Month: April 2007

Antiwar.com regular and Foreign Follies author Doug Bandow dismisses our government’s ridiculous narrative about why the Terroristsâ„¢ are at war with the United States.

MP3 here. (39:06)

Doug Bandow is a Washington-based political writer and policy analyst and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and as a senior policy analyst in the 1980 Reagan for President campaign.

He has been widely published in leading newspapers and periodicals and has appeared on numerous radio and television shows. He has written and edited several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire (Xulon Press), The Korean Conundrum: America’s Troubled Relations with North and South Korea (Palgrave/Macmillan, coauthor), Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World (Cato), Perpetuating Poverty: The World Bank, the IMF, and the Developing World (Cato, coeditor), and Military Manpower and Human Resources (National Defense University). His latest book is Foreign Follies (Dimension Press).

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains just what a horrible Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet was: Really horrible. Also, Dick Durbin’s folly.

MP3 here. (36:05)

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years – from the John F. Kennedy administration to that of George H. W. Bush.

Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli scientist who exposed the secret of Israel’s nukes, was recently convicted, according to this Reuters report, of “giving a slew of interviews to international media outlets over the past three years, defying a government order on him to limit contacts with foreigners.”

It’s worth remembering the mantra we always hear from American supporters of Israel: the Jewish state, they say, is the only democracy in the region: why, they’re just like us, a free country. But are they? When giving an interview to a blogger is a “crime,” one has to wonder about the meaning of such a comparative analysis.

After spending 18 years in jail, with over 11 of those years spent in solitary confinement, this prisoner of Zion was released but forbidden to speak to the media, and denied permission to leave Israel. Just like those Soviet Jews of days gone by, who were kept inside the USSR against their will. Israel, a refuge for Jews, has become a prison for this particular one — but where is the international outcry? After all, Vanunu hasn’t revealed anything that we all didn’t know anyway: that Israel does indeed posssess nuclear weapons, and his recent interviews have merely been reiterations of his 1986 chat with the Times of London.

The treatment of Vanunu is outrageous, and no civilized person can condone it, regardless of their opinion of the Israeli government or its policies. The U.S. government, watching this spectacle of deliberate cruelty in silence, further blackens an already dark reputation in the region.

Nikolas K. Gvosdek, editor of The National Interest and a senior fellow at the Nixon Center, points out in the Washington Realist that Georgia, Ukraine, Albania, Croatia and Macedonia are the recent recipients of billions in largesse from the U.S. Congress, with the funds slated for upgrading their militaries and putting them on a fast track to full NATO membership. The “NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007” was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush with “almost no debate,” bringing “together members of the legislature who otherwise never stand shoulder to shoulder on other foreign policy issues—including Iraq.” Why this strange comity when it comes to the expansion of an alliance that has long since lost its original rationale? “Whereas the creation of the alliance itself back in the 1940s was hotly and vigorously discussed,” notes Gvosdek, “the extension of NATO’s geographic reach as well as its commitments to new states is now apparently not a matter for serious dialogue. Why?”

The reason is all too apparent. Albania, say, cannot just join NATO: aside from jumping through all sorts of procedural and political hoops, the Albanians must upgrade their armed forces to meet NATO standards. And they can’t do that without first buying a lot of expensive equipment from American arms manufacturers. The billions in “foreign aid” going to these aspiring NATO nations is a direct subsidy to America’s military-industrial complex, a gift from Congress to Lockheed-Martin.

That‘s why ….

Antiwar.com columnist Philip Giraldi will appear on tonight’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann. The show airs at 8 p.m. Eastern.

Journalist and historian Gareth Porter explains the the massive loopholes in the Democrat’s bogus withdrawal plan, the false premise of both parties that al Qaeda in Iraq would be anything but doomed if the U.S. left, the question of neocon malevolence versus incompetence, the possibility of war with Iran, whether talks with that country could just be used as a further excuse for war when they “fail,” the first Democratic presidential debate blues and the common assumption that if the U.S. did leave, that the civil war will get worse.

MP3 here. (41:00)

Gareth Porter is a historian. His latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press).