Cassandra or Kassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.
The Clinton Doctrine is not an official government statement but an interpretation made by experts of the main priorities in the foreign policy of the Bill Clinton administration in the United States, 1993-2001.
The 1998 bombing of Iraq was a major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets from 16 to 19 December 1998, by the United States and the United Kingdom. On 16 December 1998, President of the United States Bill Clinton announced that he had ordered strikes against Iraq. The contemporaneous justification for the strikes was Iraq's failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions and its interference with United Nations Special Commission inspectors who were looking for weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors were sent back in 1997 and were repeatedly refused access to certain sites thus compelling the U.S to launch strikes. However, Clinton's decision was criticized and challenged by many key members of Congress, accusing Clinton of directing attention away from ongoing impeachment proceedings against him.
Andrew Myles Cockburn is a British journalist and the Washington, D.C., editor of Harper's Magazine.
Richard Alan Clarke is an American national security expert, novelist, and former government official. He served as the Counterterrorism Czar as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism for the United States between 1998 and 2003.
Philip David Zelikow is an American diplomat, academic and author. He has worked as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and counselor of the United States Department of State. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and was American Academy in Berlin Axel Springer Fellow, in the fall of 2009.
The 9/11 Commission Report is the official report into the events leading up to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It was prepared by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States at the request of US President George W. Bush and Congress and is available to the public for sale or free download.
Michael Chertoff is an American attorney who was the second United States Secretary of Homeland Security to serve under President George W. Bush. Chertoff also served for one additional day under President Barack Obama. He was the co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. Chertoff previously served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a federal prosecutor, and as Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He succeeded Tom Ridge as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security on February 15, 2005.
Human extinction is the hypothetical end of the human species due to either natural causes such as population decline from sub-replacement fertility, an asteroid impact, large-scale volcanism, or to anthropogenic (human) causes.
Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects. The normalcy bias causes many people to not adequately prepare for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error. About 70% of people reportedly display normalcy bias during a disaster.
William D. Gertz is an American editor, columnist and reporter for The Washington Times. He is the author of eight books and writes a weekly column on the Pentagon and national security issues called "Inside the Ring". During the administration of Bill Clinton, Gertz was known for his stories exposing government secrets.
Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter was an American historian of U.S. military intelligence. She authored Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, which former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is said to have required his aides read. Indeed, it was brought up during discussions of intelligence failures leading to the successful Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Jōgan (貞観) was a Japanese era name after Ten'an and before Gangyō. This period spanned the years from April 859 through April 878. The two reigning emperors were Seiwa-tennō (清和天皇) and Yōzei-tennō (陽成天皇).
Various conspiracy theories allege that certain institutions or individuals had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001. Some of the primary debates include whether the Bush administration or the United States Armed Forces had awareness of the planned attack methods, the precise volume of intelligence that American agencies had regarding al-Qaeda activities inside the United States, whether the put options placed on United Airlines and American Airlines and other trades indicated foreknowledge, and why the identities of the traders have never been made public.
A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical future event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, even endangering or destroying modern civilization. An event that could cause human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's potential is known as an "existential risk."
The Center for Policing Terrorism (CPT) is a national-security think tank formed after 9/11 in New York City.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., by the al-Qaeda terrorist group, a number of investigations were conducted to determine what intelligence may have existed before the attacks and whether this information was ignored by authorities.
The Future of Life Institute (FLI) is a nonprofit organization that works to reduce global catastrophic and existential risks facing humanity, particularly existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence (AI). The Institute's work is made up of three main strands: grantmaking for risk reduction, educational outreach, and advocacy within the United Nations, US government and European Union institutions. Its founders include MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and its advisors include entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the hypothesis that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in human extinction or some other unrecoverable global catastrophe.
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022, the possibility of Russia using tactical nuclear weapons, and the risk of broader nuclear escalation, has been widely discussed by commentators and in the media. Several senior Russian politicians, including president Vladimir Putin, former president and party leader Dmitry Medvedev, and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have made a number of statements widely seen as threatening the use of nuclear weapons.
