Antiwar.com Blog

Both from IOZ. On Christopher Hitchens:

[I]t’s always been the genius of Hitchens to set himself up in amorphous opposition to a perfectly rational, unremarkable belief, which he usually states with the clarity and concision of a wise advocate before tightening his haunches and beginning a wolf-howl of righteous derision – tuneless, frightening, and senseless.

On Andrew Sullivan:

Andrew Sullivan is an ardent disciple of Andrew Sullivan, and that latter Andrew Sullivan is an ardent disciple of a fungible series of interpretations that are remarkable for how closely they hew to whatever Andrew Sullivan is saying at the time.

Emi MacLean from the Center for Constitutional Rights discusses Friday’s New York Times story about Robert Gates’s attempt to have the Guantánamo prison closed and how he was thwarted by the attorney general and vice president, how at least two people were held there for two years after being determined to simply be refugees rather than terrorists, and her belief that many of the people there are innocent.

MP3 here. (10: 39)

Emi MacLean is a Legal Fellow with the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Stephen Grey, journalist and author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, discusses the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects to countries like Syria and Morocco in the war on whatever-they-call-it-now, the corruption of the CIA officers involved, the total lack of accountability, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abu Zubaydah.

MP3 here. (17:20)

Stephen Grey is a freelance journalist based in London, UK. He writes mainly about security issues and Iraq, for the Sunday Times of London, New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, the Atlantic Monthly and the BBC’s Newnight and BBC Radio Four.

James Bovard, author of a ton of great books, including Attention Deficit Democracy, talks about the fun he had at the DC antiwar protest back in January, his belief that the Attorney General is about to be fired, the Murray Waas’s story about his obstruction of the NSA wiretapping probe, the possibility that if more torture papers come out Bush may be removed from power, the pro-freedom conservatives, the White House Iraq Group, the craven American media, the U.S. attorney scandal, and the sickness of of former UN ambassador John Bolton and his self-congratulations at prolonging the Lebanon war.

MP3 here. (20:31)

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, 2006), and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, War Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. He is a contributing editor for the American Conservative and a frequent contributor to Freedom Daily.

The War Street Journal called Bovard “the roving inspector general of the modern state,” and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a “one-man truth squad.” His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.

His writings have been been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.

The District of Columbia is trying to fix its image, so it is spending $150,000 to choose a new motto for the city.  

A Washington Post article on the search for a catchy slogan made the mistake of permitting reader suggestions. Some of the initial proposals:

*Where Some Tourists Come to Die

*Zimbabwe Without the Passport

*Eat here and get shot

*The Most Self-Important City in the World

It would be great to come up with a motto for DC that captured Washington’s role as headquarters of the war machine & contemporary imperialism.   Suggestions are welcome at my blog here.

Here are some photos from the March 19 "Defund the War" rally at Speaker Pelosi’s office (taken by and thanks to Malcolm Garris).

The audio of the rally is available here.

Daniel Ellsberg opens the rally.

Justin Raimondo addresses the crowd.

Rabbi Michael Lerner addresses the crowd.

Eric Garris addresses the crowd.

Michael Austin and Anthony Gregory hold the Antiwar.com banner.

Some of the crowd of 300 outside Speaker Pelosi’s office.

Performers portraying Iraqi mothers and dead infants.

Homeland Security was there.