Antiwar.com Blog

Ivan Eland, author of The Empire Has No Clothes, Antiwar.com columnist and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the Independent Institute explains America’s policy toward Pakistan and how it has that country on the path to be taken over by religious types, the lack of a hunt for bin Laden and Zawahiri, the failures and fraud of American empire, why Ron Paul is right about the roots of anti-American terrorism, and hopes for a realignment among the Old Right and New Left in opposition to our country’s state of perpetual war.

MP3 here.

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. Having received his Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University, Dr. Eland has served as Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge for the U.S. General Accounting Office (national security and intelligence), and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He has testified on NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee.

Dr. Eland is the author of Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World and forty-five studies on national security issues. His articles have appeared in Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology, Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. His popular writings have been published in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, and Chicago Sun-Times. He has appeared on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” CNN’s “Crossfire,” Fox News, CNBC, CNN-fn, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, CBC, BBC, and other national and international TV and radio programs.

His column appears Tuesdays on Antiwar.com.

The Christian Science Monitor‘s Warren Richey covers the trial of Jose Padilla and his fellow accused.

MP3 here.

Warren Richey is the Miami and Washington staff reporter for the Christian Science Monitor.

Independent Institute senior fellow and Antiwar.com columnist Charles Peña discusses the most-likely false terrorist threat in the case of the Ft. Dix six, and how America ought to handle the real terrorist threat.

MP3 here. (40:58)

Charles V. Peña is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a senior fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project, and an analyst for MSNBC television. He has also appeared on CNN, Fox News, NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and The McLaughlin Group, as well as international television and radio. Peña is the co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against al-Qaeda, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

His articles have been published by Reason; The American Conservative; The National Interest; Mediterranean Quarterly; Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics, & Public Policy; Journal of Law & Social Change (University of San Francisco); Nexus (Chapman University); and Issues in Science & Technology (National Academy of Sciences).

His exclusive column appears every other Wednesday on Antiwar.com.

Oprah’s going to Israel at Elie Wiesel’s invitation. Fine by me. But then there’s this:

Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Gillerman, who attended the event, said that a visit of a figure with such influence on the international media could help bring an end to the indifference towards the terror threat faced by Israelis.

Yeah, that’s some indifference.

(Ynet link via Jonathan Schwarz.)

Via Michael Ledeen’s blog, I see that the look-how-many-Iraqi-potholes-we’ve-filled meme lives on in the pro-war blogosphere, long after even Arthur Chrenkoff quit, um, “Chrenkin’ off”:

Glenn Reynolds has an email from Michael Yon, the great milblogger and photographer who may have been the first reporter to suggest that there was a “civil war” going on in Iraq. In short, he’s no apologist for W. His email to the Instapundit is quite dramatic, since he reports on the absence of violence. No shooting, no rockets, no mortars, every now and then an IED. Almost apologetically he says “I have no bad news to report today.”

And here’s the part that popped open my sleepy eyes:

In addition to basic services being restored, the city of Hit has rebuilt its library. Citizens had stored away the books during the war here. They are preparing to re-stock the library.

Just compare those three simple declarative sentences to the stereotype of Iraqi Arabs as unbeknighted, ignorant barbarians who could not possibly govern themselves.

Speaking of ignorance – since Ledeen is what passes for a brain among the warbots – there’s no such word as “unbeknighted,” or even “beknighted.” The word he’s looking for here is “benighted,” meaning unenlightened. Of course, if the Iraqis were stereotyped as “unbenighted,” that would be a compliment, so Ledeen, as usual, is peddling nonsense squared, wrapped in illiteracy.

As the Pentagon announced the deaths of 10 more US soldiers in Iraq on Memorial Day, May has become the worst month since 2004.

At the end of the month, May 2007 had the highest death toll for US troops (124) since November 2004.

With White House plans to double the number of combat troops in Iraq by Christmas, these numbers are unfortunately likely to continue to rise.