Chalmers Johnson

Antiwar Radio: Chalmers Johnson

Former CIA analyst, and author of the trilogy Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic and now Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson discusses his books, and the ways Republics die: the English model of losing an empire without total self destruction and the Roman way of dictatorship and destruction which America seems to be following instead.

MP3 here.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley. He first visited Japan in 1953 as a U.S. Navy officer and has lived and worked there with his wife, the anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson, every year between 1961 and 1998.

Johnson has been honored with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and in 1976 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written numerous articles and reviews and some sixteen books, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power on the Chinese revolution, An Instance of Treason on Japan’s most famous spy, Revolutionary Change on the theory of violent protest movements, and MITI and the Japanese Miracle on Japanese economic development. This last-named book laid the foundation for the “revisionist” school of writers on Japan, and because of it the Japanese press dubbed him the “Godfather of revisionism.”

He was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS television series “The Pacific Century,” and he played a prominent role in the PBS “Frontline” documentary “Losing the War with Japan.” Both won Emmy awards. His most recent books are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which was published by Metropolitan in January 2004. Blowback won the 2001 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation.

Trita Parsi

Antiwar Radio: Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi, the President of the National Iranian-American Council, discusses the “surge” distraction from the impending war with Iran, Bush’s false claims about Iran killing Americans in Iraq, the Walter Jones resolution, why the U.S. ought to try talking Iran for a change and how the average Iranian feels about the U.S.

MP3 here.

Trita Parsi is the author of the forthcoming Treacherous Triangle: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007.) He wrote his Doctoral thesis on Israeli-Iranian relations under Professor Francis Fukuyama (and Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski, R. K. Ramazani, Jakub Grygiel, Charles Doran) at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 2006.

Dr. Parsi is one of the few people in the US – if not the only one – that has traveled both to Iran and Israel and interviewed top officials in these countries on the state of Israeli-Iranian relations. He has conducted more than 130 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American officials in all three countries. He is fluent in Persian/Farsi.

He has followed Middle East politics for more than a decade, both through work in the field, and through extensive experience on Capitol Hill and the United Nations.

Dr. Parsi’s articles on Middle East affairs have been published in the Financial Times, Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Globalist, the Jerusalem Post, the Forward, BitterLemons and the Daily Star.

He is a frequent commentator on US-Iranian relations and Middle Eastern affairs, and has appeared on BBC World News, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN (Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Anderson Cooper 360°), CNN International (Your World Today), Al Jazeera, C-Span, NPR, MSNBC, Voice of America and British Channel 4.

Ray McGovern

Antiwar Radio: Ray McGovern

Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains what a putz his former subordinate Robert Gates is, Tyler Drumheller‘s efforts to exclude the phony bio-weapons trucks information from Colin Powell’s speech and kidnap and torture human beings, the indictment of some of them by the Germans, the suppression of George “Slam Dunk” Tenet’s book, the likelihood of war with Iran, the possibility of a manufactured pretext for war, the lack of evidence for the accusations against them, Bush’s phony 4 terror busts, Israel’s nukes, their influence over American foreign policy.

MP3 here.

Former CIA official, Ray McGovern, has leveled serious accusations at the Bush administration in connection with the war in Iraq. McGovern served as a CIA analyst for almost 30 years. From 1981 to 1985 he conducted daily briefings for Vice President George Bush. He is a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Why They Hate Us: Some Examples

YouTube gives some examples of why Iraqis may have a less than positive view of US occupiers. I am not only amazed at what some of these videos show, but also the fact that the soldiers who shot the videos were apparently proud of their behavior.

Driving in Baghdad

I first saw this one on MSNBC. Col. Jack Jacobs explained that this is the way US forces in Iraq are now trained to drive in Baghdad.

US Soldiers Taunt Kids With Water

US soldiers conduct “kid races” where they use precious clean drinking water in the same way they use the fake rabbit at the greyhound races.

US Soldiers Punish Looters of Firewood

Speaks for itself.

It would be hard to argue that any of the victims in these videos were deserving of this behavior.

Chris Hedges

Antiwar Radio: Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, explains his view of the disaster in Iraq, the signs and likely consequences of the impending war with Iran and his new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

MP3 here.

Chris Hedges, currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges, who has reported from more than fifty countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. The book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was described by Abraham Verghese, who reviewed the book for The New York Times, as “…a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally.”

Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. The Free Press published his most recent book, Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America in June 2005. The book was inspired by the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski and his ten-part film series The Decalogue. Hedges writes about lives, including his own, which have been consumed by one of the violations or issues raised by a commandment. The Christian Century said of the book: “Far from the grandstanding around stone tablets in front of an Alabama courthouse comes Losing Moses on the Freeway, a refreshing reflection on the ten great Mosaic laws that is muted yet monumental in its own right.”

Hedges is also the author of What Every Person Should Know About War, a book he worked on with several combat veterans. Robert Pinsky, reviewing this book in The New York Times, called the book “…arresting, peculiar” and “significant.” “Neither jingoistic nor pacifist,” Pinsky wrote, “the book is about the moral authority of information, as it applies to the present and future nature of war.”

Hedges published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America in January 2007 with The Free Press. The Christian right is a movement the former seminarian has criticized in articles such as his cover story in the May 2005 issue of Harpers’ magazine called “Soldiers of Christ.”