Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?

Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism?
Author: Naomi A. Moland
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0190903953

Sesame Street has taught generations of Americans their letters and numbers, and also how to better understand and get along with people of different races, faiths, ethnicities, and temperaments. But the show has a global reach as well, with more than thirty co-productions of Sesame Street that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria. Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism? takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Square, which began airing in 2011. In addition to teaching preschool-level academic skills, Sesame Square seeks to promote peaceful coexistence-a daunting task in Nigeria, where escalating ethno-religious tensions and terrorism threaten to fracture the nation. After a year of interviewing Sesame creators, observing their production processes, conducting episode analysis, and talking to local educators who use the program in classrooms, Naomi Moland found that this child-focused use of soft power raised complex questions about how multicultural ideals translate into different settings. In Nigeria, where segregation, state fragility, and escalating conflict raise the stakes of peacebuilding efforts, multicultural education may be ineffective at best, and possibly even divisive. This book offers rare insights into the complexities, challenges, and dilemmas inherent in soft power attempts to teach the ideals of diversity and tolerance in countries suffering from internal conflicts.

Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups

Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups
Author: Mark S. Hamm
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2011
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1437929591

This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Examines terrorists¿ involvement in a variety of crimes ranging from motor vehicle violations, immigration fraud, and mfg. illegal firearms to counterfeiting, armed bank robbery, and smuggling weapons of mass destruction. There are 3 parts: (1) Compares the criminality of internat. jihad groups with domestic right-wing groups. (2) Six case studies of crimes includes trial transcripts, official reports, previous scholarship, and interviews with law enforce. officials and former terrorists are used to explore skills that made crimes possible; or events and lack of skill that the prevented crimes. Includes brief bio. of the terrorists along with descriptions of their org., strategies, and plots. (3) Analysis of the themes in closing arguments of the transcripts in Part 2. Illus.

Blackout

Blackout
Author: Robison Wells
Publisher: HarperTeen
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-08-26
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 9780062026132

Homeland meets Marie Lu's Legend in Blackout, which #1 New York Times bestselling author Ally Condie called "a thrilling combination of Wells's trademark twists and terror. Fantastic!" Laura and Alec are highly trained teenage terrorists. Jack and Aubrey are small-town high school students. There was no reason for their paths ever to cross. But now a mysterious virus is spreading throughout America, infecting teenagers with impossible superpowers—and all teens are being rounded up, dragged to government testing facilities, and drafted into the army to fight terrorism. Suddenly, Jack, Laura, Aubrey, and Alec find their lives intertwined in a complex web of deception, loyalty, and catastrophic danger—where one wrong choice could trigger an explosion that ends it all.

Fearless

Fearless
Author: Eric Blehm
Publisher: WaterBrook
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2013-05-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307730700

Go deep into SEAL Team SIX, straight to the heart of one of its most legendary operators. When Navy SEAL Adam Brown woke up on March 17, 2010, he didn’t know he would die that night in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan—but he was ready. In a letter to his children, not meant to be seen unless the worst happened, he wrote, “I’m not afraid of anything that might happen to me on this earth, because I know no matter what, nothing can take my spirit from me.” Fearless is the story of a man of extremes, whose courage and determination were fueled by faith, family, and the love of a woman. It’s about a man who waged a war against his own worst impulses, including drug addiction, and persevered to reach the top tier of the U.S. military. In a deeply personal and absorbing chronicle, Fearless reveals a glimpse inside the SEAL Team SIX brotherhood, and presents an indelible portrait of a highly trained warrior whose final act of bravery led to the ultimate sacrifice. Adam Brown was a devoted man who was an unlikely hero but a true warrior, described by all who knew him as…fearless. “As a rule, we don’t endorse books or movies or anything regarding the command where I work—and Adam Brown worked—but as the author writes in Fearless, ‘you have to know the rules, so you know when to bend or break them.’ This is one of those times. Read this book. Period. It succeeds where all the others have failed.” —SEAL Team SIX Operator

Congressional Record

Congressional Record
Author: United States. Congress
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1564
Release: 2006
Genre: Law
ISBN:

The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

Terrorist Assemblages

Terrorist Assemblages
Author: Jasbir K. Puar
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2007-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822390442

In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

Use of Force

Use of Force
Author: Brad Thor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982148543

After the body of a high-value terrorism suspect washes ashore on the coast of Italy, covert counterterrorism operative Scot Horvath must stop an ISIS-led plot to destroy the Vatican in this pulse-pounding thriller by #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author Thor. Tall Premium Edition.

Hearts, Minds, and Hydras

Hearts, Minds, and Hydras
Author: William R. Nester
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2012
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1597979511

From the publisher. Insurgencies are like the hydra, the many-headed beast of Greek mythology. Once one begins, the measures a government takes to eliminate militants -- to cut off the insurgency's head -- can provoke countless others to join the enemy ranks. Tactical victories often breed strategic defeats. Traditional "search, destroy, and withdraw" missions that rely on firepower to wipe out rebels frequently destroy the livelihoods and loved ones of innocent people caught in the cross fire. U.S. troops have seen the pattern repeated as their initially successful offensives toppled enemy regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq but soon transformed into grueling guerrilla wars. Hearts, Minds, and Hydras outlines the reasons for these worsening situations. The most crucial were self-defeating decisions made by the George W. Bush administration, whose neoconservatism and hubris rather than careful analysis of genuine threats, national interests, and reasonable options shaped its policies. Although the Americans were eventually able to contain and diminish the insurgency in Iraq, the one in Afghanistan not only steadily intensified but also spread into neighboring Pakistan. The near abandonment of the war in Afghanistan and the neoconservative campaign in Iraq were godsends for al Qaeda and all other enemies of the United States. Then, as America's position deteriorated in both wars, the neoconservatives became even more determined to stay the course. William Nester analyzes some of the more prominent dilemmas haunting American policymakers now struggling to win in Afghanistan, fight terrorism in the United States, and reshape their relationship with Pakistan. In doing so, he reveals the nature of that all-too-real monster of insurgency, what feeds it, and how to starve it.

Worst Cases

Worst Cases
Author: Lee Clarke
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2021-04-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226108600

Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in Times Square during rush hour, wiping out half of Manhattan and killing 500,000 people. A virulent strain of bird flu jumps to humans in Thailand, sweeps across Asia, and claims more than fifty million lives. A single freight car of chlorine derails on the outskirts of Los Angeles, spilling its contents and killing seven million. An asteroid ten kilometers wide slams into the Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami that renders life on the planet as we know it extinct. We consider the few who live in fear of such scenarios to be alarmist or even paranoid. But Worst Cases shows that such individuals—like Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy—are more reasonable and prescient than you might think. In this book, Lee Clarke surveys the full range of possible catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular imagination, from toxic spills and terrorism to plane crashes and pandemics. Along the way, he explores how the ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has rendered them ordinary and mundane. Fear and dread, Clarke argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public has more substantial information and more credible warnings will it take worst cases as seriously as it should. A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases will be must reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.

The Big Bamboozle

The Big Bamboozle
Author: Philip Marshall
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Conspiracies
ISBN: 9781468094589

From the perspective of a Boeing 767 captain and former "special activities" contract pilot, Philip Marshall straps the reader into the cockpits of hijacked commercial airliners to tell the story of the most sophisticated terrorist attack in history. Based on a comprehensive ten-year study into the murders of his fellow pilots on 9/11, he explains how hijackers, novice pilots at the controls of massive guided missiles, were able to beat United States Air Force fighters to iconic targets with advanced maneuvering, daring speeds and a kamikaze finish. But, as Marshall explains, the tactical plan was so precise that it rules out car-bombers and shoe-bombers known as al Qaeda, KSM and Osama bin Laden. So then, who was it? That''s what you are about learn. Backed by official NTSB, FAA and black box recordings, Marshall finds the most capable and most documented group of conspirators buried deep within a Congressional Inquiry''s report and retraces their work in gripping detail. Fasten your seatbelt--- the sad truth is that all of the solid evidence points to a dark collaboration between members of the Bush Administration and a covert group of Saudi government officials. This is a game changer that will finally set the record straight on the most horrific crime in US history.This book is a compilation of official reports that disputes the Bush Administration, the Bush Intelligence Community and the American media''s account of the 9/11 attack. United States Senator Bob Graham''s Congressional Joint Inquiry in 2002 revealed that Saudi Arabian Intelligence agents met the 9/11 hijackers in the Los Angeles in January of 2000, harbored them and led them to 18 months of flight training in Florida and Arizona. Marshall follows reports from FBI field agents that warned George W. Bush''s Administration that a "cadre of individuals of investigative interest were engaged in flight training" in the Arizona desert in the spring of 2001. Marshall identifies three top federal investigators who complained that Dick Cheney obstructed justice by refusing access to suspects who supposedly confessed to the greatest crime in U.S. history. None of the federal investigators were ever allowed to verify the confession of Khalid Sheik Mohammed who had been water boarded over 180 times at Guantanamo detention facility. The book disputes the video and media confession of Osama bin Laden and points out that none of the accusations by the Bush Administration could be proved. Marshall asserts that the Saudi government was the true executioners of the 9/11 attack and framed their enemies while CIA special operations set up an elaborate decoy named Osama bin Laden to divert attention away from the Saudi operation. He follows the hijackers to flight training airports and finds that Saudi agents led the hijackers to the Arizona desert where Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 airliners were parked at a secluded CIA operated airport. The operators of the CIA airport were traced to suspicious insider stock trades on two airlines, United Airlines and American Airlines, the only two airlines used in the 9/11 attack. Marshall breaks down the tactical flight plan that was used by the hijackers and chronicles the actions of Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Dick Cheney and George W. Bsuh to learn that their account of the attack was severely flawed. Three top investigators wrote that Dick Cheney had obstructed the investigation and redacted the involvement of the Saudi government agents who were employed in California by the Saudi Civil Aviation authority. The Congressional Inquiry reported that the Saudi agents had "seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia" and had traced the hijacker financial support to Prince Bandar through a Riggs Bank account. Finally Marshall chronicles the media trial that allowed Bush and Cheney to derail American Justice by trying the 9/11 case with media propaganda and away from the American federal court system.