Buffalo attorney and libertarian activist James Ostrowski discusses his strategy to try to keep the tea parties a libertarian movement, prevent astro-turfing by the war party and find common cause with conservatives out of power, plans for antiwar protests on September 5, how the G.I. bill increased college enrollment, lowered standards and is used to lure young people into the Army.

MP3 here. (23:06)

James Ostrowski is a trial and appellate lawyer and libertarian author from Buffalo, New York. He graduated from St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in 1975 and obtained a degree in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1980. He graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1983. In law school, he was writing assistant to Dean David G. Trager, now a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York. He was a member of the Moot Court Honor Society and the International Law Moot Court Team.

He served as vice-chairman of the law reform committee of the New York County Lawyers Association (1986-88) and wrote two widely quoted reports critical of the law enforcement approach to the drug problem. He was chair of the human rights committee, Erie County Bar Association (1997-1999). He has written a number of scholarly articles on the law on subjects ranging from drug policy to the commerce clause of the constitution.

His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Buffalo News, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Legislative Gazette. His policy studies have been published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, and the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. His articles have been used as course materials at numerous colleges including Brown, Rutgers and Stanford.

Presently, he is an adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for two of the largest political websites in the world, Mises.org and LewRockwell.com.

He and his wife Amy live in North Buffalo with their two children.

Pepe Escobar, writer for the Asia Times, discusses the Pentagon’s “arc of instability” that follows the same path as a potential Western-dominated oil pipeline, how U.S. aggression abroad has united Russia, China and Iran, the internal economic-fueled strife in China and Joe Biden’s wacky rant against Russia.

MP3 here. (21:59)

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War and Obama Does Globalistan.

Rachel Morris, author of “Shock and Audit: The Hidden Defense Budget,” discusses the real defense budget numbers, Obama’s promise to stop using supplemental bills to pay for U.S. wars, the lack of penalties against defense contractors that don’t perform and the overriding power of Congress to save endangered weapons programs.

MP3 here. (18:30)

Rachel Morris is the Washington bureau editor for Mother Jones. Previously she was an editor at the Washington Monthly and an assistant editor at Legal Affairs. Her writing has also appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review and the Guardian, among other publications.

Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional lawyer and current Salon.com blogger, discusses the nefarious origin of the state secrets privilege, the ways in which Obama has exceeded the Bush administration on secrecy invocations, the fight over releasing the few remaining Bush torture memos and the Obama administration’s foot-dragging over prosecuting Bush-era crimes.

MP3 here: (39:52)

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer and author of Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. His blog and radio show can be found at Salon.com.

David R. Henderson, research fellow with the Hoover Institution, discusses the love-fest between Congressional Democrats and President Obama, the benefit of empire for a select few and the net loss for everyone else, the common misconceptions on what caused and worsened the 1973 oil crisis and the difficulty of communicating with people whose ideas and arguments are wrapped in insulating layers of emotion and patriotism.

MP3 here. (37:08)

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He writes a regular column, “The Wartime Economist”, for Antiwar.com and is the author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey. His latest book is The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, discusses the PBS Nova program The Spy Factory, the legality and efficacy of the NSA’s communications monitoring, the massive amounts of permanent archived data that required a new NSA data storage facility in Texas and the Israeli companies involved in intercepting highly sensitive communications for the U.S. government.

MP3 here. (40:56)

James Bamford wrote and produced The Spy Factory aired on the PBS Nova program. It can be viewed online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/ He is the author of Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization and most recently The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, discusses the enormous and expanding U.S. defense budget amidst a general economic collapse, the army of defense lobbyists ready to fight against any spending cuts, how military spending diverts economic resources away from beneficial uses and how defense contractors make the largest and most dubious defense projects into sacred cows by spreading production to as many congressional districts as possible.

MP3 here. (22:46)

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. His latest article, “Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon”, co-written with Tom Engelhardt, is at Tomdispatch.com and at Antiwar.com.

Why did America invade Iraq?

Oil? Israel? …

Jets, bombs and taxed dollars.

So says Richard Cummings as he explains the story behind his Playboy.com article “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels“: the direct role in policy-making played by Lockheed Martin and the rest of the Military Industrial Complex and the amount of money they loot from the U.S. Treasury.

Also discussed: whether the National Review is a CIA front.

MP3 here.

Richard Cummings taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author of The Immortalists, The Pied Piper – Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, and the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell. He holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

Daniel Ellsberg, famous leaker of the Pentagon Papers, and Chris Deliso, of Balkanalysis.com, discuss the case of FBI translator-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and the international crime rings she exposed.

MP3 here. (49:08)

Balkanalysis.com director Christopher Deliso has lived and traveled widely in SE Europe and has a master’s degree with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University (1999). His two new books, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West and Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa will appeal to readers interested in, respectively, the major security issues involving the region today, and travel in one of Europe’s most fascinating but least visited areas.

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Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. He was born in Detroit in 1931. After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. Summa cum Laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.

From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision.

In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making.

He joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification on the front lines.

On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, he worked on the Top Secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Since the end of the Vietnam War he has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era and unlawful interventions.

Visit his Web site.