Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer and current Salon.com blogger, discusses the Republican brouhaha about the Islamic non-profit CAIR, the ease of tarnishing reputations with “unindicted  co-conspirator” designations, vitriolic anti-Islam bigotry in Congress and the pervasive fear of an Islamic takeover of the U.S.

MP3 here. (12:38)

Glenn Greenwald was a constitutional lawyer in New York City, first at the Manhattan firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and then at the litigation firm he founded, Greenwald, Christoph. Greenwald litigated numerous high-profile and significant constitutional cases in federal and state courts around the country, including multiple First Amendment challenges. He has a J.D. from New York University School of Law (1994) and a B.A. from George Washington University (1990). In October of 2005, Greenwald started a political and legal blog, Unclaimed Territory, which quickly became one of the most popular and highest-trafficked in the blogosphere.

Upon disclosure by the New York Times in December 2005 of President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program, Greenwald became one of the leading and most cited experts on that controversy. In early 2006, he broke a story on his blog regarding the NSA scandal that served as the basis for front-page articles in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, all of which credited his blog for the story. Several months later, Sen. Russ Feingold read from one of Greenwald’s posts during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Feingold’s resolution to censure the president for violating FISA. In 2008, Sen. Chris Dodd read from Greenwald’s Salon blog during floor debate over FISA. Greenwald’s blog was also cited as one of the sources for the comprehensive report issued by Rep. John Conyers titled “The Constitution in Crisis.” In 2006, he won the Koufax Award for best new blog.

Greenwald is the author of A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok and Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, discusses the anti-occupation motives of terrorists, the similarities of extremists that transcend religion and culture, how a U.S. economic collapse could usher in a popular uprising of the Christian Right, the desperate and mostly ignored situation in the Gaza Strip and the terrible consequences of a war with Iran.

MP3 here. (36:03)

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, senior fellow at The Nation Institute, lecturer at Princeton University and the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.

Eric Margolis, author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World, discusses the Mumbai terrorist attacks, India’s numerous enemies both foreign and domestic, the 2002 Gujarat province massacre of Indian Muslims, the sixty year long battle over Kashmir and the risk of an India-Pakistan nuclear war.

MP3 here. (48:24)

Eric Margolis is a foreign correspondent and columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.

Jon Basil Utley, director of Americans Against World Empire, discusses the true costs of the war and staggering defense budget, the many hidden earmarks Congress rewards itself, the role of the empire in the financial meltdown, the many new enemies being created around the world, Americans’ love of war and the end of the empire.

MP3 here. (41:31)

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative and Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A former correspondent for Knight Ridder in South America, Utley has written for the Harvard Business Review on foreign nationalism and was for 17 years a commentator on the Voice of America. He is director of Americans Against World Empire.

Robert A. Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, discusses his database of every suicide terrorist attack on earth since 1980, what it shows about the role of religion and occupation in motivating suicide terrorism, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the amount of truth discernible from social science, the suicide bombing campaign in Iraq and spread around the world since the Iraq invasion, the motivation of the Japanese Kamikazes, the suicide attacks of the Jewish Zealots against Roman occupation 2,000 years ago, the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, the importance in the difference in religion of the occupiers and occupied, the illogical Obama/McCain consensus on escalating the war in Afghanistan and now Pakistan, the example of Hezbollah’s suicide campaign against Israeli/French/American forces in Lebanon, the profile of the individual suicide bomber, why fighting them over there makes us less safe here, Adam Gadahn and the real, human, political reasons he sites in al Qaeda recruitment videos, and why Paul Wolfowitz got it wrong even on the one occasion he was right.

MP3 here. (51:57)

Robert A. Pape is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in international security affairs. His publications include Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House 2005); Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell 1996), “Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work,” International Security (1997), “The Determinants of International Moral Action,” International Organization (1999); “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review (2003); and “Soft Balancing against the United States,” International Security (2005). His commentary on international security policy has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, as well as on Nightline, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and National Public Radio. Before coming to Chicago in 1999, he taught international relations at Dartmouth College for five years and air power strategy for the USAF’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies for three years. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1988 and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pittsburgh in 1982. His current work focuses on the causes of suicide terrorism and the politics of unipolarity.

Jeff Huber, blogger at Pen and Sword and At-Largely and author of Bathtub Admirals, discusses the empire’s disaster in Iraq, the danger of the Afghan occupation spreading into Pakistan, the unconstitutional “war powers act,” the difficulty of being an empire with no one but defenseless people to fight, the John McCain pathology of trying to win the Vietnam war by killing Iraqis, the so-called clash of civilizations and the pure evil that is Dick Cheney.

MP3 here. (34:21)

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) commanded an E-2C Hawkeye squadron and was operations officer of a Navy air wing and an aircraft carrier. Jeff’s essays have been required reading at the U.S. Naval War College where he earned a master of arts degree in neoconservative studies in 1995. His satires on military and foreign policy affairs appear at Military.com, Aviation Week and Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon of America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Steve Connors and Molly Bingham discuss their movie “Meeting Resistance” about the Sunni occupation resistance, how Saddam Hussein’s capture freed more Iraqis to fight against the Americans, the psych-ops aimed at America framing the insurgents as social outcasts instead of the normal citizens they are, the complex interplay between the Iraqi, Iranian and American factions in Iraq, the similarity in the way the West and Islamic traditions venerate war dead and the difficulty they had in getting the film made.

MP3 here. (42:18)

Steve Connors was born in Sheffield, England. He began taking photographs while serving as a British soldier in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s. After leaving the military in 1984 he worked for London newspapers and housing charities, but maintained a preference for photographing the quirkiness of British life.

At the end of 1989 Connors started traveling – first to Czechoslovakia as the communist government fell and then into Sri Lanka in 1990. Connors spent the early1990s covering the wars following the break-up of Yugoslavia and later spending time in Russia and the former Soviet Union as the euphoria of a new age gave way to the miserable realities of economic meltdown. Connors has worked for most of the worlds’ newspapers and magazines including Time, Newsweek, The New York Times in the United States; The Guardian, The Observer and The Telegraph in London and in Europe he has worked for Der Spiegel, Stern and Paris Match among others. Connors spent fifteen months from November 2001 on in Afghanistan. Starting during the invasion, he went to Iraq, and spent fourteen months there total, working ten months solidly on Meeting Resistance, Connors’ directorial debut.

Molly Bingham was born in Kentucky and graduated from Harvard College in 1990. She began working as a photojournalist in earnest in 1994, traveling to Rwanda in the wake of the genocide. She spent a good amount of her energies for the following four years focused on the regional fallout of that event. Aside from her photojournalistic work, Bingham has also completed two special projects for Human Rights Watch – one on Burundi and another on small arms trafficking in Central Africa. From 1998 through 2001 Bingham worked as Official Photographer to the Office of the Vice President of the United States.

In 2001 Bingham returned to work in Central Africa, producing a story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine (published in August 2001) on the mineral “coltan” that is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In Washington on September 11 Bingham got some of the only close up pictures of the Pentagon, and followed the story of America’s response to the 9/11 attacks to Afghanistan later in the fall. 2002 found Bingham in the Gaza Strip and Iran before heading to Iraq shortly before the US attack in March 2003. Bingham was detained for eight days by the Iraqi government security services and held in Abu Ghraib prison with four other westerners during the war, and released to Jordan in early April 2003. Bingham’s first major written story – on the Iraqi resistance – was published in Vanity Fair in July 2004. Bingham teamed up with Connors in August of 2003 to begin a film about who was behind the emerging post-war violence in Iraq.

Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for Canada’s Sun National Media and author of the brand new American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World, discusses the importance of maintaining level-headed relations with Russia, the consequences of U.S. support for Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, Pakistan’s decreasing stability and our increased interference, the beginning of the “pipeline security wars,” the war party’s bogus explanations of the causes of terrorism and the Arab world’s former admiration for America.

MP3 here. (53:24)

Award winning author, columnist, and broadcaster Eric S. Margolis has covered 14 wars and is a leading authority on military affairs, the Middle East, South Asia, and Islamic movements. He is foreign correspondent for Canada’s Sun National Media and author of War at the Top of the World and the brand new American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.

Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism officer and columnist for Antiwar.com, discusses the possibility of and precedents for an Israeli “False Flag” operation in Iraq to frame Iran and draw the U.S. into attacking, the conflicts within the administration over Iran policy, the likely catastrophic consequences of any attack, U.S. covert operations within Iran, America’s support of the Iranian Islamic Revolution back in 1979, how real conservative principles apply to foreign policy, the extensive databases of “dangerous” Americans kept by the government, total lack of accountability in Washington, provocative stance toward Russia and demented neocon view of the world.

MP3 here. (39:41)

Philip Giraldi is a former DIA and CIA officer, partner at Cannistraro Associates, Francis Walsingham Fellow for the American Conservative Defense Alliance, contributing editor at the American Conservative magazine and columnist at Antiwar.com.

Dean Ahmad, president of the Minaret of Freedom Institute and co-author with Rose Wilder Lane of Islam and the Discovery of Freedom, discusses the so-called clash of civilizations, Western misconceptions about Islam, extremist instigators on both sides, how bin Laden’s primary reasons for the Fatwa against America are political not religious, how Islam and Christianity are closely related, misquotations of the Koran’s advice on violence and his view of the possibility that Scottish Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and some of the early Spanish “proto-Austrian School” economists were inspired by Islamic scholars.

MP3 here. (40:18)

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D, president of the Minaret of Freedom Institute is an internationally known interdisciplinary scientist, author of Signs in the Heavens: A Muslim Astronomer’s Perspective on Religion and Science. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Maryland where he teaches courses on religion and progress and on religion, science and freedom. He also teaches a course on Islam, Science and Development at Georgetown University for the Center on Muslim-Christian Understanding.