Bio
Jeffrey Goldberg
Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent of The Atlantic. Before joining the magazine in 2007, he was Middle East correspondent and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. Previously, he served as a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine. He has also written for the Forward and was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post. His book Prisoners has been hailed as one of the best books of 2006. Goldberg is the recipient of the 2003 National Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of Islamic terrorism. He is also the winner of an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists prize for best international investigative journalist, an Overseas Press Club award for best human rights reporting, and the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism. He is also the recipient of 2005’s Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize.
John Negroponte
John D. Negroponte is vice chairman of McLarty Associates. A career diplomat and national security official, Negroponte has held government positions abroad and in Washington between 1960 and 1997, and again from 2001 to 2008. His most recent position in government was as deputy secretary of state, where he served as the State Department's chief operating officer. Negroponte held a cabinet-level position as the first director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush. He has been ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, the Philippines, the United Nations, and Iraq. In Washington, he served twice on the National Security Council staff, first as director for Vietnam in the Nixon Administration and then as deputy national security advisor under President Reagan. Negroponte has received numerous awards including the State Department’s Distinguished Service Medal on two separate occasions.
Thom Shanker
Thom Shanker is a correspondent covering the Pentagon and national security policy for the New York Times. He routinely spends time embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to joining the Times in 1997, he served for ten years overseas with the Chicago Tribune, based in Moscow, Berlin, and the former Yugoslavia, before being named Tribune foreign editor.
He is co-author, with Eric Schmitt, of Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda, to be published in August. The book traces how new counter-terrorism strategies, adopted under George W. Bush and expanded under Barack Obama, were successfully employed in planning and carrying out the dramatic May 2011 raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed.
Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor is an elected member of the Indian Parliament and former minister of state for external affairs. In 2007, he concluded a nearly 29-year career at the United Nations, including his role as undersecretary-general for communications and public information. In 2006, he was India's candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General and emerged a strong second out of seven contenders.
Tharoor is the prize-winning author of twelve books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the classic The Great Indian Novel; India: From Midnight to the Millennium; Nehru: The Invention of India; and The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century. A widely published critic, commentator, and columnist in publications including The Hindu, The Times of India, and Newsweek. He has won India's highest honor for overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He is a trustee of the Aspen Institute.
Robin Wright
Robin Wright is a journalist and foreign policy analyst. Since October 2010, she has been a joint senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. During her fellowship, she will work on two books, Jihad Against the Jihad and The Iran Primer, the latter of which is about the thinkers and trends that will define the future of the Islamic world over the next decade.
Wright has reported from more than a 140 countries on six continents for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Sunday Times of London, CBS News and the Christian Science Monitor. Her foreign tours include the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and several years as a roving foreign correspondent. Wright has covered a dozen wars and several revolutions and most recently covered U.S. foreign policy for the Washington Post.
Among her many awards, Wright has received the U.N. Correspondent's Gold Medal, the National Magazine Award for reportage from Iran in The New Yorker, and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative" for coverage of African wars. She has also been the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Wright has been a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, Yale University, Duke University, Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lectures extensively around the United States and has appeared on programs on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and PBS.
Wright's books include The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam, Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade. She received both her master's and bachelor's degrees from the University of Michigan.
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Encyclopædia Britannica Articles
- bin Laden, Osama
(born 1957, Riyadh, Saud.Ar.) Leader of a broad-based Islamic extremist movement implicated in numerous acts of terrorism against the U.S. and other Western countries. The son of a wealthy Saudi family, he joined the Muslim resistance in Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country. Following his homecoming, he became enraged at the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) and, through a network of like-minded Islamic militants known as al-Qaeda, launched a series of terrorist attacks. These acts included the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the U.S. warship Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000. A self-styled Islamic scholar, bin Laden issued several legal opinions calling on Muslims to take up jihad (holy war) against the U.S., and in 2001 a group of militants under his direction launched the September 11 attacks, which led to the deaths of some 3,000 people. The U.S. thereafter demanded bin Laden's extradition from Afghanistan, where he was sheltered by that country's Taliban militia, and launched attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda forces when that ultimatum was not met. With the collapse of the Taliban, bin Laden and his associates went into hiding.
- bin Laden, Osama on britannica.com
- Qaeda, al-
Broad-based Islamic militant organization founded in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden. Its members supported Muslim fighters during the Afghan war of 1979–89; afterward the organization dispersed but continued to oppose secularized Muslim regimes and foreign (notably U.S.) presence in Islamic lands. It staged numerous terrorist attacks, including the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and a suicide bomb attack against the U.S. warship Cole in 2000. During that time it merged with other Islamic extremist organizations and eventually reestablished its headquarters in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where it trained thousands of Muslim militants. In 2001, 19 such militants staged the September 11 attacks. The U.S. and allied forces responded by attacking Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan, killing and capturing thousands and driving the remainder into hiding.
- Qaeda, al- on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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