Background
Mansfield is fluent in written and spoken Arabic, and has spent nearly seven years living in the Middle East, working for a wide range of clients including a U.S. Embassy, the United States Agency for International Development, and international corporations. She was active in the embassy warden system, acting as a liaison between the Embassy security office and her employer during the 1985 Beirut hijacking.
Mansfield heads the Strategic Translations and Analysis service which specializes in monitoring and translating Arabic language bulletin boards, news media and communiques from alleged radical Islamists.
Read more about this topic: Laura Mansfield
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“In the true sense ones native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (18691940)
“Pilate with his question What is truth? is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900)