Leslie Lefkow, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, discusses the worsening situation in Somalia since the 2006 Ethiopian invasion, the media’s preference for reporting on piracy instead of humanitarian disasters, the appearance that the U.S. helped destabilize Somalia simply to apprehend a few suspects from the 1998 embassy bombings, how the U.S. is more careful distributing food-aid than weapons, increasing Al Shabaab radicalism, Ethiopia’s hosting of extraordinary rendition victims and the extreme risks journalists and human rights activists take in Somalia.

For those interested – a short list of news sources that cover Africa more in depth: Voice of America, BBC, Garowe Online, Al Jazeera.

MP3 here. (40:45)

Leslie Lefkow, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, has specialized expertise on Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Lefkow focuses on investigating and documenting abuses in Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, abuses in armed conflicts, and other issues requiring rapid response in sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining Human Rights Watch, she worked as a humanitarian affairs advisor in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Lefkow is a graduate of Columbia Law School and Bryn Mawr College.

Tim Wise, director of the movie Soldiers of Peace, discusses the worldwide outbreak of peace (really!), reconciliation of Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, ending the vicious cycle of tribal retribution, ranking the benevolence of nations with a Global Peace Index and how free trade and open communication decrease the likelihood of war.

MP3 here. (30:05)

Tim Wise is the director of the documentary movie Soldiers of Peace. Tim has freelanced for all the major news networks around the world focusing on ‘Hard Access’ news stories. From his base in London, where he lived for 10 years, Tim worked on a wide range of assignments for such networks as BBC TV, CH4 News, SABC South Africa, EOTV Holland, NHK Hong Kong, ABC Australia ‘Foreign Correspondent’ & ‘Four Corners”, WTN London, DRTV Denmark, Focus Germany, RTL and ZDF Germany.

During this time, Tim traveled to some of the most dangerous countries in the world including Iraq, Bosnia, Northern Sri-Lanka, East Timor, Liberia, Colombia, Southern Sudan, Burma and East India. He also did a series of filming stints working undercover from China, Kurdistan, Burma and Sri-Lanka.

In 2003 Tim was involved in the making of the international award-winning documentary ‘Child Soldiers’ for ABC TV Australia where he spent 2 weeks living with one of the child soldier units of the SPLA rebels of Southern Sudan. In Assam in East India Tim gained unprecedented access to the ULFA rebels, the first western journalist to ever do so in the 18 years that ULFA had been in existence. Tim was smuggled into their secret bases inside Bhutan and went out on operations with the rebels as they fought with the Indian Army. He was also smuggled inside Burma with the ABSDF student rebels while making an ABC Four Corners report.

Tim has also freelanced for the Award winning SBS TV show ‘Dateline’ where he reported from Northern Uganda covering the LRA rebels – The Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, that has abducted over 30,000 children and forced boys as young as 10 into becoming child soldiers and girls to become porters, cooks and sex slaves for the top LRA commanders.

Tim is now the CEO of the documentary production company One Tree Films, which was established in 2006 with founder Steve Killelea. The core aims is to produce world-class documentaries focusing on social issues. Soldiers of Peace is their first film together.

Internationally syndicated columnist Eric Margolis discusses the terrorist safe-haven and failed state of Somalia, U.S. mission creep on the African continent, the questionable legal authority of assassination via airstrike, Afghanistan’s fraudulent election and popular discontent in Pakistan against U.S. influence.

MP3 here. (33:56)

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and Dawn. He is a regular columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and a contributor to The Huffington Post. He appears as an expert on foreign affairs on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and CBC.

As a war correspondent Margolis has covered conflicts in Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Sinai, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, Pakistan, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He was among the first journalists to ever interview Libya’s Muammar Khadaffi and was among the first to be allowed access to KGB headquarters in Moscow. A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq.

Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet and American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.

Internationally syndicated columnist Eric Margolis discusses Mike Huckabee’s opinion that there are no Palestinians, the financial-military-industrial complex, the exclusion of occupation opponents from the Afghan elections and how the U.S. is pushing for independent Kurdish and South Sudanese states.

MP3 here. (41:33)

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and Dawn. He is a regular columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and a contributor to The Huffington Post. He appears as an expert on foreign affairs on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and CBC.

As a war correspondent Margolis has covered conflicts in Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Sinai, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, Pakistan, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He was among the first journalists to ever interview Libya’s Muammar Khadaffi and was among the first to be allowed access to KGB headquarters in Moscow. A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq.

Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet and American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.

Chris Floyd, author of Empire Burlesque – High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, discusses U.S. drug interdiction in Afghanistan that is more about playing favorites than eradication, how Obama is following the game plan of the worst president in recent history, the background behind Somalia’s humanitarian disaster and the U.S. gift of 80 tons of weapons to Somalia’s black market.

MP3 here. (37:35)

Chris Floyd operates a website and blog at chris-floyd.com. He is the author of Empire Burlesque – High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium.

Kelley B. Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, discusses how the CIA successfully undermined Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union and created something much worse, the paltry U.S. troop contingent in Afghanistan compared to the 600,000 troops needed to pacify the country, the generally counterproductive Global War on Terror and how military failures become justifications for expanded and prolonged occupations.

MP3 here. (26:54)

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime political reporter for FoxNews.com, a contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine and featured Antiwar.com columnist.

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell during his tenure as Secretary of State, discusses how the Bush administration ignored the perfectly adequate Geneva Conventions guidelines for classifying war-zone detainees, the ethical and practical considerations of detaining and interrogating innocent civilians to “fight terror,” the counterclaim to Dick Cheney’s assertion that torture prevents terrorism and the end of an Israel/Palestine two state solution. Wilkerson also says he would cooperate with the prosecution of Dick Cheney for war crimes – not that that would ever happen.

MP3 here. (30:10)

Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is chairman of the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative and wrote “Some Truths About Guantanamo” as a guest post on The Washington Note.

Doug Bandow, author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire, discusses the Bush administration’s foreign policy legacy, why maintaining a U.S. military presence in S. Korea makes less sense than ever, the difficulty of negotiating alternative U.S. supply routes to Afghanistan while taking a hard line on Russia and Iran, the high cost in Iraqi lives for their “liberation” from one authoritarian government to another and the demise of Bush’s two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

MP3 here. (21:45)

Doug Bandow is a recent addition to the Cato Institute. His new and archived articles can be found at Antiwar.com/bandow.

Joshua Frank, contributor to Antiwar.com, Counterpunch and DissidentVoice, and co-editor (with Jeffery St. Clair) of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, discusses the continuing need for a political realignment against empire, the dangers associated with Obama’s stated intentions of saving it while many former antiwar voices are diluted by love for the new emperor.

MP3 here. (38:57)

Joshua Frank is a contributor to Antiwar.com, Counterpunch and DissidentVoice, and co-editor (with Jeffery St. Clair) of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland.

Philip Hammond, author of “Darfur: the Dangers of Celebrity Imperialism” in the Spiked Review of Books, discusses the folly of liberal “humanitarian” interventionism, why complicated conflicts like that in the Darfur region of Sudan are often described as “genocide” and why waging empire in the name of helping people never does any such thing.

MP3 here. (36:16)

Philip Hammond, a senior lecturer in media and communications at London South Bank University, is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity.