Antiwar.com Blog

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.

In response to Aaron Glantz’s Friday article “Congressman Trades Iraq Vote for Spinach,” Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-OR) asked that we run his reply. Glantz charged that Rep. DeFazio, who had previously opposed Iraq war funding bills, “decided to vote for President Bush’s most recent funding request after Congressional leaders added 400 million dollars in funding for rural schools.”

Here is Rep. DeFazio’s reponse:

I was an early, outspoken and consistent opponent of the war in Iraq. I doubted claims of WMD and ties to al-Qaeda. As the deception regarding the aluminum tubes and uranium for Niger began to unravel the WMD allegations, Rep. Ron Paul and I introduced a bill in February 2003 to repeal the use of force resolution passed by Congress. I first proposed a plan to negotiate a timeline to end the war to the president in February 2005.

However, unlike some other Out of Iraq Caucus members, I made the difficult choice to vote for the three previous supplementals to provide essential equipment (not preprovided by the Bush team) and support for the troops. It was a much easier call for me to vote for this emergency supplemental since it both provided essential equipment to the troops and an enforceable deadline to end the war. To say the least, it’s more than a bit of a stretch to take a staff member’s comments out of context and imply that my vote hinged upon a domestic spending addition to the bill.

It was the right vote, a vote to set an end to a war launched with massive deception that should never have been fought. Any suggestion that I had another motive for supporting the bill is flat out wrong.

Responses to the Rep. DeFazio may be sent via his contact form.

Bill Kelsey talks about his time as a pilot for an NGO, flying relief missions in Uganda, Sudan and Afghanistan.

MP3 here. (37:29)

Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal discusses his recent TomDispatch column “Four Years Later… and Counting” about the terrible destruction America has wrought in Iraq and prospects for a new political realignment against Empire and the central state here at home.

MP3 here. (35:55)

Anthony Arnove is the editor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the long-awaited primary-source companion to A People’s History of the United States. He is also editor of Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War and a collection of interviews with Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War. An activist based on Brooklyn, New York, he is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and Haymarket Books, and is a member of the National Writers Union and the International Socialist Organization. He also has contributed to The Struggle for Palestine and has written for Z Magazine, The Nation, In These Times, Monthly Review, the Financial Times, and other publications.