Antiwar.com Blog

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.

Murray Waas, one of the best investigative journalists in DC, has a new piece on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s role in derailing a Justice Department investigation of his own possible criminality. Waas notes at the National Journal:

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.

Waas’s superb work greatly advanced the exposure of the White House’s role in smearing an undercover CIA agent. And Waas may now have an even bigger fish – especially if Bush knew that Gonzo was a target of the investigation that Bush derailed.

Comments/condemnations welcome at my blog here.

Here is Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, writing in the Financial Times about the latest American Enterprise Institute shindig, where neocon bigwig Bernard Lewis received an award and made a speech defending the Crusades as the first phase of the necessary struggle against “Islamofascism”:

Were one to start counting ironies here, where would one stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticising the Pope for apologising to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge their war an error. And here was the clubhouse of the neo-conservatives, throwing itself a lavish party when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they have dug.

In attendance: Dick Cheney, applauding; Clarence Thomas, the first to rise for a standing ovation; Richard Perle, Robert Bork, and Reason editor Nick Gillespie. We hear the crab bisque was “better-than-average.”

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), one of the few members of Congress in recent history to understand the nature of US foreign policy, has a new book, The Foreign Policy of Freedom.

I haven’t read it yet, but knowing Ron, it promises to be a great read.

Check out Ron’s latest piece on US foreign policy on today’s Antiwar.com, and also check out the introduction to the book by Lew Rockwell.

Buy it through this link to give Antiwar.com a cut.

Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo discusses the role of the Israel lobby in pushing for the war in Iraq and the next one in Iran, Pelosi’s green light to Dick Cheney and the loss of domestic liberty that always accompanies foreign empire.

MP3 here. (34:41)

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.