This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 22nd, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Will the Intelligence Gathering Abuses of the Bush Administration simply be wiped away in the Obama years?

And will Obama counter-terrorism policies be informed by the mistakes of Congress and the White House

in these past eight years?

Michael German is not terribly optimistic that the

Obama administration will have learned all of what it should from the Bush years.

He is a former FBI Special Agent who twice successfully infiltrated domestic terrorist organizations

and obtained criminal convictions against many would-be terrorists.

His first book, Thinking Like a Terrorist, Insights of a former FBI undercover agent was published in 2007.

German will be among those attending Cato's Counterterrorism Conference scheduled for January.

You may sign up to attend at Cato.org

slash counter-terrorism.

What is the biggest risk going forward for

the new administration coming in in dealing with

terrorism and trying to understand how to most appropriately, efficiently,

even cost effectively deal with terrorism, what is the biggest misconception

that they might be bringing with them from the Bush administration as a leftover?

I think the most difficult thing will be recognizing that you have to do an

assessment of what has been successful and what has been counterproductive and I

think that's probably the most difficult.

I mean you hear all the time that you know we want to move forward and not look back.

...