courses and as a federal exercise evaluator for the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Cline is married and has three children.Wise is detailed to the Office of Homeland Security's Kentucky Intelligence Fusion Center in Frankfort, Ky. where he serves as the FBI's terrorism representative.
Wise is detailed to the Office of Homeland Security's Kentucky Intelligence Fusion Center in Frankfort, Ky. where he serves as the FBI's terrorism representative.He joined the FBI in January of 2002 following a three-year stint as a political science instructor at Campbellsville University.
Wise's first assignment in the FBI was to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. where he worked in the counterterrorism division. In the summer of 2003, Wise received a transfer to the Lexington, Ky. office where he served for three years as a full-time member of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Wise is a Campbellsville University honors graduate and received his master of arts in international politics and national security from the Patterson School of Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky.
He is pursuing post-graduate work in the Homeland Security discipline from the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University.
Wise and his wife, Heather, are the parents of 3-year-old Grayson and2-year-old Jackson. Mrs. Wise is a 2001 graduate of CU.
For more information about the Sept. 12 event, contact Chowning at (270) 789-5520.
Campbellsville University, founded in 1906, is a private, comprehensive institution located in South Central Kentucky. Affiliated with the Kentucky Baptist Convention, Campbellsville has an enrollment of 2,197 students who represent 100 Kentucky counties, 32 states and 28 foreign nations. Listed in U.S. News & World Report's “America's Best Colleges” 14 consecutive years as one of the leading Southern master's colleges and universities, Campbellsville University is located 82 miles southwest of Lexington, Ky., and 80 miles southeast of Louisville, Ky. Dr. Michael V. Carter is in his eighth year as president.