Counter-terrorism (also spelled counterterrorism) is the practices, tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, militaries, police departments and corporations adopt to attack terrorist threats and/or acts, both real and imputed.

The tactic of terrorism (used by terrorists) is available to insurgents and governments. Not all insurgents use terror as a tactic, and some choose not to use it because other tactics work better for them in a particular context. Individuals, such as Timothy McVeigh, may also engage in terrorist acts such as the Oklahoma City bombing.

If the terrorism is part of a broader insurgency, counter-terrorism may also form a part of a counter-insurgency doctrine, but political, economic, and other measures may focus more on the insurgency than the specific acts of terror. Foreign internal defense (FID) is a term used for programs either to suppress insurgency, or reduce the conditions under which insurgency could develop. Counter-terrorism includes both the detection of potential acts and the response to related events.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

Tom Cotton (born May 13, 1977) is from the city of Dardanelle, Arkansas. He spent five years serving in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Cotton is the Republican (GOP) nominee running for the United States Congress in Arkansas's 4th congressional district for the 2012 election cycle.

Cotton grew up outside Dardanelle, Arkansas, on his family's cattle farm. After graduating from Dardanelle High School, he went on to attend Harvard College, where he was as a columnist for the Harvard Crimson, played on the junior-varsity basketball team, and was a member of the Harvard Republican Club. He earned a law degree from Harvard Law School.

After completing law school, he served as a federal judicial clerk at the United States Court of Appeal for Judge Jerry Edwin Smith. Moving on to private practice, his work focused on labor, employment, and constitutional law cases at all levels of state and federal court.

In 2004, Cotton enlisted in the U.S. Army as a infantryman. After completing his initial training at Fort Benning, he was deployed in 2006 to Baghdad as a leader of a 41-man air-assault infantry platoon with the 101st Airborne Division. In Iraq, Cotton led daily combat patrols in Al Dora, Abu Dashir, and the surrounding rural sectors outside Baghdad.