Freedom National

It could be said that Leon Panetta has had two of the most consequential careers of any American public servant in the past 50 years. His first career, beginning as an army intelligence officer and including a distinguished run as one of Congress' most powerful and respected members, lasted 35 years and culminated in his transformational role as Clinton's budget czar and White House chief of staff.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is an exacerbation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of advances in technologies combined with changes in who can use them. Indeed, accessible innovations in destructive force have long driven new patterns of political violence. When Nobel invented dynamite and Kalashnikov designed the AK-47, each inadvertently spurred terrorist and insurgent movements that killed millions and upended the international system.

The wait is over. After a two-year investigation, the results of The Mueller Report have been released to the public. Now listen to an audio version of one of the most talked about government documents in history. These are the redacted findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team, which was tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, including exploring any links or coordination between President Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.

Prairie Fire is a guide for Red Counties to survive and thrive during what looks to be another Civil War brewing. Drawing on his experience in Special Forces with counterinsurgency, the author creates a step-by-step road map to making it out alive. Featuring the same gallows humor mixed with real-world examples as Concrete Jungle: A Green Beret's Guide to Urban Survival, Prairie Fire is the spiritual successor made specifically for those in rural areas.

In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance.

Six Minutes to Freedom is the remarkable tale of Kurt Muse's arrest and harrowing months of imprisonment; his eyewitness accounts of torture; and the plight of his family as they fled for their lives. It is also the heart-pounding account of the only American civilian ever rescued by the elite Delta Force. Timelier than ever, this is a thrilling and highly personal narrative about one man's courage and dedication to his beliefs.

Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Ronald Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

On January 6, 2021, insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol, an act of domestic terror without parallel in American history, designed to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. In a resolution six months later, the House of Representatives called it "one of the darkest days of our democracy," and established a special committee to investigate how and why the attack happened. Celadon Books, in collaboration with The New Yorker, presents the committee's final report, the definitive account of January 6th and what led up to it.

Steven Johnson’s engrossing account of the epic struggle between the anarchist movement and the emerging surveillance state stretches around the world and between two centuries—from Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite and the assassination of Czar Alexander II to New York City in the shadow of World War I.

Although it has been over five years since the 9/11 attacks, Americans still do not have a clear sense of how our government is waging the war on terror. In The Terrorist Watch, best-selling author Ronald Kessler takes listeners behind the scenes to reveal exactly how our leaders, charged with protecting the American people, are stopping terrorists.

The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing geopolitical interests and a stark ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the twenty-first century. But both history and China's current trajectory suggest that this rivalry will reach its moment of maximum danger in the 2020s. The Chinese challenge will most likely prove more manageable than many pessimists currently believe—but during the 2020s, the pace of Sino-American conflict will accelerate, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real.

The New York Times bestselling author of MY GRANDMOTHER'S HANDS surveys America's deteriorating democracy and offers embodied practices to help us protect ourselves and our country. In THE QUAKING OF AMERICA, therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem takes listeners through somatic processes addressing the growing threat of white-supremacist political violence.

Recounting the actors and events of US foreign policy, Zoellick identifies five traditions that have emerged from America's encounters with the world: the importance of North America; the special roles trading, transnational, and technological relations play in defining ties with others; changing attitudes toward alliances and ways of ordering connections among states; the need for public support, especially through Congress; and the belief that American policy should serve a larger purpose.

On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. In attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakmi talks to the people who lived through the catastrophe, and in so doing lays bare the Japanese psyche. As he discerns the fundamental issues that led to the attack, Murakami paints a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere.

With unprecedented access to more than a dozen individuals who have made the life-and-death decisions that come with running the world’s most powerful and influential intelligence service, Chris Whipple tells the story of an agency that answers to the United States president alone, but whose activities — spying, espionage, and covert action — take place on every continent. At pivotal moments, the CIA acts as a counterforce against rogue presidents, starting in the mid-70s with DCI Richard Helms’s refusal to conceal Richard Nixon’s criminality.

In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O’Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on covert cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O’Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was 10 times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War.

A former adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff explains how government's oldest problem is its greatest destabilizing force. Thieves of State argues that corruption is not just a nuisance; it is a major source of geopolitical turmoil. Since the late 1990s, corruption has grown such that some governments now resemble criminal gangs, provoking extreme reactions ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion.

This historic mission of this remarkable but little-known organization, the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), now 40 years old, is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. Its signature inside products, National Intelligence Estimates, are now accompanied by the NIC's every-four-years Global Trends. Unclassified, Global Trends has become a noted NIC brand, its release awaited by officials, academics, and private sector managers around the world.

An absolutely essential, not to be missed experience by specialist Edward J. Ruppelt for fans of ufology! This is the first work of any substance written about the fascinating subject of UFOs. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was the first director of Project Blue Book, and the person who came up with the phrase UFO, Unidentified Flying Object. This work is a unique and comprehensive look at the Air Force's early attempts to investigate UFOs.

The virus now known as Stuxnet was unlike any other piece of malware built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it proved that a piece of code could escape the digital realm and wreak actual, physical destruction—in this case, on an Iranian nuclear facility.