The American Academy of Political and Social Science

The following are excerpts from a series of interviews with some of the country's top terrorism experts conducted by Trudy Rubin, Worldview columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer in conjunction with the July 2008 volume of The Annals,Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face.” This interview is with Richard Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism for Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush and author of Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, and Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters. Trudy Rubin: You write in The Annals about the need to diagnose the problem of terrorism correctly. Let me go back in history…

The following are excerpts from a series of interviews with some of the country’s top terrorism experts conducted by Trudy Rubin, the Worldview columnist for thePhiladelphia Inquirer in conjunction with the July 2008 volume of The Annals on “Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face.”  This interview is with Bruce Riedel, a senior advisor on Middle East and South Asian issues to the last three US presidents, who was in the White House situation room during the 9/11 attacks.  He is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “The Search for al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future.” 
Trudy Rubin: …

 At the most recent G8 summit in St. Petersburg, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement that focused on "the devastation that could befall our people and the world community if nuclear weapons or materials or other weapons of mass destruction were to fall into the hands of terrorists."  These words echo the conclusion of the essays in the special volume of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science I edited: Nuclear terrorism represents the major threat to American national security and international security today. The essays raise several…

 In a recent sweeping assessment of the terrorist threats facing the United States, Evan Thomas ofNewsweek revealed a chilling story about the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack just weeks after 9/11:  "Authorities in Pennsylvania received a frightening tip from an FBI office overseas: terrorists had a nuclear device on a train somewhere between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia...The information, while terrifying, turned out to be bogus. Within a day it had been traced back to a conversation between two men overheard at a urinal in Ukraine. Characteristically, some time later, Bush made a mordant joke of the…