Daily Briefing - Thursday September 2, 2010

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C. Christine Fair is a professor in the Center for Peace and Security Studies within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Previously, she has served as a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation, a political officer to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, and as a senior research associate in USIP’s Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. She is also a senior fellow with the Counter Terrorism Center at West Point. She has authored, co-authored and co-edited several books including Treading Softly on Sacred Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations on Sacred Space, The Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan, and Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance.

Amy Myers Jaffe is the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and is the associate director of the Rice University Energy Program. She has researched and written extensively on the issues of oil geopolitics and strategic energy policy. Her publications include the books Natural Gas and Geopolitics: From 1970 to 2040, Energy in the Caspian Region: Present and Future, and Energy and Security: Toward a New Foreign Policy Strategy. Prior to joining Rice University, Jaffe was the senior editor and Middle East analyst for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. 

Chris Hedges is a journalist, author, and social critic who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 2002 he was part of the team at the New York Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism, and he also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights. Now he writes primarily about American and Middle Eastern politics and society. His books include War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and most recently, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.