Cooley marshals a wealth of evidence to demonstrate the devastating consequences of the alliance between the US government and radical Islam - from the assassination of Sadat, the destabilization of Algeria and Chechnya and the emergence of the Taliban, to the bombings of the World Trade Center and the US embassies in Africa. Cooley examines the crucial role of Pakistan's military intelligence organization; uncovers China's involvement and its aftermath; the extent of Saudi financial support; the role of America's most wanted man, the guerrilla leader Osama bin Laden; the BCCI connection; and the CIA's cynical promotion of drug traffic in the Golden Crescent. This text seeks out the lessons to be learned from this still unfolding drama. This revised edition examines the events of September 11th 2001, Osama bin Laden's role and the complex working of the Al Queda terror network. It also covers the important events in Pakistan since the military coup of October 1999 and the impact of this on Indo-Pakistani relations. This should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand the roots of the international crisis.

Governments are common to all societies, although their forms, goals, methods and intents vary widely. The government of the United States has rested lightly upon its citizens in the past, but this has been changing in the past century, and the rate of change has been increasing. These changes are impacting our freedoms, bypassing the Constitution and leading to basic modifications in our form of government. This small book explores a number (by no means exhaustive) of the problems, dangers and trends in the political scene. It bears heavily on the politicians, corruption and legalities of modern government while exploring some ideas and changes that might regain us a strong, Constitutional, smaller and more efficient government.

What I lacked and what I needed,"" confessed Samuel Clemens in 1908, "was grandchildren." Near the end of his life, Clemens became the doting friend and correspondent of twelve schoolgirls ranging in age from ten to sixteen. For Clemens, "collecting" these surrogate granddaughters was a way of overcoming his loneliness, a respite from the pessimism, illness, and depression that dominated his later years. In Mark Twain's Aquarium, John Cooley brings together virtually every known communication exchanged between the writer and the girls he called his "angelfish." Cooley also includes a number of Clemens's notebook entries, autobiographical dictations, short manuscripts, and other relevant materials that further illuminate this fascinating story. Clemens relished the attention of these girls, orchestrating chaperoned visits to his homes and creating an elaborate set of rules and emblems for the Aquarium Club. He hung their portraits in his billiard room and invented games and plays for their amusement. For much of 1908, he was sending and receiving a letter a week from his angelfish. Cooley argues that Clemens saw cheerfulness and laughter as his only defenses against the despair of his late years. His enchantment with children, years before, had given birth to such characters as Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn. In the frivolities of the Aquarium Club, it found its final expression. Cooley finds no evidence of impropriety in Clemens behavior with the girls. Perhaps his greatest crime, the editor suggests, was in idealizing them, in regarding them as precious collectibles. "He tried to trap them in the amber of endless adolescence," Cooley writes. ""By pleading that they stay young and innocent, he was perhaps attempting to deny that, as they and the world continued to change, so must he.

What amount of pain is required to produce a terrorist? What happens when that terrorist becomes the master of sophisticated weapons - and uses them? What if that terrorist is immune to attack? How many millions will have to die before the President will place peace ahead of politics, and sit down to negotiate? What if he comes to the negotiating table with an empty hand? What if the terms for peace place a fearsome responsibility on all persons, from criminal to university professor? The answers must be found when the nation faces the ultimate terrorist, the one they call 'The Madman'.

Boyhood is the most familiar province of Mark Twain's fiction, but a reader doesn't have to look far to find feminine territory--and it's not the perfectly neat and respectable place where you'd expect to see Becky Thatcher. This is a fictional world where rather than polishing their domestic arts and waiting for marriage proposals, girls are fighting battles, riding stallions, rescuing boys from rivers, cross-dressing, debating religion, hunting, squaring off against angry bulls, or, in what may be the most flagrant flouting of Victorian convention, marrying other women. This special edition brings together the best of Twain's stories about unconventional girls and women, from Eve as she names the animals in Eden to Joan of Arc to the transvestite farce of a young man named Alice from the Wapping district of London. Whatever they're doing--bopping boys with a baseball bat in "Hellfire Hotchkiss," treating the author to a life story and a dogsled ride in "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance," or sacrificing all for the sake of a horse, as in "A Horse's Tale"--these women and girls are surprising, provocative, and irresistibly entertaining in the great Twain tradition in which they now finally take their rightful place.

Albert Einstein famously remarked that he did not know what weapons would be used in World War III, but World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. In this volume, a distinguished group of scholars, government officials, politicians, journalists, and statesmen examine what can be learned from the wars of the twentieth century, and how that knowledge might help us as we step ever so perilously into the twenty-first. Following an introduction by Padraig O'Malley, the book is divided into four sections: Understanding the World as We Have Known It; Global Uncertainties; Whose Values? Whose Justice?; and Shaping a New World. The first section reviews what we have learned about war and establishes benchmarks for judging whether that knowledge is being translated into changes in the behaviour of our political cultures. It suggests that the world's premier superpower, in its effort to promote Western-style democracy, has taken steps that have inhibited rather than facilitated democratization. The second section examines the war on terror and the concept of global war. From the essays in this section emerges a consensus that democracy as practiced in the West cannot be exported to countries with radically different cultures, traditions, and values. The third section visits the question of means and ends in the context of varying value systems and of theocracy, democracy, and culture. In the final section, the focus shifts to our need for global institutions to maintain order and assist change in the twenty-first century. Although each contributor comes from a different starting point, speaks with a different voice, and has a different ideological perspective, the essays reach startlingly similar conclusions. In sum, they find that the West has not absorbed the lessons from the wars of the last century, and is inadequately prepared to meet the new challenges that now confront us.