Antiwar.com Blog

Thus grunts law professor Glenn Reynolds.

Peter Eisner discusses his new book The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq, how the forgeries came to be a major basis for America’s war of aggression in Iraq, how incredibly crude they were, how the already discredited documents “turned up” on Oct. 7, 2002, two day before the Congressional vote for Bush’s war “authorization,” how the CIA debunked the information prior to Bush’s Oct. 7, 2002, how Cheney’s neocon cabal kept bringing it up, leading to the Joe Wilson trip to Niger to debunk it once more, how the White House cut the CIA out of the speech-vetting process, how the Brits never had any more evidence than the same forgeries, his conclusion thus-far that the forgeries originated with a “rouge faction” at SISMI and the background of that organization.

MP3 here. (18: 50)

Peter Eisner is a deputy foreign editor at the Washington Post. He served as a foreign editor at Newsday from 1985 through 1989 and as the paper’s Latin America correspondent from 1989 through 1994. He was also a reporter, editor and bureau chief with the Associated Press. Eisner won the InterAmerican Press Association Award in 1991 for his investigations of drug trafficking in the Americas. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Robert MacNeil discusses the new PBS special series “America at the Crossroads,” the origin of the project, Martin Smith‘s Frontline contribution to the project about America training the Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Richard Perle’s bald face lies in defense of the mass slaughter he has perpetrated, Islam in Indonesia and the national government’s abuse of the PATRIOT Act.

MP3 here. (16:25)

Robert MacNeil was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1931, and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After graduating from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955, he moved to London, England, where he worked first for Reuters News Agency and then for the National Broadcasting Corporation. From 1963 to 1967, he was a correspondent for NBC in Washington and New York City. From 1967 to 1971, he covered American and European politics for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

After he returned to Washington, MacNeil co-anchored (with Jim Lehrer) coverage by the Public Broadcasting Service of the Senate Watergate Hearings, for which he won the first of several Emmy awards. In October 1975, he and Lehrer launched a half-hour nightly news program, “The Robert MacNeil Report with Jim Lehrer” (later “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report”), which dealt with a single issue each night. Eight years later, this innovative approach was expanded to “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” the first hour-long evening news program in the United States. “NewsHour” continues to earn major broadcasting awards a decade later.

Robert MacNeil has written several books, including The People Machine: The Influence of Television on American Politics, The Story of English (with Robert McCrum and William Cran) and two memoirs, The Right Place at the Right Time and Wordstruck. His first novel, Burden of Desire, is set in Nova Scotia during the First World War. He is currently completing a second novel.

John Cassidy discusses his new piece in the New Yorker magazine about Paul Wolfowitz and his reign at the World Bank, his ownership of the ongoing massacre in Iraq, his difficulty in controlling the Bank and the ability and unwillingness of the Congress to get rid of him.

MP3 here. (16:21)

John Cassidy, one of the country’s leading business journalists, has been a staff writer at the New Yorker for six years, covering economics and finance. Previously he was business editor of the Sunday Times (London) and deputy editor of the New York Post. He lives in New York.

Atrios (Via Lew Rockwell) has caught the Washington Post attempting to lie you into another war.

I had noticed a funny thing to make it into print in today’s Antiwar.com top story from the Christian Science Monitor while reading it on my radio show this morning. Dig this:

The US military also issued a statement on Sunday calling the operation in Diwaniyah, dubbed Black Eagle, a “great success” so far. It said it detained 39 militiamen and killed an unspecified number. It also has uncovered “many large caches of weapons,” including factories that make explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), devices that Washington accuses Tehran of supplying to Sadr’s militia.

You remember the EFPs right? The IEDs that are so powerful they got a brand new acronym a couple months back? The ones that, as the Monitor notes above, the U.S. government has accused Iran of supplying to the Iraqi Shi’ite militias that America and Iran are both currently backing? (Gareth Porter explains the truth about them here.)

Well, here was also this Reuters piece from Saturday which included the same information. The Post ran the story, but apparently one of their editors (liars) realized this might reveal the holes in War Party claims that these new “EFPs” must be coming from Iran. After all, here, supposedly, is a whole EFP factory just a few miles south of Baghdad.

The paragraphs revealing Iraqi EFP-self-reliance were then excised from Post version of the story.

“Red alert! Quick! Get out your Pravda penâ„¢ brand exacto-knives and get to work before some damn blogger catches us admitting the truth in contradiction to one more of our half-baked excuses for war against Iran!”

Too Late. You’re caught, discredited Washington Post liars. From Eschaton:

“Washington Post version of the story, as captured by Google News”:

That paragraph is now missing from that WaPo version of the story. But you do have this:

The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday. One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of device which Washington accuses Iran of supplying Iraqi militants. [AWC bold]

Am I supposed to believe that this was anything but a deliberate, premeditated act meant to deny the truth to people who may cite it as a reason to not have a war and replace it with more government lies?

The Post is forever disgraced and has been. This is just another nail in their coffin.

To any Post reporter who considers himself an actual journalist, why not pick today to resign from that War Party propaganda rag?

What? Do you think their reputation is going to get better from here?

Justin Raimondo discusses the failures of the American media, warmongers who misleadingly identify themselves as libertarians, the threat of war with Iran and the upcoming trial of AIPAC’s Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman for espionage.

MP3 here. (41:43)

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.