Antiwar.com Blog

Joshua Frank, author of Left Out: How Liberals Helped Re-elect George W. Bush, explains the relationships between the major Democratic presidential candidates and the Israel Lobby and the negative consequences.

MP3 here. (28:39)

Joshua Frank was born and raised in Montana and and now lives in New York. He is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush published by Common Courage Press (2005) and co-editor along with Jeffrey St. Clair of the forthcoming Red State Rebels to be published by AK Press in March of 2008.

He has appeared as a political commentator on MSNBC as well as numerous radio programs. His investigative reports and columns have appeared in many publications, among them: CounterPunch, Z Magazine, Alternet, Guerrilla News Network, Lew Rockwell, Common Dreams, Antiwar.com, Clamor, Metro New York, Green Left Weekly, Left Turn Magazine, and Anderson Valley Advertiser.

He has also contributed essays for several books: Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils published by CounterPunch/AK Press (2004). Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate published by Haymarket Books (2006). Beyond Borders published by Worth Publishers (2006). As well as the introduction to Ward Churchill’s forthcoming book, Speaking Truth in the Teeth of Power, to be published by AK Press in early 2007.

Joshua Frank edits BrickBurner.org, and along with Kim Petersen and Sunil Sharma, DissidentVoice.org.

A slick White House flack clarifies the war’s progress on CNN: “We’re still at the input stage.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space, discusses the incredible amount of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and Russia and the non-threats of Iran and North Korea, Reagan and Gorbachev’s near agreement to abolish them in 1987, the danger of Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of Taliban types, Israel’s nukes, what a 20-megaton H-bomb would do to Phoenix, Three Mile Island, the damage at the local nuclear plant, and hears from a caller – a former U.S. military nuclear missile launcher – how she changed his life.

MP3 here. (16:54)

Dr. Helen Caldicott is founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. For over 35 years, Dr. Caldicott has been active in spreading information about the hazards of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. The organization she co-founded in 1978, Physicians for Social Responsibility, was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, and a documentary based on a lecture she gave in 1981, on the topic of nuclear war, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (short) in 1982. Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1938, she currently divides her time between Australia and the U.S. For more information about Helen Caldicott.

Marjorie Cohn discusses the firing of the U.S. attorneys, particularly Carol Lamm (the one who prosecuted Duke Cunningham and Dusty Foggo), the new PATRIOT Act provision that makes it so that the Attorney General can appoint new U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation, Gonzales’s Soviet theory of state-granted rights and his lifting of the phrase “quaint and obsolete” in regards to torture provisions in the Geneva Conventions from the German Nazis.

MP3 here. (9:05)

Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law. She lectures throughout the world on human rights and US foreign policy.

Giuliana Sgrena discusses her new book, Friendly Fire: The Remarkable Story of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq, Rescued by an Italian Secret Service Agent, and Shot by U.S. Forces, the circumstances of her captivity and release, how U.S. troops shot her and her rescuers as she was finally on her way to safety and why they should have known who she was at the time of the shooting.

MP3 here. (16:44)

On February 4, 2005, while reporting in Iraq for the Italian daily newspaper Il Manifesto, leading Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was kidnapped by a group of Iraqis and held hostage for one month. On the day of her release, as she was being escorted to Baghdad International Airport by Italian security, U.S. forces fired on her vehicle. The attack killed Major General Nicola Calipari, the number two man in Italian military intelligence, as he shielded Sgrena.

Murray Waas, one of the best investigative journalists in DC, has a new piece on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s role in derailing a Justice Department investigation of his own possible criminality. Waas notes at the National Journal:

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.

Waas’s superb work greatly advanced the exposure of the White House’s role in smearing an undercover CIA agent. And Waas may now have an even bigger fish – especially if Bush knew that Gonzo was a target of the investigation that Bush derailed.

Comments/condemnations welcome at my blog here.