Independent investigative journalist Joe Lauria discusses the 2009 General Assembly of the United Nations, Muammar Gaddafi’s energetic denouncement of the U.N. Security Council and every recent U.S. military action, observations that Obama’s rock star aura remains intact, Iran’s obligations and alleged violations under their IAEA Safeguards Agreement, the politics of climate change and the UN Security Council’s war powers.

MP3 here. (30:20)

Joe Lauria is a New York-based independent investigative journalist. A freelance member of the Sunday Times of London Insight team, he has also worked on investigations for the Boston Globe and Bloomberg News. Joe’s articles have additionally appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Montreal Gazette, The Johannesburg Star, The Washington Times, New York Magazine, ARTnews and other publications.

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondant for The Independent, discusses the Iraqi National Intelligence Service threat to sue Ahmed Chalabi, the myth that the “surge” pacified Iraq, the continued scarcity of clean water and electricity in Baghdad, a likely new UN resolution by the new year and how a Shia-dominated government may be strong enough to take over from the U.S.

MP3 here. (52:45)

Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent of The Independent, has been visiting Iraq since 1978. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting in recognition of his writing on Iraq. He is the author of, his memoir, The Broken Boy, and with Andrew Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, The Occupation: War, Resistance and Daily Life in Iraq and Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the Struggle for Iraq.

Frida Berrigan, Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, discusses the Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being negotiated with Iraq to allow the U.S. military to stay forever, demands for total legal immunity and at least 58 military bases, the escalating rhetoric against Iran, the danger in sending the army into Pakistan and Bush’s continued failure in negotiating with North Korea.

MP3 here. (32:41)

Frida Berrigan is Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Previously, she served for eight years as Deputy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City. She has also worked as a researcher at The Nation magazine.

Ms. Berrigan is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor of In These Times magazine. She is the author of reports on arms trade and human rights, U.S. nuclear weapons policy, and the domestic politics of U.S. missile defense and space weapons policies. She has been a featured expert on national and regional radio outlets, and regularly speaks on national security issues to citizen’s organizations and at major conferences throughout the United States.

Abdulkadir Abdirahman, president of Somali Cause, discusses the humanitarian catastrophe resulting from America’s proxy war waged by Ethiopian forces there since December, 2006, the million-plus refugees from Mogadishu and surrounding areas, America’s alliance with the brutal warlords from the days of “Operation Restore Hope” and “Black Hawk Down,” and the rotting corpses they leave wherever they go, the American excuse of al Qaeda terrorism and “Islamic extremism,” the former Soviet-, now American-backed murderous dictator of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi, the relative peace and security which had been finally been achieved for a short time in Somalia before America came and destroyed it, his experience during “Restore Hope,” the three men “wanted for questioning by the FBI” as suspects in the 1998 Africa embassy bombings whose supposed presence served as the pretext for this invasion and the increase in the radicalization of the Somali population, his group’s efforts to educate congressmen on the subject, his call for UN peacekeepers in order to try to please the U.S., but end the Ethiopian occupation.

MP3 here. (28:47)

Abdulkadir Abdirahman is president of Somali Cause.

Dr. Gordon Prather, Antiwar.com’s in-house nuclear physicist, discusses the chaos of the Bush regime’s policies against the “Axis of Evil” and global non-proliferation regime, from trying to frame North Korea with the same bogus intel as they used on Iraq to trying to connect Iran and North Korea with the Israeli-bombed facility in Syria, the U.S.’s nuclear deals with India, how A.Q. Kahn’s stolen intel scheme was falsely claimed by George Tenet to be a CIA success story, the vague credentials of nuke “expert” David Albright Ph.D and how the Bush team has put us in far more danger from nuclear proliferation.

MP3 here. (52:09)

YouTube here.

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.

Former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel, now running for the Libertarian Party nomination for president, explains how he helped to force the expiration of America’s conscription program, the many views he holds in common with libertarians (eg: the war, the draft, the military industrial complex, empire, habeus corpus, renditions, the Patriot Act, Alaskan Oil and fair debates), democracy versus limited government, America’s belligerence toward Iran, his desire for an unlimited majoritarian world state under a reformed United Nations and his position on trade and trade agreements. (Edited for phone troubles with as much content spared as possible.)

MP3 here. (35:07)

Mike Gravel is a former senator from Alaska now running for the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States.

Rep. Ron Paul M.D., congressman representing district 14 on the Texas gulf coast and champion of human liberty, discusses the relative powers of the president, congress and UN over U.S. foreign policy, his recent vote against a resolution condemning one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the counter-productive nature of American foreign policy in fighting al Qaeda terrorism and his upcoming “no” votes on warrantless wiretapping and immunity for the telecoms.

MP3 here. (10:04)

Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.

Chris Deliso, the only western journalist in Macedonia, longtime contributor to Antiwar.com, proprietor of Balkanalysis.com and author of The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, discusses the problems of ethnic and religious differences, crime and corruption in the former Yugoslavia, the rise of Saudi-financed Wahaabi Islam in Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and the compromised and ineffectual “humanitarians” from the UN who’ve been running Kosovo.

MP3 here. (28:20)

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.

Since 2001, he has published many articles on Balkan politics, economics, security issues, travel, history and culture in US and world newspapers, analysis firms such as the Economist Intelligence Unit, and in numerous magazines and websites. He is also a travel writer for Lonely Planet, covering SE Europe.

Philip Cunliffe, freelance writer and researcher at King’s College in London, England, discusses the new “supervised independence” of Kosovo under the authority of the European Union, the fallacy of benevolent international humanitarian intervention and its consequences in Sudan and Iraq as well as the Balkans.

MP3 here. (41:28)

Philip Cunliffe is co-editor of Politics without Sovereignty: A critique of contemporary international relations (UCL Press, 2007). Read more about the book here.