Joe Scarborough, like an increasing number of conservative Republicans, has had enough.
Month: February 2007
Trita Parsi
Trita Parsi, the President of the National Iranian-American Council, discusses the “surge” distraction from the impending war with Iran, Bush’s false claims about Iran killing Americans in Iraq, the Walter Jones resolution, why the U.S. ought to try talking Iran for a change and how the average Iranian feels about the U.S.
Trita Parsi is the author of the forthcoming Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007.) He wrote his Doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Professor Francis Fukuyama (and Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, R. K. Ramazani, Jakub Grygiel, Charles Doran) at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 2006.
Dr. Parsi is one of the few people in the US – if not the only one – that has traveled both to Iran and Israel and interviewed top officials in these countries on the state of Israeli-Iranian relations. He has conducted more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American officials in all three countries. He is fluent in Persian/Farsi.
He has followed Middle East politics for more than a decade, both through work in the field, and through extensive experience on Capitol Hill and the United Nations.
Dr. Parsi’s articles on Middle East affairs have been published in the Financial Times, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Globalist, the Jerusalem Post, the Forward, BitterLemons and the Daily Star.
He is a frequent commentator on US-Iranian relations and Middle Eastern affairs, and has appeared on BBC World News, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN (Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360°), CNN International (Your World Today), Al Jazeera, C-Span, NPR, MSNBC, Voice of America and British Channel 4.
Ray McGovern
Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains what a putz his former subordinate Robert Gates is, Tyler Drumheller‘s efforts to exclude the phony bio-weapons trucks information from Colin Powell’s speech and kidnap and torture human beings, the indictment of some of them by the Germans, the suppression of George “Slam Dunk” Tenet’s book, the likelihood of war with Iran, the possibility of a manufactured pretext for war, the lack of evidence for the accusations against them, Bush’s phony 4 terror busts, Israel’s nukes, their influence over American foreign policy.
Former CIA official, Ray McGovern, has leveled serious accusations at the Bush administration in connection with the war in Iraq. McGovern served as a CIA analyst for almost 30 years. From 1981 to 1985 he conducted daily briefings for Vice President George Bush. He is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Why They Hate Us: Some Examples
YouTube gives some examples of why Iraqis may have a less than positive view of US occupiers. I am not only amazed at what some of these videos show, but also the fact that the soldiers who shot the videos were apparently proud of their behavior.
Driving in Baghdad
I first saw this one on MSNBC. Col. Jack Jacobs explained that this is the way US forces in Iraq are now trained to drive in Baghdad.
US Soldiers Taunt Kids With Water
US soldiers conduct “kid races” where they use precious clean drinking water in the same way they use the fake rabbit at the greyhound races.
US Soldiers Punish Looters of Firewood
Speaks for itself.
It would be hard to argue that any of the victims in these videos were deserving of this behavior.
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, explains his view of the disaster in Iraq, the signs and likely consequences of the impending war with Iran and his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than fifty countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. The book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was described by Abraham Verghese, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, as “…a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally.”
Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. The Free Press published his most recent book, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America in June 2005. The book was inspired by the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski and his ten-part film series The Decalogue. Hedges writes about lives, including his own, which have been consumed by one of the violations or issues raised by a commandment. The Christian Century said of the book: “Far from the grandstanding around stone tablets in front of an Alabama courthouse comes Losing Moses on the Freeway, a refreshing reflection on the ten great Mosaic laws that is muted yet monumental in its own right.”
Hedges is also the author of What Every Person Should Know About War, a book he worked on with several combat veterans. Robert Pinsky, reviewing this book in The New York Times, called the book “…arresting, peculiar” and “significant.” “Neither jingoistic nor pacifist,” Pinsky wrote, “the book is about the moral authority of information, as it applies to the present and future nature of war.”
Hedges published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in January 2007 with The Free Press. The Christian right is a movement the former seminarian has criticized in articles such as his cover story in the May 2005 issue of Harpers’ magazine called “Soldiers of Christ.”
Bert Sacks
Retired engineer Bert Sacks discusses his case before the U.S. Supreme Court: sticking up for innocent Iraqi kids killed by the UN/U.S./UK blockade of 1990-2003, the different ways the law protects politicians for the mass murders they commit and the danger of dehumanizing even the worst people.
After the first Gulf War in 1991 Bert Sacks read a New York Times front-page story about famine and epidemic in Iraq “unless massive life-supporting aid was given.” He read in that same story that “by making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people [sanctions] will soon encourage them to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.” Sacks thought something was terribly wrong. When he read a 1992 New England Journal of Medicine report that 46,900 Iraqi kids had died in just the first 8 months of 1991, he knew that something was terribly wrong. Since then he’s worked to educate about this issue.