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In a story about the level of threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the United States, The New York Times turns to Dartmouth’s Daniel Benjamin, the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, for comment about the militant group.

Benjamin says that public discussions about the threat posed by ISIS are a “farce,” with “members of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the threat in lurid terms that are not justified,” he tells the newspaper.

“It’s hard to imagine a better indication of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells, that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems—all on the basis of no corroborated information,” says Benjamin, the Norman E. McCulloch Jr. Director of Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

Read the full story, published 9/10/14 by The New York Times.