Antiwar.com Blog

Tucked away in an Associated Press story this morning:

Meanwhile, in Kut, 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad, 70 police officers resigned Sunday morning and handed over their weapons. They cited their fears of being targeted by Mahdi Army militants, police said.

Scott Ritter, author of Target Iran and Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement, discusses the irrationality of Bush’s Iraq policy, the Democrats betrayal of the Antiwar Left, Mitt Romney’s fit over ABC News’ reporting Cheney’s leak of the finding authorizing CIA action against Iran, the pretext of Iran’s nuclear program as the excuse to bomb them, Pelosi and Reid’s complicity in that upcoming war and John Boehner’s blubbering crocodile tears.

MP3 here. (19:18)

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.

Former NSC staffer Roger Morris discusses the pathetic American media, U.S. covert action in Iran, the sad state of 9/10 of the Republican candidates, and 7/8 of the Democrats, the growth of terrorism, why the 9/11 hijackers did it, the ignorance of the U.S. population, and the overthrow of Mossedeq.

MP3 here. (15:07)

Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, and writes this Rumsfeldian history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive research. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute, where his work originally appears. He is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note blog and the New America Foundation discusses his contribution to the final destruction of the career of Paul Wolfowitz.

MP3 here. (9:38)

Steven Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote a new American internationalism that combines a tough-minded realism about America’s interests in the world with a pragmatic idealism about the kind of world order best suited to America’s democratic way of life. He is also a Senior Fellow at New America, and previously served as Executive Vice President.

Publisher of the popular political blog The Washington Note, Mr. Clemons is a long-term policy practitioner and entrepreneur in Washington, D.C. He has served as Executive Vice President of the Economic Strategy Institute, Senior Policy Advisor on Economic and International Affairs to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and was the first Executive Director of the Nixon Center.

Prior to moving to Washington, Mr. Clemons served for seven years as Executive Director of the Japan America Society of Southern California, and co-founded with Chalmers Johnson the Japan Policy Research Institute, of which he is still Director. He is a Member of the Board of the Clarke Center at Dickinson College, a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pa., as well as an Advisory Board Member of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. He is also a Board Member of the Global Policy Innovations Program at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and a member of the board of the Citizens for Global Solutions Education Fund.

Mr. Clemons writes frequently on matters of foreign policy, defense, and international economic policy. His work has appeared in many of the major leading op-ed pages, journal, and magazines around the world.

Executive Director of the ACLU In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror discusses Congress’ destruction of the “Great Writ,” habeas corpus with the Military Commissions Act, which he identifies as the single greatest threat to America’s heritage of liberty and limited government power, widespread electronic spying on American citizens, how even John Ashcroft opposed the program.

MP3 here.

Anthony D. Romero is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation’s premier defender of liberty and individual freedom. He took the helm of the 87-year-old organization just four days before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Shortly after, the ACLU launched its national Safe and Free campaign to protect basic freedoms during a time of crisis. Under Romero’s leadership, the ACLU gained court victories on the Patriot Act and filed landmark litigation on the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. Most recently, the ACLU successfully challenged the Bush administration’s illegal spying program.

Romero, an attorney with a history of public-interest activism, has presided over the most successful membership growth in the ACLU’s history and more than doubled the budget and national staff of the organization since he began his tenure. This unprecedented growth has allowed the ACLU to expand its litigation, lobbying and public education efforts, including new initiatives focused on racial justice, religious freedom, privacy, reproductive freedom and lesbian and gay rights.

Romero is the ACLU’s sixth executive director, and the first Latino and openly gay man to serve in that capacity. In 2005, Romero was named one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America, and has received dozens of public service awards and an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York School of Law.

Born in New York City to parents who hailed from Puerto Rico, Romero was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He is a graduate of Stanford University Law School and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs. He is a member of the New York Bar Association and has sat on numerous nonprofit boards.

For the third time this week, a retired CIA officer has told Antiwar Radio that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is the driving force in al Qaeda’s recruitment and motivation for attacking America on September 11th.

Ray McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, when asked Friday afternoon what he thought of the exchange between Congressman Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani said (at 23:45 out of 43:23)

MP3 here.

“I’m really edified by Ron Paul stepping up and stating what he believes to be the case.

“If you believe that they hate us for our democracy or for our freedoms, well I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn that I’d really like to sell you at a cut rate.

“They hate us for our policies and that’s what Ron Paul was saying. …

“Giuliani … really showed his true colors there as a demagogue.”

Earlier this week Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit and Philip Giraldi, another former CIA counter-terrorism officer, made much the same statements to Antiwar Radio.

McGovern then made the common analogy of terrorists and mosquitos and why the policy should be to “drain the swamp.” But rather than advising more invasions in the name of swamp draining as the Bush administration has maintained is their policy, McGovern says you want to remove the circumstances which create terrorism, by “find[ing] out where these terrorists are breeding.”

“[There is a] swamp of grievances dating back decades: Three generations of people living in the equivalent of concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza, dictatorial regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other places.

“If you look at those grievances and instead of trying to shoot those terrorists as they leave that swamp, you drain that swamp by addressing those grievances and giving these people some reason to hope for a better future. …

“People will come back and say, ‘Now Ray, for God’s sake, Osama bin Laden doesn’t give a darn about the Palestinians.’ Well, that doesn’t matter whether he does or he doesn’t. He knows the kind of resonance that kind of appeal has.”

McGovern then quoted the 9/11 Commission Report regarding the motivation of Kahlid Sheik Mohammad, the ringleader of the September 11th attacks:

“Kahlid Sheik Mohammad was motivated not by any antipathy resulting from his stay in the United States [where he had attended college years before], but by his profound hatred for U.S. policy toward Israel – favoring Israel one-sidedly.”

McGovern then summarized a footnote in the back of the 9/11 Commission Report as saying:

“These are practically the exact words of what Ramzi Yousef – Kahlid Sheik Mohammad’s nephew – used in bragging about his pride in being condemned to 140 years in a federal penitentiary for trying to knock down one of the Twin Towers back in 1993.”

That is indeed what Yousef said.

Also discussed: How the 9/11 Commission whitewashed the role of U.S. Israel policy in their report, How the Dick Cheney-neoconservative cabal lied us into war in Iraq and Tenet’s failure to stop them, the history of the “crazies in the basement,” Bush Jr.’s relationship with Cheney in light of Steve Clemons’ scoop about Dick Cheney’s efforts to force a war with Iran in an end run around the President, Brent Scowcroft’s statement that Ariel Sharon had Bush wrapped around his little finger and why he made it, Cheney’s twisted motivations for the exercise of his power, the interest which put Cheney firmly in the camp of the Israel Lobby over most of the rest of the establishment and why he hasn’t completely given up on the Democrats.