Month: February 2007

Antiwar Radio: Abi Wright

Abi Wright, Communications Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, on the CPJ’s report of Journalists Killed in 2006.

MP3 here.

Abi Wright most recently worked as CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. She traveled throughout the region researching and documenting press freedom abuses, meeting with journalists and government officials, and reporting on breaking news stories. Much of her prior professional experience has been as a television news producer. She worked for two years as a producer in the NBC News Moscow bureau, reported in Iran for an ABC News documentary, traveled throughout the former Soviet republic of Georgia as an Internews consultant, and spent several months working with Memorial, one of the earliest and most important civic organizations in Russia, which led the way in digging out information on Stalin’s crimes against humanity. She graduated from Barnard College with a degree in Russian studies.

Antiwar Radio: Robert Naiman

Robert Neiman challenges the Bush regime’s assertions about Iran’s involvement in violence against American soldiers in Iraq.

MP3 here.

Robert Naiman is Senior Policy Analyst and National Coordinator of Just Foreign Policy. He has worked as a policy analyst, researcher, union organizer, and teacher of economics and mathematics. He has worked and studied in the Middle East, and has a basic knowledge of spoken and written Arabic and Hebrew. Naiman produces the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and podcast. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois. He is co-author, with Mark Weisbrot, of a blog on Huffington Post.

President Bush yesterday asked Congress for an additional $6.4 billion to develop ways of defeating roadside bombs in Iraq — nearly double what has been provided since 2003 — in the hopes of reviving an effort once billed as the “Manhattan Project” of the war but which has failed to stop the insurgents’ weapon of choice from becoming even deadlier.

Not that I’m a fan of the nuclear bomb or anything but in 2007, the “Manhattan Project” of our age is to find out how to avoid getting blowed up by a homemade roadside bomb stuck in a dead dog’s belly? What is this costing so far — like a million bucks per defeated IED (assuming, very generously, that the project succeeds)?

Is there anything that isn’t tragically pathetic about the Bush administration? Seems like it’d be on the short list.

The amazing Taki Theodoracopulos has started a webzine, Taki’s Top Drawer, a development that is sure to make waves from one end of the blogosphere to the other. The first issue features contributions from conservative academic Paul Gottfried, the delightful Taki himself, writer F. J. Sarto, and myself. I’ll be writing a column twice a month, where I’ll be dealilng with some issues that Antiwar.com is just not the right venue for, although my first contribution, “National Socialism and National Greatness,” would fit in nicely here.

I can’t resist quoting from the first paragraph of Taki’s credo, “Why I Publish This Magazine”:

I want to shake up the stodgy world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion. For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars.

Now you know why I call him delightful….

Antiwar Radio: Gabriel Kolko

Professor Gabriel Kolko discusses the catastrophic post World War II American Empire along the lines covered in his book The Age of War: The United States Confronts the World: the phony Cold War against the USSR, attempted domination of the third world, the Military Industrial Complex’s permanent function in the American economy, the true purpose and fate of the NATO alliance, and the coming destruction – on way or another – of America’s global position.

MP3 here.

Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?

Antiwar Radio: Chalmers Johnson

Former CIA analyst, and author of the trilogy Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic and now Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson discusses his books, and the ways Republics die: the English model of losing an empire without total self destruction and the Roman way of dictatorship and destruction which America seems to be following instead.

MP3 here.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley. He first visited Japan in 1953 as a U.S. Navy officer and has lived and worked there with his wife, the anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson, every year between 1961 and 1998.

Johnson has been honored with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and in 1976 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written numerous articles and reviews and some sixteen books, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power on the Chinese revolution, An Instance of Treason on Japan’s most famous spy, Revolutionary Change on the theory of violent protest movements, and MITI and the Japanese Miracle on Japanese economic development. This last-named book laid the foundation for the “revisionist” school of writers on Japan, and because of it the Japanese press dubbed him the “Godfather of revisionism.”

He was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS television series “The Pacific Century,” and he played a prominent role in the PBS “Frontline” documentary “Losing the War with Japan.” Both won Emmy awards. His most recent books are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which was published by Metropolitan in January 2004. Blowback won the 2001 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation.