Trita Parsi

New Equation in the Gulf

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/charles/aw20071207tritaparsi.mp3]

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council and author of Treacherous Alliance, discusses the possibility that the new Iran NIE will give the Israeli government the opportunity to adopt a new foreign policy toward Iran, how the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have benefited Iran and the Iranian leadership’s sanity.

MP3 here.

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.

Wayne Barrett

Giuliani’s Ties to KSM and Osama’s Friend

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_06_barrett.mp3]

Village Voice senior editor Wayne Barrett discusses Rudolph Guliani’s business dealings with the Interior Ministry of Qatar, whose chief, Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, helped 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed escape the clutches of the FBI in 1996, Rudy’s company’s helping to provide security for the leaders of Iran, Syria and Hamas while they were in Qatar during the Asian Games last year and the role of al Qaeda and al-Thani in the Khobar Towers attack of 1996.

MP3 here. (27:18)

Wayne Barrett, senior editor at the Village Voice and teacher at the Journalism School at Columbia University. In addition to covering city and state government and politics at the Voice for 28 years, Barrett has written three books: City for Sale; Trump: the Deals and the Downfall; and Rudy! An Investigative Biography and Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11.

Scott Ritter

Cheney’s Iran Policy Still Stands

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_06_ritter.mp3]

Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector and author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change, discusses the new Iran NIE, its confirmation of his long-held contention that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, the lack of hard evidence that they ever did, the illogic of the administration’s demands that Iraq and now Iran prove a negative, the mysterious origin of the “smoking laptop,” his patriotism, the state of Iran’s compliance with the IAEA, the possibility that the timing of the NIE’s release was a preemptive action against Mohamed ElBaradei’s upcoming report on the last outstanding questions, the lies claiming Iran is backing enemies of the U.S. in Iraq, the necessity of withdrawal, his case that the total debacle of the Iraqi occupation is the result of abject incompetence, the danger to U.S. troops in Iraq in the event of war with Iran, his admiration for Ron Paul and the need of the American people to destroy the careers of their warmonger representatives.

MP3 here. (43:47)

As a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq, Scott Ritter was labeled a hero by some, a maverick by others, and a spy by the Iraqi government. In charge of searching out weapons of mass destruction within Iraq, Ritter was on the front lines of the ongoing battle against arms proliferation. His experience in Iraq served as the basis for his book Endgame, which explored the shortcomings of American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf region and alternative approaches to handling the Iraqi crisis, and for Iraq Confidential, which detailed his seven year experience as a weapons inspector.

Scott Ritter has had an extensive and distinguished career in government service. He is an intelligence specialist with a 12-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps including assignments in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Rising to the rank of Major, Ritter spent several months of the Gulf War serving under General Norman Schwarzkopf with US Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia, where he played an instrumental role in formulating and implementing combat operations targeting Iraqi mobile missile launchers which threatened Israel.

In 1991, Ritter joined the United Nations weapons inspections team, or UNSCOM. He participated in 34 inspection missions, 14 of them as chief inspector. Ritter resigned from UNSCOM in August 1998, citing US interference in the work of the inspections.

He is the author of many books, including “Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein” and most recently “Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change.” He lives in New York State. Ritter was born in Florida, and raised all over the world in a career military family. He is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, with a B.A. in Soviet History.

Gareth Porter

War Party Loses a Round

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_05_porter.mp3]

Historian and journalist Gareth Porter discusses the new Iran NIE, it’s dual role as verifying the peaceful nature of the Iranian’s nuclear program while also pretending to verify that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in the first place (which remains unproven, confirmation in the NIE that the Iranians can in fact be negotiated with, the deterrent value in simply being able to get their centrifuges working right, the lowered standard of their “possessing the knowledge,” to make a nuke as casus belli and his view that the NIE has greatly reduced the possibility of war.

MP3 here. (19:19)

Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Dr. Porter was both a Vietnam specialist and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and was Co-Director of Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Dr. Porter taught international studies at City College of New York and American University. He was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.

Philip Giraldi

Danger of War With Iran Remains

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_05_giraldi.mp3]

Former CIA and DIA officer and Antiwar.com columnist Philip Giraldi explains his view of the new Iran NIE, Iran’s “hypothetical” nuclear weapons program which amounts to basically nothing to have been suspended in 2003, the neocons’ pathetic cries that the CIA is out to get the vice president, the new evidence obtained, the ignorance of the Congress, the likely angle of the War Party from here, what sort of war is planned for, the U.S.-Israeli attempt to get friendly Arab governments on board and the future of U.S. occupation in Iraq.

MP3 here. (21:31)

Philip Giraldi is a former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine, blogger at the Huffington Post and columnist at Antiwar.com.

Gordon Prather

Iran Never Had a Nuke Weapons Program

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_12_05_prather.mp3]

Antiwar.com’s Dr. Gordon Prather explains his suspicions that the CIA doesn’t have any credible evidence that Iran ever had a nuclear weapons program to halt in 2003 and that the timing of the NIE may have been meant to undercut ElBaradei’s anticipated report to that effect later this month.

MP3 here. (35:01)

Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. – ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.