Order To Kill

Mitch Rapp is used to winning. But now the CIA operative finds himself chasing false leads from continent to continent in an effort to keep nukes from falling into the hands of terrorists. Together with friend and colleague Scott Coleman, Rapp struggles to prevent the loss of these lethal weapons, and soon it becomes alarmingly clear that forces in Moscow are hell-bent on fomenting even more chaos and turmoil in the Middle East. Rapp must go deep into Russian territory, posing as an American ISIS recruit, to stop a plan much more dangerous and insidious than he ever expected.

This comprehensive volume addresses the important question of whether and how the current transformation of targeted killing is transforming the global international order. The age-old practice of targeted killing has undergone a profound transformation since the turn of the millennium. States resort to it more frequently, especially in the context of counter-terrorism operations. The rapid development of surveillance and drone technologies facilitates targeted-killing missions, and states are starting to slowly abandon their policies of secrecy and denial with regard to this form of violence. To answer this question, the volume introduces a theoretical framework that conceives the maintenance and transformation of international order as a dynamic, triangular process between violence, discourse, and the institutions that make up the international order. It then sheds light on different parts of this triangular process: the reinterpretation of international law to legitimize targeted killing, the contestation between state and non-state actors over the development of a new targeted-killing norm, the emergence of targeted killing in the context of changes in the broader normative context of international order, and the impact of new technologies, in particular autonomous weapons systems, on the future of targeted-killing practices and international order. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Security Policy.

Mitch Rapp is used to winning. But now the CIA operative finds himself chasing false leads from continent to continent in an effort to keep nukes from falling into the hands of terrorists. Together with friend and colleague Scott Coleman, Rapp struggles to prevent the loss of these lethal weapons, and soon it becomes alarmingly clear that forces in Moscow are hell-bent on fomenting even more chaos and turmoil in the Middle East. Rapp must go deep into Russian territory, posing as an American ISIS recruit, to stop a plan much more dangerous and insidious than he ever expected.

For months, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of the men responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians including his own girlfriend in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing - bullet by bullet. His next target - a Libyan diplomat - should be easy. Prone to drink and currently in Paris without a bodyguard, Rapp quickly tracks the man down and sends a bullet into his skull while he's sleeping. But in the split second it takes the bullet to leave the silenced pistol, everything changes. The door to the hotel room is kicked open and gunfire erupts all around Rapp. When the news breaks that Libya's Oil Minister has been killed along with three innocent civilians and four unidentified men, the French authorities are certain that the gunman is wounded and still on the loose in Paris. As the finger-pointing begins, Rapp's handlers have only one choice - deny any responsibility for the incident and race to do damage control. Rapp has become a liability, and he must not be taken alive by the French authorities. But alone in Paris, on the run from the authorities and from his own employers, Mitch Rapp must prepare to fight for his life.

This collection of essays continues a long and venerable debate in the history of the Christian church regarding the legacy of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great. For some, Constantine's conversion to Christianity early in the fourth century set in motion a process that made the church subservient to the civil authority of the state, brought a definitive end to pacifism as a central teaching of the early church, and redefined the character of Christian catechesis and missions. In 2010, Peter J. Leithart published a widely read polemic, Defending Constantine, that vigorously refuted this interpretation. In its place, Leithart offered a thoroughgoing rehabilitation of Constantine and his legacy, while directing a rhetorical fusillade against the pacifist theology and ethics of the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. The essays gathered here in response to Leithart reflect the insights of eleven leading theologians, historians, and ethicists from a wide range of theological traditions. They engage one of the most contentious issues in Christian church history in irenic fashion and at the highest level of scholarship. In so doing, they help ensure that the "Constantinian Debate" will continue to be lively, substantive, and consequential.

Criminal Law: A Comparative Approach presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the substantive criminal law of two major jurisdictions: the United States and Germany. Presupposing no familiarity with either U.S. or German criminal law, the book will provide criminal law scholars and students with a rich comparative understanding of criminal law's foundations and central doctrines. All foreign-language sources have been translated into English; cases and materials are accompanied by heavily cross-referenced introductions and notes that place them within the framework of each country's criminal law system and highlight issues ripe for comparative analysis. Divided into three parts, the book covers foundational issues - such as constitutional limits on the criminal law - before tackling the major features of the general part of the criminal law and a selection of offences in the special part. Throughout, readers are exposed to alternative approaches to familiar problems in criminal law, and as a result will have a chance to see a given country's criminal law doctrine, on specific issues and in general, from the critical distance of comparative analysis.

An easily accessible resource that showcases the links between using documented primary sources and gaining a more nuanced understanding of military history. • Covers benchmark documents in U.S. diplomatic and military history from 14 conflicts • Utilizes document introductions and scholarly analysis to help students understand the primary source materials • Supports document-based teaching and learning strategies • Ties into Common Core critical thinking guidelines commonly used in high school history courses for document analysis • Helps students understand the difference between original source material and unsourced claims made on the Internet

Religious political violence is by no means a new phenomenon, yet there are critical differences between the various historical instances of such violence and its more current permutations. Since the mid-1970s, religious fundamentalist movements have been seeking to influence world order by participating in local political systems. For example, Islamic fundamentalism is at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Christian fundamental right wing has seen a resurgence in Europe, and Jewish fundamentalism is behind the actions of Meir Kahane’s Kach movement and the settler movement. The shift in recent years from secular to religious political violence necessitates a reevaluation of contemporary political violence and of the concept of religious violence. This text analyzes the evolution of religious political violence, in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Since religious political violent events are usually associated with the term “terrorism,” the book first analyzes the origins of this controversial term and its religious manifestations. It then outlines and highlights the differences between secular and religious political violence, on ideological, strategic, and tactical levels before comparing the concept of Holy War in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Lastly, it shows how modern radical monotheistic religious groups interpret and manipulate their religious sources and ideas to advocate their political agendas, including the practice of violence. A unique comparative study of religious political violence across Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, this text features many international case studies from the Crusades to the Arab Spring.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“A trenchant summation” and analysis of the legal rationales behind the US drone policy of targeted killing of suspected terrorists, including US citizens (Publishers Weekly, starred review). In the long response to 9/11, the US government initiated a deeply controversial policy of “targeted killing”—the extrajudicial execution of suspected terrorists and militants, typically via drones. A remarkable effort was made to legitimize this practice; one that most human rights experts agree is illegal and that the United States has historically condemned. In The Drone Memos, civil rights lawyer Jameel Jaffer presents and assesses the legal memos and policy documents that enabled the Obama administration to put this program into action. In a lucid and provocative introduction, Jaffer, who led the ACLU legal team that secured the release of many of the documents, evaluates the drone memos in light of domestic and international law. He connects the documents’ legal abstractions to the real-world violence they allow, and makes the case that we are trading core principles of democracy and human rights for the illusion of security. “A careful study of a secretive counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining endless, orderless war, this book is profoundly necessary.” —Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation

Kill Shot For months, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way - bullet by bullet - through a list of the men responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians, including his own girlfriend, in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing. His next target - a Libyan diplomat - should be easy. Prone to drink and currently in Paris without a bodyguard, Rapp quickly tracks the man down and sends a bullet into his skull while he's sleeping. But in the split second it takes the bullet to leave the silenced pistol, everything changes. The door to the hotel room is kicked open and gunfire erupts all around Rapp. When the news breaks that Libya's Oil Minister has been killed along with three innocent civilians and four unidentified men, the French authorities are certain that a wounded gunman is still on the loose in Paris. As the finger-pointing begins, Rapp's handlers have only one choice - deny any responsibility for the incident and race to do damage control. Rapp has become a liability, and he must not be taken alive by the French authorities. But alone in Paris, on the run from the authorities and from his own employers, Mitch Rapp must prepare to fight for his life. Third Option Mitch Rapp is sent on his final mission But he doesn't know that the ultimate target of this mission is himself. Mitch Rapp, the CIA's top counterterrorism operative, is sent on his final mission, to eliminate a European industrialist who has been selling sensitive equipment to one of terrorism's most notorious sponsors. But he doesn't know that the ultimate target of this mission is himself. Set up by forces within the US who do not want the next Director-elect of the CIA to take over, and therefore need a disaster for the present regime, Mitch refuses to die ... the conspirators have made an awful miscalculation. They have enraged one of the most lethal and efficient killers the CIA has ever produced. Now they will pay.

In the course of the study, we have used the methodological approach to the scientific substantiation of the comprehensiveness of expert assessments of the mental state of patients-offenders suffering from cerebral-organic pathology. As a result, we have formulated the following general points: The forensic-psychiatric expert procedure is comprehensive in nature due to the participation of medical doctors, medical psychiatrists, and medical psychologists. Medical-social examination, which is carried out for the purposes of determining the social status of patients (disabled or not disabled) and their need for social protection, is a processthat is comprehensive due to participation of medical doctors, medical clinicians, and medical psychologists. The comprehensiveness of expert assessmentsthe forensic psychiatric and the medical social onesis made more complex due to the comprehensiveness of each one of these expert assessments. The methodological approach to the comprehensiveness of expert assessments is based on taking into account the following three principles: the principle of continuity, the principle of cooperation, and the principle of psychological support for patients-offenders, provided to them over the entire length of their medical-social route.

The Life of an Activist is a non-fiction narrative that describes key steps on how to become and evolve into an effective activist and community leader. Ertll describes social movements and provides useful advice on how to successfully manage non-profits to accomplish positive social change that truly improves people’s lives.

This book draws on a multiplicity of sources to recreate brilliantly the proceedings and to offer a reasoned, often profound examination of the processes that created international law.

Edited by Mylan Engel Jr. and Gary Lynn Comstock, this book employs different ethical lenses, including classical deontology, libertarianism, commonsense morality, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and the capabilities approach, to explore the philosophical basis for the strong animal rights view, which holds that animals have moral rights equal in strength to the rights of humans, while also addressing what are undoubtedly the most serious challenges to the strong animal rights stance, including the challenges posed by rights nihilism, the “kind” argument against animal rights, the problem of predation, and the comparative value of lives. In addition, contributors explore the practical import of animal rights both from a social policy standpoint and from the standpoint of personal ethical decisions concerning what to eat and whether to hunt animals. Unlike other volumes on animal rights, which focus primarily on the legal rights of animals, and unlike other anthologies on animal ethics, which tend to cover a wide variety of topics but only devote a few articles to each topic, this volume focuses exclusively on the question of whether animals have moral rights and the practical import of such rights. The Moral Rights of Animals will be an indispensable resource for scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of animal ethics, applied ethics, ethical theory, and human-animal studies, as well as animal rights advocates and policy makers interested in improving the treatment of animals.

Brazil is a rapidly emerging country. Brazilian theology, namely the Theology of Liberation, has become well known in the 1970s and 1980s. The politically active Base Ecclesial Communities and the progressive posture of the Roman Catholic Church contrasted with a steadily growing number of evangelicals, mostly aligned with the military regime but attractive precisely to the poor. After democratic transition in the mid-1980s, the context changed considerably. Democracy, growing religious pluralism and mobility, a vibrant civil society, the political ascension of the Worker's Party and growing wealth, albeit within a continuously wide social gap, are some of the elements that show the need of a new approach to theology. It must be a theology that is both critical and constructive, resisting and cooperative, a theology that is able to give orientation to the churches, valuing and encouraging their contribution in society while avoiding attempts of imposition. The Churches and Democracy in Brazil, the fruit of years of interdisciplinary study of the Brazilian context and its main churches and theology, makes its case for an ecumenically articulated public theology. It seeks inspiration mainly in Luther and Lutheran theology, emphasizing human dignity, freedom, trust, the disposition to serve, and the ability to endure the ambiguities of reality, as well as a fresh interpretation of the doctrine of the two regiments. These are the fundamental elements of what makes human beings full members of the body politic: citizenship, their right to have rights and to be able to effectively live them, together with their corresponding duties, in a move of growing political participation conscious of their religious motivation in view of the commonweal.