Tom Engelhardt, proprietor of TomDispatch.com and editor of the new book, The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, discusses his recent article “The Greatest Story Never Told” about the immense permanent military bases the U.S. has built throughout Iraq, how most Americans are oblivious to this, the lack of media coverage of the U.S. bombing escalation of Iraq, how Americans would react if we were attacked, how few Americans grasp the enormous number of civilians killed by the U.S in Iraq, the 20% of Iraqis either dead or exiled, and the little, if any, change the presidential candidates will bring to the American empire.

MP3 here. (38:14)

An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era, now out in a revised edition with a new preface and afterword, and Mission Unaccomplished, Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley. Visit his Web site.

Pentagon whistleblower and libertarian writer Karen Kwiatkowski discusses the importance of radicalism and principle in American life as the empire collapses, the modern American secession movements in the Lakota Nation, Hawaii and Vermont, the costs of empire, the growing police state, how the neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon lied this country into war in 2002 and 2003 and the sickness of Dick Cheney.

Her best articles on the OSP are here, here, here, here, and here. See also this, this, this and this.

MP3 here. (40:37)

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here.