An Inconvenient Book or How to Break a Terrorist

An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems

Author: Glenn Beck

FUNNY.

OUTRAGEOUS.

TRUE.

Have you ever wondered why some of the biggest problems we face, from illegal immigration to global warming to poverty, never seem to get fixed? The reason is simple: the solutions just aren't very convenient. Fortunately, radio and television host Glenn Beck doesn't care much about convenience; he cares about common sense.

Take the issue of poverty, for example. Over the last forty years, America's ten poorest cities all had one simple thing in common, but self-serving politicians will never tell you what that is (or explain how easy it would be to change): Glenn Beck will (see chapter 20).

Global warming is another issue that's ripe with lies and distortion. How many times have you heard that carbon dioxide is responsible for huge natural disasters that have killed millions of people? The truth is, it's actually the other way around: as CO2 has increased, deaths from extreme weather have decreased. Bet you'll never see that in an Al Gore slide show.

An Inconvenient Book contains hundreds of these same "why have I never heard that before?" types of facts that will leave you wondering how political correctness, special interests, and outright stupidity have gotten us so far away from the commonsense solutions this country was built on.

As the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, The Glenn Beck Program, and a prime-time television show on CNN Headline News, Glenn Beck combines a refreshing level of honesty with a biting sense of humor and a lot of research to find solutions that will open your eyes while entertaining you along the way.

Publishers Weekly

In this appraisal of America's woes, conservative TV and talk-radio host Beck (The Real America) lays lighthearted siege to everything that makes the world worse. "[P]olitical correctness is the biggest threat this nation faces today," he declares, as it makes us prey for Islamic fundamentalists, renders taboo the roots of our economic troubles (poor people are, in fact, lazy, he argues) and creates rampant distortion in the media. Beck goes paragraph for paragraph with global-warming alarmist Al Gore, merrily slaughtering the sacred cows of the environmentalist crowd. Not sated by the hide of the former vice president, he goes after everything and everyone from poverty to "perverts," offering solutions to these and other problems (e.g., "the key to success in the capitalist system is to believe in it"). While often informative, as in his chapter on global warming, Beck is sometimes tedious, particularly when dealing with Islam and education ("France is literally teetering on the edge, and our biggest ally, England, is about to be turned inside out as well"). He's at his best when most absurd, and funniest when he's his own target (the father of four is "little more than a flesh-and-bone jungle gym"). This should make a good read for conservatives. (Nov.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq

Author: Matthew Alexander

Finding Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, had long been the U.S. military's top priority -- trumping even the search for Osama bin Laden. No brutality was spared in trying to squeeze intelligence from Zarqawi's suspected associates. But these "force on force" techniques yielded exactly nothing, and, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the military rushed a new breed of interrogator to Iraq.

Matthew Alexander, a former criminal investigator and head of a handpicked interrogation team, gives us the first inside look at the U.S. military's attempt at more civilized interrogation techniques -- and their astounding success. The intelligence coup that enabled the June 7, 2006, air strike onZarqawi's rural safe house was the result of several keenly strategized interrogations, none of which involved torture or even "control" tactics.

Matthew and his team decided instead to get to know their opponents. Who were these monsters? Who were they working for? What were they trying to protect? Every day the "'gators" matched wits with a rogues' gallery of suspects brought in by Special Forces ("door kickers"): egomaniacs, bloodthirsty adolescents, opportunistic stereo repairmen, Sunni clerics horrified by the sectarian bloodbath, Al Qaeda fanatics, and good people in the wrong place at the wrong time. With most prisoners, negotiation was possible and psychological manipulation stunningly effective. But Matthew's commitment to cracking the case with these methods sometimes isolated his superiors and put his own career at risk.

This account is an unputdownable thriller -- more of a psychological suspense story than a war memoir. And indeed, the story reaches far pastthe current conflict in Iraq with a reminder that we don't have to become our enemy to defeat him. Matthew Alexander and his ilk, subtle enough and flexible enough to adapt to the challenges of modern, asymmetrical warfare, have proved to be our best weapons against terrorists all over the world.

Publishers Weekly

Alexander, a pseudonymous air force officer, and writer Bruning (House to House), collaborate to tell the stranger-than-fiction "story of the intelligence operation that located and ultimately killed Abu Musab Al Zarqawi," the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. An "Air Force investigator turned interrogator," Alexander was trained in the post-Abu Ghraib interrogation techniques that replace "fear and control" with "respect, rapport, hope, cunning and deception." He arrived in Iraq in March 2006, a month after al-Qaeda bombed the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra in an effort to incite sectarian violence, and Zarqawi became "the most wanted man in Iraq" and the primary focus of U.S. intelligence efforts. Using the new methods, Alexander interrogated five captured al-Qaeda members and tracked down Zarqawi's personal spiritual adviser, who unwittingly led U.S. Special Forces to Zarqawi's hideout; this vindicated Alexander's methods and eliminated the key terrorist leader. Alexander provides a front-row seat to the intelligence war inside the "Global War on Terrorism" in a riveting, fast-paced account that reads like a first-rate thriller. (Oct.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

"We don't have to become our enemies to defeat them," declares a U.S. Air Force officer who led a team of interrogators in Iraq. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, American interrogators adopted a gentler approach, writes the pseudonymous author, using respect, rapport, hope, cunning and deception to obtain information. His slow-moving book profiles a group of special agents and criminal investigators who introduced the new violence-free approach in questioning that ultimately led to the death in 2006 of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq. Assisted by veteran co-author Bruning (House to House, 2007, etc.), the officer conveys a vivid sense of the intense pressures facing those interrogators, who had to quickly apply the six weeks of training they received at "the Schoolhouse" (Fort Huachuca in Arizona) to ferret out the master terrorist behind a rash of suicide bombings. Much of the book focuses on the questioning of five well-dressed men, captured at a farmhouse "wedding," who turned out to be senior-level al-Qaeda leaders. Facing trial and imprisonment, each detainee was painstakingly cajoled, flattered and manipulated with favors and promises ("I'll take care of you. I'll try to help you as best I can") into revealing fellow terrorists' locations, which were promptly attacked by Special Forces. The Geneva Conventions were respected, although nothing was done to determine who was present at targeted sites before they were destroyed by bombing. The fact that two young children died along with Zarqawi prompts no more than a verbal shrug from the author: "Innocent people get hurt." A surprising number of the detainees were not religious zealots but simply Iraqis who went along withal-Qaeda to make ends meet; Abu Gamal, an electrician with two wives to support, made hundreds of roadside bombs to earn extra money ($50 per job). The author's gung-ho tone and such melodramatic lines as "we could change history" fail to boost a flat narrative. Fascinating and informative content, poorly delivered. Agent: Jim Hornfischer/Hornfischer Literary Management

Table of Contents:

Foreword by Mark Bowden

Part Iв??Prologue
The Golden Dome
1. The 'Gator Pit
2. The Skeleton
3. The Jovial Imam
4. Love of Family
5. The Convenient Car Bomb
6. The Burning House

Part IIв??Coming into Focus
7. Fractures
8. The Other Side of the House
9. The Group of Five
10. The Second Wife
11. A Life for Redemption
12. Preacher of Hate
13. The Blue BMW
14. The Devil's Choice 160

Part III Going in Circles
15. Cat and Mouse
16. The Leader
17. Fault Lines
18. The Eyes of Fatima
19. The Return to the Other Side of the House
20. Terrorist Follies
21. The Media Man
22. A Visit from the Boss
23. A Slip

Part IV Dice Roll
24. A Single, Empty Hand
25. Six Hours
26. The Duel
27. A Chance for Unity
28. Treason
29. The Secret Deal
30. Stasis
31. The Unknown Imam
32. The Seventh of June

Epilogue: Killing the Hydra