Author: Charles Goyette

Bill Minutaglio, author of First Son: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty and The President’s Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales, discusses the story of attorney general and his relationship with the President and his likely future.

MP3 here. (15:45)

Bill Minutaglio has distinguished himself as an award-winning Texas journalist with the Abilene Reporter-News, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, and Dallas Morning News, where he has worked since 1983 as a special writer. His work has appeared in many national publications including Talk, where he is a contributing writer, and the New York Times. He has coauthored two books and served as a contributing author to three others. He lives in Austin with his two children and his wife, Holly.

Helen Thomas, author of Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public, laments the tragedy of the Iraq war, now beginning its fifth year, the lives/votes trade that the Democrats are so quick to make to gain power, her favorite press secretary, the travesty Judith Miller, Jeff Gannon and how she got her seat back.

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Commonly referred to as “The First Lady of the Press,” former White House Bureau Chief Helen Thomas is a trailblazer, breaking through barriers for women reporters while covering every President since John F. Kennedy. For 57 years, Helen also served as White House correspondent for United Press International. She recently left this post and joined Hearst Newspapers as a syndicated columnist.

Born in Winchester, Kentucky, Helen Thomas was raised in Detroit, Michigan where she attended public schools and later graduated from Wayne State University. Upon leaving college, Helen served as a copy girl on the old, now defunct Washington Daily News. In 1943, Ms. Thomas joined United Press International and the Washington Press Corps.

For 12 years, Helen wrote radio news for UPI, her work day beginning at 5:30am. Eventually she covered the news of the Federal government, including the FBI and Capitol Hill.

In November, 1960, Helen Thomas began covering then President elect John F. Kennedy, following him to the White House in January, 1961 as a member of the UPI team. It was during this first White House assignment that Thomas began closing presidential press conferences with “Thank you, Mr. President.”

In September, 1971, Pat Nixon scooped Helen by announcing her engagement to Associated Press’ retiring White House correspondent, Douglas B. Cornell at a White house party hosted by then President Nixon in honor of Cornell.

Thomaswas the only woman print journalist traveling with then President Nixon to China during his breakthrough trip in January, 1972. She has the distinction of having traveled around the world several times with Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, during the course of which she covered every Economic Summit. The World Almanac has cited her as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in America.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space, discusses the incredible amount of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and Russia and the non-threats of Iran and North Korea, Reagan and Gorbachev’s near agreement to abolish them in 1987, the danger of Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of Taliban types, Israel’s nukes, what a 20-megaton H-bomb would do to Phoenix, Three Mile Island, the damage at the local nuclear plant, and hears from a caller – a former U.S. military nuclear missile launcher – how she changed his life.

MP3 here. (16:54)

Dr. Helen Caldicott is founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. For over 35 years, Dr. Caldicott has been active in spreading information about the hazards of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. The organization she co-founded in 1978, Physicians for Social Responsibility, was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, and a documentary based on a lecture she gave in 1981, on the topic of nuclear war, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (short) in 1982. Born in Melbourne, Australia in 1938, she currently divides her time between Australia and the U.S. For more information about Helen Caldicott.

Marjorie Cohn discusses the firing of the U.S. attorneys, particularly Carol Lamm (the one who prosecuted Duke Cunningham and Dusty Foggo), the new PATRIOT Act provision that makes it so that the Attorney General can appoint new U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation, Gonzales’s Soviet theory of state-granted rights and his lifting of the phrase “quaint and obsolete” in regards to torture provisions in the Geneva Conventions from the German Nazis.

MP3 here. (9:05)

Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law. She lectures throughout the world on human rights and US foreign policy.

Giuliana Sgrena discusses her new book, Friendly Fire: The Remarkable Story of a Journalist Kidnapped in Iraq, Rescued by an Italian Secret Service Agent, and Shot by U.S. Forces, the circumstances of her captivity and release, how U.S. troops shot her and her rescuers as she was finally on her way to safety and why they should have known who she was at the time of the shooting.

MP3 here. (16:44)

On February 4, 2005, while reporting in Iraq for the Italian daily newspaper Il Manifesto, leading Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was kidnapped by a group of Iraqis and held hostage for one month. On the day of her release, as she was being escorted to Baghdad International Airport by Italian security, U.S. forces fired on her vehicle. The attack killed Major General Nicola Calipari, the number two man in Italian military intelligence, as he shielded Sgrena.

David Corn Washington editor of the Nation and co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War discusses his fun humiliating George F. Will on ABC’s This Week for his blatant hypocrisy, why Libby deserved to be convicted, why it’s a canard that Armitage was the first to reveal Wilson’s wife to Novak, Cheney’s role in lying us into war and punishing those who contradicted him, the time Novak lied directly to my face about Rove and whether the Democrats will ever get their act together and hold real investigations.

MP3 here. (18:52)

David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation, the oldest political weekly in America, and a Fox News Channel contributor. He writes on a host of subjects, including politics, the White House, Congress, and the national security establishment. He has broken stories on George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, Enron, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leak case, the Pentagon, and other Washington players and institutions. He currently writes a web column for The Nation called “Capital Games.”