Monthly Archives: March 2008

The Show: Alan Bock

Alan Bock, columnist and the senior writer for the editorial page of the Orange County Register will be the featured guest tomorrow, 1:15PM Eastern.

Alan Bock will be discussing his recent column on Antiwar.com , Getting It Wrong Again.

Alan Bock has been a speaker at the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, the Drug Policy Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Freedom Summit, the Liberty Editors’ Conference and the Festival of Freedom. Prior to coming to the Register he spent eight years in Washington, D.C., where he worked for two congressmen and formed Libertarian Advocate, a libertarian lobbying organization whose organizing banquet featured speeches by Karl Hess and Wain Dawson.

The show airs Monday through Friday from 12PM-2PM Eastern on KAOS 92.7FM. Additional feeds and podcasts available at Antiwar Radio.

Antiwar Radio: Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz, journalist and Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook, discusses the history of the U.S. military’s various policies for and against various religious and political factions in Iraq over the past 5 years, Dick Cheney’s oil “control” motive for the war and the necessity of American withdrawal.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (8.7MB)

Update to WordPress 2.5

The site has been updated to WordPress 2.5, which has changed the dashboard considerably, and for the better. I am staying with the default WordPress dashboard theme for the forseeable future. WordPress’s lead designer, Matt Mullenweg, created a short screencast of himself using the new dashboard to post and add images or galleries to a post. This may answer any questions you have about how this is done. I encourage you all to take advantage of the new features. The screencast can be found here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-rc2/

The Show: Michael Schwartz

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook will be the featured guest on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio, 12:15PM Eastern, Monday, March 31. Listen live at KAOS 95.9FM.

Michael Schwartz will be discussing his article, How to Disintegrate a City.

Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on US business and government dynamics. His work has appeared at Asia Times, MotherJones.com, TomDispatch, and ZNet, and in Against the Current, Contexts, International Socialist Review, Socialist WorkerZ magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, and The Power Structure of American Business.

Antiwar Radio: Gareth Porter

Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist for IPS News, discusses the Iraqi Army’s targeting of the Mahdi Army, his suspicion that Cheney arranged this with Maliki on his recent trip, the doom this could spell for the occupation, Iran’s relative influence with the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps of the Hakim faction and the neoconservative propaganda that Iran backs al Qaeda.

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Antiwar Radio: David Case

Freelance journalist David Case discusses the U.S. government’s program of “targeted assassination” of terrorist suspects and Iraqi enemies, the results of the two major studies of the program (total failure), the U.S. war in Somalia, the lack of legal oversight, the more restrictive Israeli legal precedent, the difficulty of covering the story and overall counter-productive nature of the “War on Terror.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.3MB)

Amy Goodman Calls Out Borat O’Bomb-Ya

March 28, 2008

Amy Goodman Questions Sen. Obama on Heeding Iraqis’
Call for Full US Withdrawal

Following his speech on the economy at New York’s
Cooper Union, Amy Goodman asks Sen. Barack Obama why
he is not calling for a total withdrawal of US troops
from Iraq in accordance with the 70 percent of Iraqis
who say they want the US out. [includes rush
transcript]

Sen. Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate.
—————————————————–
AMY GOODMAN: Obama was speaking at the Cooper Union. I
had a chance to briefly interview him as he was
shaking people’s hands after he left the stage. I
asked Obama why he’s not calling for a total
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in accordance with
the 70 percent of Iraqis who say they want the US out.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Obama, quick question: 70 percent
of Iraqis say they want the US to withdraw completely;
why don’t you call for a total withdrawal?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I do, except for our embassy.
I call for amnesty and protecting our civilian
contractors there.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a residual force—

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Yeah, but—

AMY GOODMAN: —which means [inaudible] thousands
[inaudible].

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, no. I mean, I don’t think
that you’ve read exactly what I’ve said. What I said
is that we do need to have a strike force in the
region. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Iraq; it
could be in Kuwait or other places. But we do have to
have some presence in order to not only protect them,
but also potentially to protect their territorial
integrity.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you call for a ban on the private
military contractors like Blackwater?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually—I’m the one who
sponsored the bill that called for the investigation
of Blackwater in [inaudible], so—

AMY GOODMAN: But would you support the Sanders one
now?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem: we have 140,000
private contractors right there, so unless we want to
replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops,
we can’t draw down the contractors faster than we can
draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw—I
want them out in the same way that we make sure that
we draw out our own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I—

AMY GOODMAN: Not a ban?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don’t want to replace those
contractors with more US troops, because we don’t have
them, alright? But this was a speech about the
economy.

AMY GOODMAN: The war is costing $3 trillion, according
to Stiglitz.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That’s what—I know, which I made a
speech about last week. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Barack Obama at the
Cooper Union in New York.

————————–

“Boo, hoo, I don’t want to answer questions about the war anymore. This speech was about the economy.”

–Good for you, Ms. Goodman.

And thanks to Kev.

The Show: Gareth Porter, David Case

First hour, renowned historian Gareth Porter on warring Shi’ite factions.

Dr. Porter is the author of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. Tomorrow, 12:15PM Eastern.

At 1:15PM Eastern, David Case will be discussing his recent Mother Jones article, The U.S. Military’s Assassination Problem.

Case, a freelance journalist, has written for Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He was formerly the executive director of TomPaine.com. More of Case’s work can be found at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Tomorrow’s show can be heard live on KAOS 95.9FM or at Antiwar Radio by clicking “Listen to Scott Horton live (9-11am Pacific)” during the broadcast. Additional feeds and podcasts available at Antiwar Radio within 24 hours of air date.

Antiwar Radio: Jenny Eliscu

Jenny Eliscu, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and host of “Left of Center” on Sirius Radio, discusses the real life of the James Blake Miller, the “Marlboro Man” in the iconic photo from the 2nd Battle of Fallujah, the War Party’s spin which used him as a poster boy and the reality of the real man – broken by and opposed to the war, his PTSD symptoms, survivors guilt and the difficulty of getting help from the VA.

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Antiwar Radio: John McGlynn

Economic and financial analyst John McGlynn discusses the U.S. Government’s financial war against Iran’s banking system, the system of blackmail of banks around the world if they don’t fall in line, the example set when Treasury’s FinCen went after a Macau bank for dealing with North Korea in 2005, China’s role and the likely humanitarian consequences for the people of Iran.

MP3 here. (37:18)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (8.5MB)

Antiwar Radio: Spencer Ackerman

Spencer Ackerman, reporter for The Washington Independent, discusses the shame deserved by neo-crazy media sycophants Jeffery Goldberg and Stephen F. Hayes, who have both done so much to push the lie that Saddam Hussein was working with Osama bin Laden, the effect of the echo chamber on the inside of the media industry, how he got the war wrong and what he’s trying to do about it now and the fight between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps (aka “Iraqi Army”) and the failure of the surge.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (11.1MB)

The Show: Jenny Eliscu

Rolling Stone contributing editor Jenny Eliscu will be the featured guest on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio, Thursday, March 27 at 12:15PM Eastern. Eliscu will be discussing her recent Rolling Stone article, The Troubled Homecoming of the Marlboro Marine.

Eliscu is a contributing editor and music critic for Rolling Stone magazine. She hosts Left of Center on Sirius Satellite Radio. Eliscu is also the author of Schools that Rock: The Rolling Stone College Guide.

For the second hour, John McGlynn, an independent economic and financial analyst, will discuss, The March 20, 2008 US Declaration of War on Iran, from Japan Focus, an Asian Pacific e-journal.

Antiwar Radio: Eric Margolis

Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for the Canadian Sun National Media and author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet, discusses the history and present circumstances of Tibet’s relationship with China, the ethnic strife between Tibetans and ethnic Han Chinese, the Uighurs, America’s terrorism double standard, Tibet’s strategic importance in China’s posture with regard to India, the results of the recent elections in Taiwan, a suggestion for a reasonable compromise in Tibet, the truth about the escalation of the Iraq war and the remaining danger of war with Iran.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (10.1MB)

Antiwar Radio: Bob Barr

Former Congressman Bob Barr discusses the possibility of running for President on the Libertarian Party ticket, the necessity of a new political realignment of right and left to end the war in Iraq and protect the Bill of Rights, the importance of ending the current regime of torture and murder and the destruction of the rule of law which used to forbid such things and the authority of the Congress to decide on matters of war and peace.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (3.1MB)