William Brand, writer for the Krakow Post, discusses the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the USSR, the 1989 Polish open elections where communist candidates were trounced, Gorbachev’s made-good promise to end military crackdowns and the flood of other Soviet bloc countries that followed Poland’s lead (some not so peacefully).

MP3 here. (21:53)

William Brand is an American expatriate living in Poland.

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.

Gareth Porter, independent historian and investigative journalist for IPS News and Antiwar.com, discusses the themes in his article “Georgia War Rooted in US Self-Deceit on NATO,” how the national security bureaucracy dominates American policy to the detriment of the rest of Americans’ interests, the rise of the empire after World War II, how American Cold War policy pushed China toward Russia until the 1970s, the imperial bureaucrats desire to expand NATO up to the Russian border to weaken them, the often conflicting views between the American military and corporate policy ambitions and the multitude of excuses given to retain our many hundreds of military bases around the world.

MP3 here. (34:06)

Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Dr. Gordon Prather discusses the different uses for varying yield nuclear weapons for missile defense, the tactical and strategic handicaps of our missile defense systems, what it takes to build a nuclear weapon and the difference between a nuclear weapons program and what the Iranians are doing.

MP3 here. (31:09)

Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. — ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.