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\"11 In May 2004, Donald Rumsfeld, commenting on the abuses uncovered at Abu Ghraib, undermined the seriousness of prisoner treatment: \"My impression is what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture . . . and therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word. Later, over a whiskey, Adama (Edward James Olmos), the ship's commander, tells Roslin, [T]hat's a helluva risk you took today, care to tell me why? She replies, The interesting thing about being president is that you don't have to explain yourself to anyone, a sobering reminder that in times of war, laws can be reinterpreted.21 It's a prophetic conclusion to the episode, for in 2006 President George W. Bush signed a bill outlawing the torture of detainees in which he included a 'signing statement,' declaring that he would view the interrogation limits in the broader context of his broader powers to protect national security . . . [and] an official cited as an example a 'ticking bomb scenario' in which a detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist attack.

The book's gritty, downbeat take on the question \"What if superheroes really existed?\" is expressed less through its plot than through the very premise of its diegesis, an alternate reality in which Richard Nixon is entering his fifth term as president and the United States has handily won the Vietnam War with the help of Watchmen's one true superbeing, Dr.\\n That mass deception underlies Veidt's plan now seems an ironic commentary on 9/11 to those who believe the attacks enabled the US government to define the responsible forces as a shadowy network whose conveniently elastic boundaries could both dilate to encompass whole cultures and contract to enable the torture of individual suspects.

Rather than being a simple repetition of a past event, Sarah's trauma parallels that of the post-9/11 world, since it is also stuck in a state of anticipation of a future (Armageddon) that is much like the past.4 Sarah and John cycle through trauma that is both post-traumatic (informed by the horrors of the past) and preemptive (anticipating the terrors of the future) through their own memories of past encounters with terminators, through the violence of their present, and through the threat of future nuclear annihilation. [...] the protagonists exist in the continual \"ticking bomb\" scenario that the Bush administration used to justify the use of torture against suspected terrorists.

The political and military response presented a binary opposition between \"us\" (the United States) and \"them\" (terrorists), which avoided critical analysis.1 Similarly, although 9/11 provided what Susan Sontag called \"a monstrous dose of reality,\" the response was, for some, a replacement of politics with psychotherapy, indicating more concern with treating the traumatized \"victims\" than with identifying the motivations for the attacks.2 However, various popular entertainment texts did undertake a form of political criticism, as noted by Liz Powell in her contribution to this In Focus. In his DVD commentary, Greengrass describes his intention to give the film a \"strong contemporary edge,\" but his attention is focused not so much on the threat of terrorism as on the paranoid culture and \"focused brutality\" of antiterrorism that have become familiar in the post-9/11 landscape.4 Bourne's enemy in Ultimatum is CIA counterterrorist division Blackbriar, successor to the Treadstone program under which Bourne previously operated.

The film refuses to adopt a fixed moral standpoint on either Tom's or Jack's behavior; instead, both of their uses of violence are held up for the spectator's critique. [...] it would seem that the film responds to Slavoj zizek's recommendation not to include [the 9/11 attacks] in some wider narrative of the Progress of Reason or Humanity, which somehow, if it does not redeem them, makes them a part of an all-encompassing wider consistent narrative, but instead to question our own innocence, to render thematic our own (fantasmatic libidinal) investment and engagement in them [the attacks].

Each journey signifies endless connotations in literature. Kafka’s celebrated fiction The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and he seems to have set on a confusing journey on his side. The character of Yezad in Mistry’s The Family Matters walks into a fire temple, only to learn that the relevance of this sacred temple is onthe verge of extinction. Conrad’s mind capturing fiction The Shadow-Line depicts the perilsomevoy age of a young captain as a process; The protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes a journey or areturn journey to a place from where he is unlikely to move further. Tridib, Amitav Ghosh’s mind capturing character in The Shadow Lines, makes a journey, crosses the border, but never returns.

Humour has recently emerged as an important research topic in International Politics. Scholars have investigated how states and state leaders practice humour as part of their diplomatic exchanges, in misinformation campaigns, and nation-branding. Important knowledge has been gained as to how humorous practices partake in constituting identities, managing recognition, and international anxieties or contesting global orders. Yet, little attention has been devoted to interrogating the risk that humorous practices may give rise to in international politics, to the underside of humour's productive power. This article aims to begin unpacking these risks both theoretically and empirically. To do so, it engages with the critical thinking on humour by Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace in particular, suggesting three challenging implications: (1) humorous entrapments; (2) facile forms of detached engagement; and (3) ambiguous blurring of fiction and reality. It then shows how these unfold empirically in: Iran's meme war with the US, a Yes Men's parody during COP15, and the Pyongyang Nuclear Summit, developing a three-pronged analytical strategy for studying humorous practices and their different relations to formations of power/knowledge.

In the early postwar era, from 1945 to 1960, Americans confronted a dilemma that had never been faced before. In the new atomic age, which opened with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, they now had to grapple with maintaining their faith in a peaceful and prosperous future while also controlling their fear of an apocalyptic future resulting from an atomic war. Americans’ subsequent search for reassurance translated into a dramatic increase in church membership and the rise of the evangelical movement. Yet, their fear of an atomic war with the Soviet Union and possible nuclear apocalypse did not abate. This article discusses how six post-apocalyptic science fiction novels dealt with this dilemma and presented their visions of the future; more important, it argues that these novels not only reflect the views of many Americans in the early Cold War era, but also provide relevant insights into the role of religion during these complex and controversial years to reframe the belief that an apocalypse was inevitable.

This study examines the possible influence of formalising women's cooperatives on Jordan's informal economy. At the same time, to produce empirical evidence from a theoretical perspective, we study how the crucial challenges of the informal economy affect formalisation. This is an empirical study, both descriptive and inferential, in which several databases are used to extract the relevant data from the sample of 66 Jordanian women's cooperatives in the period from 2011 to 2020. A dynamic panel data model is used for the study variables with controlling for specific fixed effects. The findings indicate that the formalisation policy in the cooperative sector does not affect the informal economy. Instead, the challenges significantly affect the informal economy