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Live from the Left Coast: a program from
Ian Masters which features a longer, more in-depth interview
with a special guest on a topic of current interest, followed by a
series of listener phone calls.
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Podcast now available:
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Click for -> Archived programs from 2006
Click for -> Archived programs from 2004-2005
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December 30th, 2007
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Michael Scheuer on developments in Pakistan and the state of the "war on terror." Mr. Scheuer was a twenty-two year veteran CIA analyst, who, until his resignation, was their top expert on bin Laden. He is the author of the best-sellers "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" and "Through Our Enemies Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America," which has recently been published in a new edition. His new book, to be published in February of 2008, is "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq."
John Anderson on the ways and means of Texas corruption, which GW Bush took to a national stage. is a sixth-generation Texan who is an investigative journalist and author. He was the former deputy editor of The American Lawyer. He did his undergraduate work at Rice University in Houston and his graduate work, including a Ph.D. in American Studies, at Yale. He taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and at Swarthmore College before turning to a career in investigative journalism. His first book, Burning Down the House, is an account of the infamous 1985 MOVE Bombing in Philadelphia, and won the 1988 Gustavus Myers Award for the "outstanding work" of its year on American race relations. Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, has called his 2003 book Art Held Hostage the "indispensable history" of the famous but embattled Barnes art collection. The Wall Street Journal described this book as "a chronicle of chaos," with "one mind boggling revelation after another." His new highly acclaimed book is Follow the Money: How George Bush and the Texas Republicans Hog Tied America.
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December 23rd, 2007
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Nina Khrushcheva on Putin, Russia and related. Dr. Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at The New School in New York, and is currently a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Her new book, to be published January 8th, is Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics.
Dr. Garry Wills on the varieties of Christianity within the USA. Dr. Wills is one of America's most distinguished historians and critics. He is the author of many acclaimed books on religion and history, including Saint Augustine, Papal Sin, Why I am a Catholic, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, What Paul Meant and the Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. His previous book was "What Jesus Meant." He has won many awards in addition to the Pulitzer. Among them are two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Professor Wills studied for the priesthood and took his doctorate in the classics. He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. His new book is "Head and Heart: America's Christianities."
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December 16th, 2007
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Naomi Wolf on what she sees as "galloping fascism," which has been promulgated by the Bush administration. Naomi Wolf is a writer whose essays have appeared in various publications including: The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She is the author of a number of books, including The Beauty Myth, her first book, which was an international bestseller. She followed that with Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century, published by Random House in 1993, and Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, published in 1997. Misconceptions, released in 2001, is a powerful and passionate critique of pregnancy and birth in America. In The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love and See (2005), Wolf shared the enduring wisdom of her father, Leonard Wolf, a poet and teacher who believes that every person is an artist in their own unique way. Naomi Wolf is co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization devoted to training young women in ethical leadership for the 21st century. The institute teaches professional development in the arts and media, politics and law, business and entrepreneurship as well as ethical decision making. Her new book is "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot." This is a book which argues that America has undergone a dangerous "fascist shift," brought about by the Bush administration.
Dr. David Kotz on the current situation in Russia. Dr. Kotz is a Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His latest book is Russia's Path from Gorbachev to Putin: The Demise of the Soviet System and the New Russia, coauthored with Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor. His articles have appeared in Monthly Review, Science and Society, The Review of Political Economics and in several Russian and Chinese journals. He is a Vice-President of the World Association for Political Economy.
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December 9th, 2007
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Craig Unger on his excellent new book. Mr. Unger is an investigative journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller "House of Bush, House of Saud." A contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Unger is also a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU's School of Law. His new book is THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BUSH: THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW A BAND OF TRUE BELIEVERS SEIZED THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH, STARTED THE IRAQ WAR, AND STILL IMPERILS AMERICA'S FUTURE.
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December 2nd, 2007
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Dr. Max Neiman on California politics -- the electoral college delegates, eminent domain, disaster preparedness, water shortages, and taking the lead on reducing greenhouse gasses. Dr. Neiman is currently Director of the Governance and Public Finance Program at the Public Policy Institute of California, based in San Francisco, which he joined in 2005. Before that he was a professor at the University of California, Riverside in the Political Science Department. His most recent book is titled DEFENDING GOVERNMENT: WHY BIG GOVERNMENT WORKS, and he is currently working on a project focusing on "California's Policy Dynamics." He has authored many scholarly articles, and is a sought after analyst and consultant. He earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.
Paul Helmke in a debate on guns in America. Mr. Helmke is president of the Washington, DC-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a position he has held since July 1, 2006. He is a former mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana and a former president of The United States Conference of Mayors. The Brady Campaign is the nation's largest, non-partisan, grassroots organization leading the fight to prevent gun violence. Working with its dedicated network of Million Mom March Chapters, the Campaign is devoted to creating an America free from gun violence, where all Americans are safe at home, at school, at work, and in our communities. Their website is Bradycenter.org.
in debate with
Richard Feldman was a regional political director for the National Rifle Association during its rise to power in the 1980s. In the 1990s he was chief lobbyist and spokesman for the firearm industry's national trade association. The founder of MLS Communications, a public relations and political consulting business, Mr. Feldman is also an attorney specializing in public affairs. His new book is "Ricochet: Confessional of a Gun Lobbyist."
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November 25th, 2007
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Daniel Levy on the Annapolis conference and prospects for peaceful resolution between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr. Levy is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Policy Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and directed policy planning and international efforts at the Geneva Campaign Headquarters in Tel Aviv. He was a member of the Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and of the negotiating team for the "Oslo B" Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. www.newamerica.net
interviewed with
Gaith Al-Omeri is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Mr. al-Omari served in various senior positions within the Palestinian Authority, including Foreign Policy Advisor to the Palestinian President, Director of the International Relations Department in the Office of the Palestinian President, and Senior Advisor to former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. In these capacities, he provided advice on foreign policy -- especially vis- -vis the United States and Israel -- and security. Mr. al-Omari is a lawyer by training and a graduate of Georgetown and Oxford universities. Prior to his involvement in the Middle East peace process, he taught international law in Jordan and was active in human rights advocacy. www.newamerica.net
Andrea Elliott on the process of radicalization in the Islamic world. Andrea Elliot is a reporter for The New York Times, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. She has the cover story in today's New York Times Magazine, entitled "Where Boys Grow Up to be Jihadis," which explores why a tiny neighborhood in Tetouan, Morocco gives rise to an unusually high number of terrorists. Many of the Madrid train bombers and a number of would-be suicide bombers in Iraq are from the same quarter, known as Jamaa Mezuak. In writing this compelling investigative report, Andrea Elliott spent months on the trail of the elusive sources of radicalization. Through interviews with family members of the small-time drug dealer who led the fatal attack in Spain, mothers whose obedient sons had suddenly departed for Iraq and young men who had chosen to stay behind, Elliott provides new insights into the shadowy corners of the extremist mind. www.nytimes.com
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November 18th, 2007
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Robert Drogin on the central source of the lies and delusions that the Bush administration used to take America to a war against Iraq and subsequent occupation and quagmire. Mr. Drogin covers national security and intelligence for the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as a foreign correspondent for the Times in Asia and Africa, and as a national correspondent based in New York. He has won or shared multiple journalism awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award. His new book is "Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Con Man Who Caused a War." About this book, Bob Baer has said, "A crucial study in the political manipulation of intelligence. Understanding how Curveball got us into Iraq will arm us for the next round of lies coming out of Washington."
Reese Erlich on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East generally and US domestic politics. Mr. Erlich began his award-winning career in journalism 35 years ago as a staff writer and research editor for Ramparts, a seminal investigative reporting magazine published in San Francisco from 1963 to 1975. He taught journalism at Bay Area universities for ten years and currently works as a full-time freelance journalist and radio producer. In 2001 he produced a one-hour public radio documentary "The Struggle for Iran," and in 2002 he produced a two-hour documentary, the Russia Project, with the legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. The programs were heard throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. He reports regularly for a variety of radio networks, including National Public Radio, CBC, ABC (Australia), The World, and Common Ground Radio.and his newspaper articles have appeared in 16 daily papers in the United States and around the world, including the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, Dallas Morning News, and the Chicago Tribune. He is a contributor to Truthdig. Reese Erlich has covered the Middle East for 20 years. He is the co-author of the best-seller "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." His new book, just published, is ""The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the Middle East crisis." In preparing his book, Erlich traveled to the region multiple times, interviewed President Bashir al Asad of Syria. high Iranian officials, Kurdish leaders, Reza Pahlavi (son of the late Shah of Iran) and former U.S. CIA officials, among others.
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November 4th, 2007
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Ian Buruma on the neocons, Burma, Pakistan and more. Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in New York. He is the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, with his latest being, Murder in Amsterdam: the death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award this year and has just came out in paperback. He has a recent review in the New York Review of Books, which has received wide attention, of Norman Podhoretz's book "World War IV: the Long Struggle Against Islamofascism." In his thoughtful review, entitled "His Toughness Problem and Ours," Buruma delves deeply into the neocon mindset, which Podhoretz, regarded as the "godfather of neoconservatism," personifies.
Steve Levine on the oil, money and intrigue surrounding the Caspian Sea. Mr. Levine was a foreign correspondent for eighteen years, posted in the Soviet Union, Pakistan, and the Philippines, reporting for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and Newsweek. His new book is "The Oil and the Glory: the pursuit of empire and fortune on the Caspian Sea." Seymour Hersh has said of Steve Levine, "No one knows the murky world of American politics, international oil and corporate corruption in the Caspian better than Steve LeVine. This is an unforgettable story about forgettable fixers and forgettable governments out for the big bucks." His next book is about the concurrent revival of Russia's global influence, and its unexplained string of high-profile murders.
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October 21st, 2007
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Paul Krugman was named "Columnist of the Year" by Editor and Publisher magazine, is cited as the world's most widely-read economist, writing a twice-weekly column for the op-ed pages of the New York Times. He is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 professional journal articles. He is the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. His new book is "The Conscience of a Liberal, a wholly original work that reaches into the country's history to trace the rise and fall of America's middle class.
Dr. Drew Westen is an author and professor of psychology at Emory University. Dr. Westin received his B.A. at Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. His major areas of research are personality disorders, eating disorders, psychotherapy effectiveness, adolescent psychopathology, political psychology, and the interface of psychodynamics and neuroscience. His just-published book is "The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation." Howard Dean has said of "The Political Brain," ""Drew Westen is a must read...we will win the Presidency if our candidate reads and acts on this book."
David Freeman is leading authority in the production, management and delivery of energy to large populations. He has had the ear of federal officials since the days of JFK and helped bring about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Nixon. He headed the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest nuclear program, under Jimmy Carter. From New York to Los Angeles, Freeman has headed agencies and utilities companies, continually working to make utilities more environmentally safe, more efficient, and more cost-friendly to the customer. He is currently president of the commission overseeing the Port of Los Angeles. David Freeman's previous book was Energy: The New Era and he has just published, "Winning Our Energy Independence (and Energy Insider Shows How).
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October 14th, 2007
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General Wesley Clark is a retired four-star general of the United States Army, a former candidate for United States President, author and activist. Wesley Clark was valedictorian of his class at West Point, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, and later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master's degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the Army and the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Clark commanded Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000. General Clark was a candidate for President of the United States in 2004. General Clark currently leads a political action committee "WesPAC: Securing America" which was formed after the primaries, and used it to support numerous Democratic Party candidates in the 2006 midterm elections. Clark was considered a potential candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2008, but, on September 15, 2007, endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton. General Clark is the author os several books, including Waging Modern Warfare. His latest, just out, is "A Time To Lead." In this book, General Clark reveals the neocon plan to take down seven Middle Eastern countries in five years.
John Brady Kiesling worked for 20 years in the Foreign Service of the US State Department. He resigned publicly to protest the damage done to US interests and alliances by Bush administration foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq. In this resignation, he famously asked if the motto of the United States under Bush had become Caligula's "let them hate us, so long as they fear us. Mr. Keisling's forthcoming book, to be released September 30, is "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower."
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October 7th, 2007
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Dr. James Paul on the United Nations. Dr. Paul has been Executive Director of the Manhattan-based Global Policy Forum since its foundation in late 1993. He is a prominent figure in the NGO advocacy community at the United Nations and a well-known as an authority on the UN and global policy issues. From 1995-1999, Paul was the representative of the International Federation of Human Rights at UN headquarters. Since 1995, he has frequently served as Chair of the NGO Working Group on the Security Council and he is currently Co-Chair of the group. He is a member of the Academic Council on the UN System and his honors include the World Hunger Media Award and a Peacemaker award by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He has authored well over a hundred articles and reviews in academic journals, magazines and other print media, and he has written dozens of policy papers for Global Policy Forum. He has served as an editor of the Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (1989-2006). His most recent book is entitled "Humanity Comes of Age."
David Kuhn on how the Democratic party lost the white male vote. Mr. Kuhn covered the 2004 presidential campaign as Chief Political Writer for CBS News, and is currently a Senior Political Writer and news analyst for The Politico. He has also written for The Washington Post Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Salon.com, and the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Shimbun. His new book is "The Neglected Voter," in which Kuhn shows how America's conservative party came to win a majority of America's workingmen and the White House. Equipped with unprecedented research data, reporting, and exclusive interviews with such figures as Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer, Mark Warner, and Pat Robertson, Kuhn examines the role of gender and racial identity in presidential politics through the social changes that have defined the last half century. Wesley Clark has said of David Kuhn's "The Neglected Voter:" "a brilliantly insightful analysis of American politics at the national level. Every Democrat should read this book."
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September 30th, 2007
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Dr. Galia Golan on prospects for peace and a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Dr. Golan was one of the founders of Israel's Peace Now, the largest grassroots movement in that nation's history, in 1978. For many years a leader and spokesperson for the movement, she is a dedicated peace activist and Zionist, who believes that Israel can and must reach a just and lasting peace with its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians. After a long career on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, including as Chairperson of the Department of Political Science, Professor Golan is now with the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Israel's Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Professor Golan has also been a visiting professor at a number of American universities, including the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Irvine, Wellesley College, and Cornell University as well as at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, the Rand Corporation, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Aspen Institute. She has been a Ford Foundation Fellow and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Professor Golan is a frequent radio and television commentator, and the author of numerous books. Her latest book is: "Israel and Palestine: Peace Plans and Proposals from Oslo to Disengagement
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September 23rd, 2007
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Dr. Christopher O'Sullivan on the state of American foreign policy. Dr. O'Sullivan is a fellow at the Center for International Studies at the London School of Economics. His books on diplomacy and foreign relations include "Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order"; and the forthcoming "Colin Powell: American power and intervention from Vietnam to Iraq."
interviewed with
John Brady Kiesling worked for 20 years in the Foreign Service of the US State Department. He resigned publicly to protest the damage done to US interests and alliances by Bush administration foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq. In this resignation, he famously asked if the motto of the United States under Bush had become Caligula's "let them hate us, so long as they fear us. Mr. Keisling's forthcoming book, to be released September 30, is "Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower."
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September 16th, 2007
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Dr. John J. Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby and its impact on American foreign policy. Dr. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and in 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Mearsheimer has won numerous distinguished teaching awards. Professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics. His books include Conventional Deterrence, which won the Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., Book Award and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize. He has also written many articles in publications such as International Security, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times and others.
interviewed with:
Dr. Stephen Walt on the Israel lobby and its impact on American foreign policy. Dr. Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer Professor of International Affairs. He holds a BA in international relations from Stanford University and an MA and PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously on the faculties of Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. He is the author of The Origins of Alliances, which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award; Revolution and War; and Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy. His recent publications include: An Unnecessary War?; Beyond bin Laden: Reshaping U.S. Foreign Policy; and The Enduring Relevance of the Realist Tradition. Together, Drs. Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer have written the controversial new book, which is currently on the New York Times' Bestseller List, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Writing in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing declared, "Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations?' in 1993 has an academic work detonated with such force."
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September 9th, 2007
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Charlie Savage on how the Bush and Cheney administration has amplified executive power to an unprecedented level to the detriment of American democracy. Mr. Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning legal affairs reporter based in Washington for the Boston Globe. He authored an article in 2006 entitled "Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws," which received attention world-wide and prompted a number of editorials, including one in the New York Times. In that article, whiich won the Pulitzer Prize, Charlie Savage showed that President Bush claimed the right to disobey over 750 laws, assuming a level of power hetetofore unseen in an American president. Now, with the publication of the book "Takeover: the return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy," Savage greatly expands on his analysis to produce a comprehensive and searing indictment of the Bush presidency.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran on perception and spin vs. reality in Iraq. Mr. Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. He previously served the Post as a bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan. He recently completed a term as journalist-in-residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center. His recent book is "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," described as "as extraordinary vivid and compelling anatomy of a fiasco."
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September 2nd, 2007
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Jeff Goodell on how powerfully coal mining impacts us all and how little is know about it. Mr. Goodell is the author of the new book "Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future." His previous book was the New York Times bestseller "Our Story, an account of nine Quecreek miners who were trapped underground in 2002, and several other books. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and is frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and his work has appeared in the New Republic, Wired, and GQ. Of Goodell's "Big Coal," the New York Times has said, ""There is perhaps no greater act of denial in modern life than sticking a plug into an electrical outlet...(electricity) pours out of the socket almost like magic. In his new book, Jeff Goodell breaks the spell with a single number: 20. That's how many pounds of coal each person in the United States consumes, on average, every day to keep the electricity flowing."
Matt Taibbi on the rampant corruption taking place in Iraq. Mr. Taibbi is a journalist, who writes for Rolling Stone, where he authors a column called "Road Rage" for the print version, and an additional weekly online-only column called "The Low Post". He is well known for his coverage of the 2004 US presidential election, and for his former editorial positions at newspapers the eXile, the New York Press, and the Beast. He is also a sports columnist for the Boston Phoenix. He has a new article in the Sept 5 issue of Rolling Stone which is getting considerable attention, "The Great Iraq Swindle: how Bush allowed an army of for-profit contractors to invade the US Treasury."
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August 26th, 2007
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Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen are the co-writers, directors and producers of "The 11th Hour," an acclaimed new documentary feature which powerfully reveals the environmental jeopardy which grips this planet. Their website is 11thhouraction.com, Nadia Conners is a writer, director and producer of both narrative and documentary films. She is a Founder and Creative Director of Tree Media Group. Conners is a director and writer on the new documentary feature "The 11th Hour," as well as the director and writer of the two shorts, "Global Warning" and "Water Planet" (along with Leonardo DiCaprio). Last year, she wrote a narrative feature for Ridley Scott's company, Scott Free, called "Oceano." Conners is set to direct her first narrative feature, "Earthquake Weather," which she also wrote. In addition to receiving a degree in European Philosophy and History from the American University in Paris, she also attended New York University's Directors Workshop. Leila Conners Petersen is Founder and President of Tree Media Group. Conners Petersen is director, producer, and writer on "The 11th Hour," as well as the short films "Global Warning" and "Water Planet" (also with DiCaprio).Conners Petersen co-wrote "Oceano", a narrative feature for Ridley Scott's, Scott Free Productions. Conners Petersen was associate editor at New Perspectives Quarterly and Global Viewpoint, focusing on international politics and social issues. She is now Editor-at-Large. She has been published in International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and Wired, among other papers. Conners Petersen is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Next, she will direct "Original Instructions," a film about nature's operating instructions.
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August 19th, 2007
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Charles Ferguson on his powerful new documentary, "No End in Sight," which traces how the US got caught in the Iraq quagmire it is now most certainly in. Dr. Ferguson is founder and president of Representational Pictures, LLC, and writer, director, and producer of "NO END IN SIGHT: The American Occupation of Iraq," a feature-length documentary film whose subject is U.S. policy with regard to the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It won the Documentary Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2007. Ferguson was originally trained as a political scientist. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and obtained a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1989. Following his Ph.D., Ferguson conducted postdoctoral research at MIT while also consulting to the White House, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Department of Defense, and several U.S. and European high technology firms. From 1992 to1994, Ferguson was an independent consultant, providing strategic consulting to the top managements of U.S. high technology firms including Apple, Xerox, Motorola, and Texas Instruments. In 1994, Ferguson founded Vermeer Technologies, one of the earliest Internet software companies, with Randy Forgaard. Vermeer created the first visual website development tool, FrontPage. In early 1996, Ferguson sold Vermeer to Microsoft, which integrated FrontPage into Microsoft Office. After selling Vermeer, Ferguson returned to research and writing. He was a visiting scholar and/or lecturer for several years at MIT and Berkeley and for three years was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.
Patrick Symmes on the past, present and possible future of Cuba. Mr. Symmes is the author of Chasing Che and writes for Harper s, Outside, New York, and Cond Nast Traveler. In his new book, "The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile, Patrick Symmes writes a history of the Cuban revolution that also explores the qualities that define what it is to be Cuban. He draws on his own visits and extended stays in Cuba, and the half-century-old memories of a group of formerly privileged boys, now mostly exiled, who along with Castro attended Dolores, a Jesuit school that until the revolution, educated Cuba's elites. The Dolores alumni speak of prerevolutionary Cuba and the necessary revolution in which many participated. Equally poignant are their descriptions of events as the revolution lurched toward socialism and repression, events that led them to self-imposed exile.
Reviews
"Arresting...Idiosyncratic and utterly engaging, this is a book as unusual and interesting as Cuba itself...This is a collective biography, deftly done. But it is also much more...a fascinating travelogue of the Cuban diaspora [and] fine history, too...Symmes tells the story...with alacrity and verve."
--The Times (London)
"Insightful and sobering...What emerges will infuriate many on both sides of the partisan divide, as it is essentially a paean for non-violence on an island unlikely to ever embrace it."
--The Independent
"Symmes's writing is lyrical and evocative; his powerful and complex picture of Cuba and the exile community is well worth reading."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This is Cuba as we've never seen it, told by a keen observer and a fine writer."
--Tom Miller, author of Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba
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August 12th, 2007
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Scott Lindlaw on the death of star athlete turned American soldier, Pat Tillman. Scott Lindlaw is an Associated Press reporter based in San Francisco. He covers national security, the military and politics. Before this assignment, he was a White House correspondent for the AP, who covered the entirety of George W. Bush's first term. His recent breakthough reporting, with co-author Martha Mendoza, has brought to light considerable new information regarding the tragic death of football hero turned American soldier in Afghanistan, Pat Tillman.
Michael Weinstein on the "religious indoctrination" which is being pushed throughout the US military. Michael "Mikey" Weinstein is a leader of the movement to restore the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state in the United States military, and the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is an attorney and businessman who served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force as a judge advocate (JAG) for ten years and also worked for more than three years as legal counsel in the Reagan White House. His just-published book is "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against the Evangelical Coup in America's Military." Ambassador Joseph Wilson said of this book, "this is the story of one man's willingness to stand up for the Constitution of the United States against those who would transform the United States military, our most revered institution, into a force of evangelical crusaders, intolerant of the diversity of our society and willfully subversive of our national security interests."
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August 5th, 2007
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Dr. Drew Westen on how the human brain processes politically and what politicians must do to connect into that cognitive/emotional process. Dr. Westen is an author and professor of psychology at Emory University. Dr. Westin received his B.A. at Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. His major areas of research are personality disorders, eating disorders, psychotherapy effectiveness, adolescent psychopathology, political psychology, and the interface of psychodynamics and neuroscience. His just-published book is "The Political Brain: the Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation." Howard Dean has said of "The Political Brain," ""Drew Westen is a must read...we will win the Presidency if our candidate reads and acts on this book."
Ambassador Chas Freeman in an analysis on the state of affairs in the Middle East. Ambassador Freeman is a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In addition, he has been a Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Charge/Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassy in both China and Thailand, Director of Chinese Affairs for the Department of State. He is a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. He is the recipient of many honors, including the Department of Defense Meritorious service (Desert Shield/Desert Storm), the CIA Medallion (Desert Shield/Desert Storm), the Distinguished Honor Award (Desert Shield/Desert Storm), and the Presidential Meritorious Service Award. Ambassador Freeman is currently Chairman of Projects International, Inc.; the President of the Middle East Policy Council; Co-Chair of the US-China Policy Council; and Vice Chair of the Atlantic Council. He is the author of "The Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy" and "The Diplomat's Dictionary."
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July 29th, 2007
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Josh Kurlantzick on the effort that China is making to improve its image and advance its interests around the world. Mr. Kurlantzick is a special correspondent for the New Republic and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has covered Southeast Asia and China as a correspondent for U.S. News and World Report and The Economist, and his writings on Asia have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. His new book is Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World.
Robert Bell on how the economy could be made "green." Dr. Bell is Professor of Management and Chairman of the Economics Department at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of 8 books, his most recent being "The Green Bubble - Waste into Wealth: the New Energy Revolution". In this book, Dr. Bell lays out an "after-oil" scenario, combining considerations of energy, geopolitics, the functioning of business and markets, extending to the mores of American society.
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July 22nd, 2007
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Tim Weiner on the history of the CIA. Mr. Weiner is a reporter for The New York Times. He has written on American intelligence for twenty years, and won the Pulitzer Prize for his work on secret national security programs. He has traveled to Afghanistan and other nations to investigate CIA covert operations firsthand. His has written two books, including the best-seller "Betrayal: the Story of Aldrich Ames" and "Blank Check: the Pentagon's Black Budget." His latest book, just published, is "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA," described by Walter Issacson as a "fascinating, deeply scary book. With prodigious reporting and on-the-record sources, Tim Weiner shows why the CIA has done so poorly in traditional intelligence. It s a riveting tale and also a warning."
Ted Gup on the growing secrecy under the Bush presidency. Mr. Gup is an investigative reporter who has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and a correspondent at Time magazine. He is also a professor of journalism at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of The Book of Honor: the Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Officers and the recipient of a George Polk Award and a Worth Bingham Prize. His new book is "Nation of Secrets: the Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life," described as "shaking our faith in some of our most trusted institutions, piercing the veil of secrecy to reveal an alarming new threat to democracy in America. Gup presents a vision radical in its clarity, conservative in its roots, of a country teetering on the brink of losing its itself.".
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July 15th, 2007
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John Nichols on why impeachment is necessitated. John Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent and has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. Formerly a writer and editor for The Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers, he is now editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers. Nichols has covered five presidential elections in the United States. He is the author, with Bob McChesney, of It's the Media, Stupid, Jews for Buchanan, on the 2000 presidential election, Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. He is perhaps the country's foremost authority on Vice President Cheney, a man he describes as a "shadow president," John Nichols is the author of the definitive "The Rise and Rise of Richard B. Cheney: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Most Powerful Vice President in American History," and his most recent book is "The Genius of Impeachment: the founder's cure for royalism."
Matthew Carr on the many contradictions within President Bush's "war on terror." Mr. Carr is a British writer, broadcaster, and journalist who has specializes in the coverage of violent conflict. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir My Father's House and his just-published new book is "The Infernal Machine: a history of terrorism." This history, which spans over a century, reveals startling parallels in different governments and societies to terrorism, despite profound political and cultural differences between them. Matthew Carr demonstrates that the true impact of terrorism has been felt in the overreactions of government and the media to acts of political violence, as rulers have consistently seized on terrorist attacks as a pretext for massive counterassault, sacrificing civil liberties and curtailing democratic institutions in the name of security. Chalmers Johnson has said that The Infernal Machine is "the best written and most comprehensive history of terrorism we have." Author Mike Davis said, "this brilliant book deftly dismantles the bogus pretenses and false analogies with which they sanctify the global war on civil liberties and free speech." And Simon Jenkins in the London Sunday Times says "I am with Carr in believing that the chief risk today is not of Muslim terrorists undermining western democracy, but of the West doing so itself by absurdly overstating the risk."
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July 8th, 2007
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Dr. Stephen Cohen on the developing situation in Pakistan and India. Dr. Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in the study and analysis of India, Pakistan, South Asian security and proliferation issues. He was previously Professor of Political Science and History, and Founder-Director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, University of Illinois-Urbana. He was a Member of the Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State (1985-87). He is the author of a number of books, including "The Idea of Pakistan" and "India: emerging power."
Frederick Schwartz with Azziz Huq on the authoritarianism which is the hallmark of the Bush presidency, which derives from an unprecedented assertion of powers derived from the president's status as a "unitary executive." Frederick Schwartz is senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Hereceived an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1957 and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1960, where he was an editor of the Law Review. After a year s clerkship with Judge J. Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, he worked one year for the Nigerian government as Assistant Commissioner for Law Revision under a Ford Foundation grant. He went on to serve as chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activity (1975-1976). He later served as Corporation Counsel under New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch (1982-1986). In 1989, he chaired the commission that revised New York City s charter. In addition to currently serving as senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, he chairs the New York City Campaign Finance Board, the Board of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Board of the Vera Institute of Justice. Azziz Huq is associate counsel at the Brennan Center. Mr. Huq clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the October 2003 Term of the Supreme Court of the United States, and for Judge Robert D. Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (2001-02). He graduated summa cum laude from both the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1996), and Columbia Law School (2001). At Columbia, he was Essay and Review Editor of the Columbia Law Review, and received several academic awards, including the John Ordonneux Prize (given to the graduating student with the highest grade point average). He is published in the Columbia Law Review, the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, the World Policy Journal and the New School s Constellations Journal. He has written for Himal Southasian, Legal Times and the American Prospect, and appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now! and NPR s Talk of the Nation. Before and during law school, Mr. Huq has also worked on human rights issues overseas in Guatemala and Cambodia. In 2002, he received a Columbia Law School Post-Graduate Human Rights Fellowship to work with the International Crisis Group studying constitutional reform in Afghanistan. He has since worked with ICG in Pakistan, and Nepal on legal and constitutional reform issues. He is co-author, with Fritz Schwartz of: "Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a time of Terror."
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July 1st, 2007
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Lawrence Korb is the Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Senior Adviser to the Center for Defense Information. Korb served as Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1981 to 1985. In that position, he administered about seventy percent of the Defense budget. For his service he was awarded the Department of Defense s medal for Distinguished Public Service. Korb served on active duty for four years as Naval Flight Officer, and retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of Captain. Korb s twenty books and more than 100 articles on national security issues include The Joint Chiefs of Staff: The First Twenty-five Years, The Fall and Rise of the Pentagon, American National Security: Policy and Process, Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy, Reshaping America s Military, and A New National Security Strategy in an Age of Terrorists, Tyrants, and Weapons of Mass Destruction. www.americanprogress.org
Eugene Linden writes about science, technology, the environment and humanity's relationship with nature in books, articles, and essays. His most recent books include: Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, which one review describes thus "The Winds of Change is fascinating -- a tour de force. Linden has accumulated a greater comprehension of paleo-climatic and oceanographic issues than all but a very few scientists. This book, is just what we need right now." He previously published The Octopus and the Orangutan: New Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity, and The Parrot's Lament and Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue, Intelligence, and Ingenuity. The Parrot's Lament was serialized at cover length in TIME. In 2002, Plume published an updated version of The Future in Plain Sight, which was described by The Rocky Mountain News as "the most important book of the decade" when it was first published in 1998. www.eugenelinden.com
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June 24th, 2007
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Dr. Obery Hendricks on the functional "hijacking" and gross distortion of Jesus by right-wing religion in America, and what he actually said and stood for. Dr. Hendricks is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at the New York Theological Seminary, an Ordained Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the author of Living Water. He has served as a professor at Drew University, as visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, and as president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological institution in the United States. In addition to his many accomplishments in the field of relgion, he is a former Wall Street investment executive, professional musician, and competitive martial artist. His new book is The Politics of Jesus : Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted, a book Jim Wallis of Sojourners described as "a critical prophetic message that interrogates our nation s politics according to the values of Jesus. This book is a must-read for everyone who seeks to understand and live out the revolutionary implications of following Christ." And Dr. Michael Eric Dyson said of it, "an instant classic a book of stunning erudition, remarkable eloquence, and political courage. The Politics of Jesus immediately thrusts Obery Hendricks, to the front ranks of American religious thinkers.
Robert Baer on the worsening situation in the Middle East. Mr. Baer was a CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997, where he served in Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Lebanon. He is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, which was the source material for the Academy-Award nominated film "Syriana."
Roger Morris on the disastrous Bush foreign policy. Mr. Morris served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. An award-winning investigative journalist and historian, he is the author of several books, including "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician." He is currently completing a history of U.S. policy and covert intervention in Southwest Asia.
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June 17th, 2007
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Michael Weinstein is a leader of the movement to restore the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state in the United States military, and the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is an attorney and businessman who served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force as a judge advocate (JAG) for ten years and also worked for more than three years as legal counsel in the Reagan White House. His just-published book is "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against the Evangelical Coup in America's Military." Ambassador Joseph Wilson said of this book, "this is the story of one man s willingness to stand up for the Constitution of the United States against those who would transform the United States military, our most revered institution, into a force of evangelical crusaders, intolerant of the diversity of our society and willfully subversive of our national security interests."
Ray McGovern on the misuse of intelligence and its consequences in the Bush/Cheney administration. Ray McGovern is a retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents over 27 years and presented the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many years. McGovern was one of President Ronald Reagan's intelligence briefers from 1981-85 when he was in charge of preparing daily security briefs for the President, the Vice President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet and National Security Advisor. Later, McGovern was one of several senior CIA analysts who prepared the President's Daily Brief (PDB) for President George Herbert Walker Bush. Upon retirement, McGovern was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal from George Herbert Walker Bush (which he later returned) and worked for Washington-based non-profits before becoming co-director of the Servant Leadership School in Washington. Together with other former CIA employees, he founded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity or VIPS. The organization is dedicated to exposing what these former Intelligence professionals believe to be the mishandling of important intelligence, specifically relating to the War in Iraq.
interviewed with:
Larry Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson works with US military commands in scripting terrorism exercises, briefs foreign governments on a regular basis on terrorist trends, and conducts undercover investigations on product counterfeiting and smuggling. He worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department s Office of Counter Terrorism, is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management.
From 1985 through September 1989 Mr. Johnson worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. During his distinguished career, he received training in paramilitary operations, worked in the Directorate of Operations, served in the CIA s Operation s Center, and established himself as a prolific analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. In his final year with the CIA he received two Exceptional Performance Awards. Mr. Johnson is a member of the American Society for Industrial Security. He taught at The American University s School of International Service (1979-1983) while working on a Ph.D. in political science. He has a M.S. degree in Community Development from the University of Missouri (1978), where he also received his B.S. degree in Sociology, graduating Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1976.
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June 10th, 2007
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Michael Beschloss on the subject of presidents and courage. Mr. Beschloss is an historian who specializes in the US presidency. He is the author of several books including: The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1980); At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993); with Strobe Talbott, and his latest Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789 - 1989.
Daniel Levy on the conflicts raging within the Palestinian territories. Mr. Levy is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Policy Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and directed policy planning and international efforts at the Geneva Campaign Headquarters in Tel Aviv. Previously, Mr. Levy served as senior policy adviser to former Israeli Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin, and under the Barak government he worked in the prime minister s office as a special adviser and head of the Jerusalem Affairs unit. He was a member of the Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and of the negotiating team for the Oslo B Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. As a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation, Mr. Levy seeks to encourage thought-provoking debate and offer strategic solutions for resolving the long-running conflicts in the Middle East, core among them the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has published extensively in a broad range of publications including Ha aretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Boston Globe, United Press International, The American Prospect, the International Herald Tribune, The Evening Standard (London), and the blog TPMCafe.
interviewed with
Gershom Gorenberg is an internationally acclaimed author and journalist based in Israel. His book The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount was described by the Washington Post as "a clear-eyed and compelling account of the messianists, would-be prophets, and adventurers who have fixed their sights on Jerusalem's holy places." His previous book, "Shalom, Friend: the Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" is considered to be a definitive biography of the fallen Israeli leader, who was slain by Israeli settler extremist. His new book is "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements. Publishers' weekley said of this book: "An essential guide to understanding Israel's own contribution to its current tragic pass." And Booklist says, "this is a timely, vital and riveting analysis of how the current territorial and ethnic Gordian knot developed."
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June 3rd, 2007
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Vincent Bugliosi on the assassination of President Kennedy. Mr. Bugliosi is a former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney, who is well-known
for his successfull prosecution of Charles Manson and several other members of his "family" for the 1969 murders of Sharon Tate and six others. As a prosecutor, he
lost only one of the 106 felony cases he tried, which included winning 21 out of 21 murder cases. Mr. Bugliosi went on to become a best-selling author, with
his book about the Manson trial called Helter Skelter. His other books include, "And the Sea Will Tell," "Outrage: the five reasons why OJ Simpsom Got Away With
Murder," "No Island of Sanity: Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton - The Supreme Court on Trial" and "The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the
Constitution and Chose Our President." His just-released new book is a monumental effort, which has taken over 20 years, is over 1,600 pages and features an
included CD-ROM, entitled "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." The Los Angeles Times has said of "Reclaiming History," "With
this work, Bugliosi has definitively explained the murder that recalibrated modern America. It is a book for the ages."
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May 27th, 2007
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Wayne White on the just-released Senate reports which reveal that Bush had been advised that the situation in Iraq, post-invasion, could deteriorate to the situation we now seeis an Adjunct Scholar at Washington s Middle East Institute. He most recently served as Deputy Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia (NESA). White also served as principal Iraq analyst and head of INR/NESA s Iraq team from 2003 to 2005. He was Chief of INR s Maghreb, Arabian Penninsula, Iran and Iraq division and State Department representative to NATO Middle East working groups from 1990 to 2002. Five times he received the State Department s Superior Honor Award, and three time s the Department s Meritorious Honor Award. In 1986, he was named INR s first Analyst of the Year, and, in 2004 received the Secretary s Career Achievement Award from Secretary Powell. Mr. White also has received the National Intelligence Certificate of Distinction for service during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, in 2000 the National Intelligence Medal for Outstanding Achievement, a 2004 citation from the National Intelligence Council for his work on the Iraq crisis, and was a 2002 National Intelligence Fellow. He recently served as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group.
Jahan Salehi on a developing situation is Turkey as that country masses troops on the border with Iraq. Mr. Salehi was born in Iran, raised and educated in the United States. As a freelance photo-journalist in the late 1970's he traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. After founding and serving as chief executive officer of several technology and health information companies in Vermont, New York, and North Carolina, he became Managing Director of European Operations of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate (now Tribune Media Services International), based in London from 2001-2003, covering twenty-five countries throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He is currently International Director of Agence Global, which is the international agency for The Nation magazine.
Antonia Juhasz on the military supplemental bill and its provision that Iraq must pass a bill privatizing their oil resources, or lose reconstruction funds. Ms. Juhasz is a policy-analyst, author and activist living in San Francisco. She is the Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. She is a teacher at the New College of California in the Activism and Social Change Masters Program. She is also a guest lecturer on U.S. Foreign Policy at the McMaster University Labour Studies Program in a unique educational program with the Canadian Automobile Workers Union. Juhasz is author of The Bu$h Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. The Bu$h Agenda exposes the Bush administration's use of corporate globalization policy as a weapon of war. Juhasz uncovers the history and key role of U.S. corporations in the creation of the Bush agenda, focusing on Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and Halliburton. Presenting the Iraq War as the most brutal application of the Bush agenda, Juhasz reveals the "oil time-line" driving the war, and how the administration has fundamentally transformed Iraq's economy, locking in sweeping advantages to its corporate allies including increased access to Iraq's oil. The administration has expanded its target to the whole Middle East through the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area. Juhasz brings to sharp focus the dangerous fallacy that the United States can combat terrorism and spread democracy through its so-called "free trade" policies. It concludes with specific achievable alternatives for a more peaceful and sustainable course. Juhasz recently began work on a new book with HarperCollins tentatively titled, The Break-Up: The Case for Taking Apart Big Oil, in which she makes the case for the break-up of the nation s largest oil corporations.
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May 20th, 2007
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Glenn Greenwald on the Justice Department in chaos, Attorney General Gonzales and the startling testimony by former Deputey Attorney General James Comey. Glenn Greenwald is a best-selling author and popular columnist at Salon.com. Prior to becoming a journalist, he was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York: In 2005, Greenwald started a political and legal blog, Unclaimed Territory, which quickly became one of the most popular and highest-trafficked in the blogosphere. Upon disclosure by the New York Times in December 2005 of President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program, Greenwald became one of the leading and most cited experts on that controversy. In early 2006, he broke a story on his blog regarding the NSA scandal that served as the basis for front-page articles in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, all of which credited his blog for the story. Greenwald is the author of the book "How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok," which critiqued the radical theories of executive power used by the Bush administration to justify everything from lawbreaking powers to the use of torture to indefinite detention of American citizens. The book was an instant bestseller, rising to No. 1 on Amazon's Best Seller List and remaining there for almost a full week. The book also debuted at No. 11 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and remained on the list for the next two months. His forthcoming book, "Tragic Legacy: How a Good v. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency," will be released in June 2007. "Tragic Legacy" examines the role of Manichaean morality and the exploitation of the concept of the "enemy" during the Bush presidency and argues that President Bush's single-minded dependence on good vs. evil themes has rendered his presidency a failure.
Robert Scheer on the issue of religion in America. Robert Scheer is a journalist, author and columnist, whose work has been published across the country for the past 30 years. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at the San Francisco Chronicle. He has written seven books, including The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq, co-authored with his son Christopher, and most recently, Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. Scheer also directs the Privacy Project at the Annenberg School. On Tuesday afternoons, Scheer can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica. After leaving the LA Times, Robert Scheer founded Truthdig, a web magazine that provides expert in-depth coverage of current affairs as well as other content assembled from a progressive point of view. This month Truthdig won both the juried Webby Award and People s Voice Award in the category of Best Political Blog.
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May 13th, 2007
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Dr. Herman Schwartz on the Military Commissions Act and habeas corpus. Dr. Schwartz is a civil rights activist, attorney and a professor of constitutional law at American Univerity's Washington College of Law. He is internationally recognized for his work in consitutional reform and the advancement of human rights in Eastern Europe, Russian and elsewhere. He has counseled and advised numerous members of the United States House of Representatives and the Senate, and was formerly the Chief Counsel to the US Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcomittee. He was a US delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission and to the World Human Rights Conference. He is the author of a number of artices and books, including "The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite the US Constitution," "The Rhenquist Court: judicial activism on the right," and his latest "Right Wing Justice: The Conservative Campaign to Take Over the Courts." He has abiding interest in Guantanamo and the loss of civil rights under the Bush administration, and has written a new article on the subject for the Legal Times.
Matthew Carr on his book, "The Infernal Machine" and on the war on terror. Mr. Carr is a British writer, broadcaster, and journalist who has specializes in the coverage of violent conflict. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir My Father's House and his just-published new book is "The Infernal Machine: a history of terrorism." This history, which spans over a century, reveals startling parallels in different governments and societies to terrorism, despite profound political and cultural differences between them. Matthew Carr demonstrates that the true impact of terrorism has been felt in the overreactions of government and the media to acts of political violence, as rulers have consistently seized on terrorist attacks as a pretext for massive counterassault, sacrificing civil liberties and curtailing democratic institutions in the name of security. Chalmers Johnson has said that The Infernal Machine is "the best written and most comprehensive history of terrorism we have." Author Mike Davis said, "this brilliant book deftly dismantles the bogus pretenses and false analogies with which they sanctify the global war on civil liberties and free speech." And Simon Jenkins in the London Sunday Times says "I am with Carr in believing that the chief risk today is not of Muslim terrorists undermining western democracy, but of the West doing so itself by absurdly overstating the risk."
Dr. John Brown on the state of American diplomacy. Dr. Brown is a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy and a Research Associate at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, where he teaches public diplomacy. He is a consultant for the Library of Congress's "Open World" exchange program with the Russian Federation, he has written for The Washington Post, The Nation on line, TomPaine.com, The Moscow Times, and American Diplomacy. Brown, who received a Ph.D. in Russian History from Princeton University in 1977, was a member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 1981 until March 10, 2003 and has served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. He is co-author (with S. Grant) of The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union." His other published writings include research on Russian history as well as articles in the Polish and Serbian press. He assembles the daily Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, distributed by the USC Center for Public Diplomacy. He is currently writing a book on Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Policy.
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May 6th, 2007
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Ray McGovern on George Tenat and his book. Mr. McGovern is a retired CIA officer turned political activist. McGovern was a Federal employee under seven U.S. presidents over 27 years and presented the morning intelligence briefings at the White House for many years. McGovern was one of President Ronald Reagan's intelligence briefers from 1981-85 when he was in charge of preparing daily security briefs for the President, the Vice President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Cabinet and National Security Advisor. Later, McGovern was one of several senior CIA analysts who prepared the President's Daily Brief (PDB) for President George Herbert Walker Bush. Upon retirement, McGovern was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal from George Herbert Walker Bush (which he later returned) and worked for Washington-based non-profits before becoming co-director of the Servant Leadership School in Washington. Together with other former CIA employees, he founded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity or VIPS. The organization is dedicated to exposing what these former Intelligence professionals believe to be the mishandling of important intelligence, specifically relating to the War in Iraq.
Robert Dallek on his new book about President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Mr. Dallek is an eminent historian who specialises in American Presidents. He has taught at Columbia, UCLA, Oxford, where he was visiting Harmsworth Professor of American history, Boston University, and most recently, Dartmouth, where he was Montgomery Fellow. U.S. presidents, foreign policy, and politics have been the focus of his teaching and writing. Professor Dallek has won numerous Fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim and a Bancroft Prize. He has published articles and reviews in the country s leading magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Society of American Historians, which he served as president in 2004-2005. He is the author of nine previous books, including FDR and American Foreign Policy, a two-volume life of Lyndon Johnson, Lone Star Rising and Flawed Giant, Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents, and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, which was a number one New York Times bestseller. His latest book, just published, is Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. Publishers Weekly says "Dallek's eloquent portrait of power depicts two men who were remarkably alike in important ways. Both harbored ravenous personal ambitions. Both suffered from (and operated out of) profound insecurities and low self-esteem. Both were deeply resentful (to the point of paranoia) of criticisms and challenges. Dallek finds important new material that will revise our thinking about a president and the man the author terms "a kind of co-president."
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April 29th, 2007
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William Langewiesche on the international market for nuclear weapons, component parts and fissile material. Mr. Langewiesche is an author and journalist, and was a professional airplane pilot for many years. He is currently a writer for Vanity Fair magazine, and was well-known as a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly magazine. He has written articles covering events such as the World Trade Center cleanup, a three-part series which was published as the book American Ground. He also detailed the last flight of the shuttle Columbia. Langewiesche was a finalist for the 2004 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage for American Ground. Unbuilding the World Trade Center and 2005 for The Outlaw Sea. He is the author of 6 books, with his latest being: new "The Atomic Bazaar: the Rise of the Nuclear Poor."
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April 22nd, 2007
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Professor Richard Hasen on the issue which underlies the US Attorney/Justice Department scandal. Professor Hasen is the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA School of Law and a PhD, also from UCLA. After law school, Richard Hasen clerked for the Honorable David R. Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Hasen is a nationally-recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, is co-author of a leading casebook on election law and co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of more than three dozen articles on election law issues. In 2002, Hasen was named one of the 20 top lawyers in California under age 40 by the Los Angeles (and San Francisco) Daily Journal and one of the top 100 lawyers in California in 2005. Hasen also writes the widely read "Election law blog." His most recent book, The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging Equality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore, was published by NYU Press in 2003. He was recently featured in a front-page New York Times article.
Michael Weinstein on the increasing presence of the religious right in the US military. Mr. Weinstein is a leader of the movement to restore the Constitutionally mandated separation of church and state in the United States military, and the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is an attorney and businessman who served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force as a judge advocate (JAG) for ten years and also worked for more than three years as legal counsel in the Reagan White House. His just-published book is "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against the Evangelical Coup in America's Military." Ambassador Joseph Wilson said of this book, "this is the story of one man s willingness to stand up for the Constitution of the United States against those who would transform the United States military, our most revered institution, into a force of evangelical crusaders, intolerant of the diversity of our society and willfully subversive of our national security interests."
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April 15th, 2007
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Ali Allawi on how Iraq got to it's present state and what the future may hold, from an insider's perspective. Mr. Allawi is senior adviser to the Prime Minister of Iraq. Since the Coalition s invasion of Iraq, he served as his country s first postwar civilian Minister of Defense, was elected to the Transitional National Assembly as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, and was appointed Minister of Finance under Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaffari. He divides his time between London and Baghdad. His just-published book is "The Occupation of Iraq:Winning the War, Losing the Peace." Roger Owens of Harvard University said of this book, "Magisterial. . . . Pure gold. . . . Will certainly become the benchmark work against which all later books will have to be measured. It is authoritative, incisive, dispassionate, devastating in its important judgments, and wholly original."
Nancy Birdsall on developments in the Paul Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank. Nancy Birdsall is the founding president of the Center for Global Development. Prior to launching the center, Birdsall served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work at Carnegie focused on issues of globalization and inequality, as well as on the reform of the international financial institutions. From 1993 to 1998, Birdsall was Executive Vice-President of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before joining the Inter-American Development Bank, Birdsall spent 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, most recently as Director of the Policy Research Department. Ms. Birdsall is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs. She has also written more than 75 articles for books and scholarly journals published in English and Spanish. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals.
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April 8th, 2007
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Dr. Thomas Mowle on the tactics of the US military as the insurgency began to rise in Iraq. Dr. Mowle is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the US Air Force Academy. He is a Major in the Air Force. He holds degrees in Government, Electrical Engineering, International Affairs and a PhD in Political Science from Ohio State University, specializing in international and comparative politics. His research focuses on Iraq, transatlantic relations, and foreign policy decision making. He has published Allies at Odds: The United States and the European Union (2004), as well as articles in International Studies Perspectives, Political Psychology, Strategic Insights, and Disarmament, and chapters in books on Iraq, Bosnia, Turkish foreign policy, and U.S. arms control policy. He served in the Strategy, Plans, and Assessment Division, Headquarters Multinational Force-Iraq, Baghdad, from August to December 2004. His new book is "Hope is Not a Plan," which takes the reader inside the Green Zone courtesy of participant-observers brought to Iraq to diagnose the insurgency and develop a get-well plan. Focusing on the critical months of late 2004 and early 2005 --when a new sovereign government in Iraq tried to build legitimacy, and the coalition force tried to find the best way to help it do so--it looks at a slice of the war not previously examined. This is not the Beltway story, nor the grunt and jarhead story. Rather, the book looks at the process of taking political and military goals and turning them into action.
Dr. Robert Edgar on the true meaning of Jesus. Dr. Edgar is general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, and a former six-term member of the United States House of Representatives. Dr. Edgar was the first Democrat in 82 years to be elected from the heavily Republican seventh congressional district of Pennsylvania, located primarily in Delaware County. He is well known for being one of the most liberal members of Congress during his six-terms of service in the U.S. House of Representatives. Serving in Congress from 1974 to 1987, Edgar led efforts to improve public transportation, authored the community Right to Know provisions of Super Fund legislation, co-authored the new G.I. Bill for the all-volunteer service, fought wasteful water projects and supported environmental goals. Among other appointments, he served as chair of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future (1982-86) and as a member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976-78) that investigated the deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and President John F. Kennedy. His career has also included pastorates at United Methodist congregations and stints as a teacher, college chaplain, community organizer, and director of a think tank on national security issues. Dr. Edgar serves on the boards of several organizations, including Independent Sector, the National Coalition for Health Care, Common Cause, and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment. He serves on the board of directors of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, an independent, non-profit organization that is a principal resource for Congress on environmental and energy issues.
interviewed with
Dr. Obery Hendricks on the true meaning of Jesus. Dr. Hendricks is Professor of Biblical Interpretation at the New York Theological Seminary, an Ordained Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the author of Living Water. He has served as a professor at Drew University, as visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary, and as president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological institution in the United States. In addition to his many accomplishments in the field of relgion, he is a former Wall Street investment executive, professional musician, and competitive martial artist. His new book is The Politics of Jesus : Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted, a book Jim Wallis of Sojourners described as "a critical prophetic message that interrogates our nation s politics according to the values of Jesus. This book is a must-read for everyone who seeks to understand and live out the revolutionary implications of following Christ." And Dr. Michael Eric Dyson said of it, "an instant classic a book of stunning erudition, remarkable eloquence, and political courage. The Politics of Jesus immediately thrusts Obery Hendricks, to the front ranks of American religious thinkers.
Jonathan Gorham and Michael Schwartz on how to use the little-known telephone tax refund to support non-profit causes. Gorham and Schwartz are partners in "Refunds for Good," which is urging taxpayers to seek a refund for long-distance telephone tax, available to 2006 taxpayers, and then to donate those funds to what they describe as good causes. www.refundsforgood.org
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April 1st, 2007
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Dr. Benjamin Barber on the infantalizing consumerism which has infected America. Dr. Barber is the Gershon and Carrol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a principal of the Democracy Collaborative , with offices in New York, Washington, and the University of Maryland. Dr. Barber brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture, and education in America and abroad. He consults regularly with political and civic leaders in the United States and Europe, including former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Senator Bill Bradley, and President Roman Herzog of Germany, as well as with institutions such as the Corporation for National Service, the United States Information Agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in Europe, UNESCO, the European Parliament, the Swedish Parliamentary Commission on Democracy, and "Mission 2000" (the French Millenial Commission). His new book is "Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole," which warns of a totalitarian "ethos of induced childishness" that not only seeks to turn the young into aggressive consumers but to arrest the psychological development of adults as well, leading them to indulge in puerile and narcissistic materialism.
Reese Erlich on the Nancy Pelosi visit to Syria and related. Mr. Erlish is a print and broadcast journalist, who reports regularly for CBC, ABC (Australia), Radio Deutche Welle and National Public Radio. His articles appear in the San Francisco Chronicle, St. Petersburg Times and the Dallas Morning News. His television documentaries have aired on PBS stations nationwide. His magazine work has appeared in San Francisco Magazine, California Monthly, California Lawyer, Mother Jones, The Progressive, The Nation, and he has worked as a consultant to National Geographic. His book, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You, was a best seller in 2003. His forthcoming book, The Iran Agenda: the real story of U.S. policy and the middle east crisis, will be in bookstores in September 2007.
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March 25th, 2007
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Goria Steinem on the state of the nation and the world six years into the Bush administration. Ms. Steinem remains the United States' most influential, eloquent and revered feminist more than three decades after founding Ms. magazine. A devoted activist and writer, Steinem continues, as she has for more than thirty-five years, to travel nationally and internationally and speak, as one of America's genuine public intellectuals, with reason and articulation about gender, racial, and other civil inequity issues. She is the author of numerous books, some of them classics, including "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions," "Revolution from Within" and "Moving Beyond Words." Her latest book is "Doing Sixty and Seventy" and she has recently announced an effort with Jane Fonda to create a radio network for women.
Jeremy Scahill on the disturbing rise of a private mercenary army, with right wing affiliations, in the United States. Mr. Scahill is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of the just-published Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, from Nation Books. In this book Scahill reports on the Bush Administration's radical privatization of the US military operations, int the form of Blackwater USA, which he as described as a Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration.
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March 18th, 2007
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Roger Morris on the failure of the American citizenry to understand the relationship of America and the world, it's history and his projections on where things are heading now. Roger Morris served on the senior staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. An award-winning investigative journalist and historian, he is the author of several books, including "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician." He is currently completing a history of U.S. policy and covert intervention in Southwest Asia.
Lisa Margonelli on oil, politics and money. Lisa Margonelli is currently an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Business 2.0, Discover, and Jane, and was the recipient of a Sundance Institute Fellowship and an excellence in journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Her just-published book is "Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline."
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March 11th, 2007
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Lawrence Kolb on his new book, "America at Night." Mr. Kolb was born in Virginia and raised around the world as the son of a senior American intelligence official, a spy master. While still in his mid-twenties, he became an agent for professional athletes, including Muhammad Ali, with whom Kolb developed a close friendship. After being recruited by legendary CIA co-founder Miles Copeland, he soon became involved in covert intrigues in Beirut, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Nicaragua, Peru, Pakistan, and India, not to mention the halls of power in London, New York, and Washington. He chronicled his colorful experiences in his first book, Overworld: The Life and Times of a Reluctant Spy. Kolb's new book, America at Night, is his firsthand account of a counterterrorism investigation he ran in 2004 for a friend who was a high-level official of the Department of Homeland Security, and of the aftermath of that investigation. Deep within the recesses of power and politics, Kolb discovers two rogue CIA operatives' secret scheme to subvert the 2004 U.S. presidential election, then he risks his life to foil the plan. In America at Night, Kolb reveals how he uncovered the vicious political plot that eluded even our best intelligence and law enforcement officials.
Brian Turner is the poet of the Iraq war. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Besides being a soldier, Brian Turner is a poet, having had work published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. His book "Here, Bullet," which has been received internationally with widespread acclaim and many awards, including the 2006 PEN Center literary award, the 2006 Lanman Literary Fellowship, the 2007 Poet's Prize and a New York Times Editor's Choice. He has received a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. "Here, Bullet" is described as a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq War by a solider-poet. Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), Iraq war veteran Brian Turner writes powerfully affecting poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. Based upon Turner s year-long tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, the poems offer gracefully-rendered, unflinching description but, remarkably, leave the reader to draw conclusions or moral lessons. Here, Bullet is a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.
Here, Bullet by Brian Turner
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, that leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.
March 4th, 2007
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Geoffrey Perret on the history of power abuse in the US presidency. Geoffrey Perret is the acclaimed award-winning historian and author of thirteen books, including Ulysses S. Grant, Eisenhower, and Lincoln s War. He has been a consultant for PBS, C-Span, and the History Channel. His latest is Commander In Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America's Future.
William Stevenson on his book on WWII spy Vera Atkins. William Stevenson was trained in aerial espionage as a British naval fighter pilot in World War II. A respected historian and expert in covert warfare, he is the author of sixteen books, including the best sellers A Man Called Intrepid, Intrepid s Last Case, and Ninety Minutes at Entebbe. His just-published new book is Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II, of which the Wall Street Journal has said To call it a thriller is an understatement. . . . This book is the real thing, from the top. Of the Spymistress Vera Atkins herself, none other than Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, said "In the real world of spies, Vera Atkins was the boss."
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February 25th, 2007
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Mike Farrell on his book "Just Call Me Mike." Mike Farrell is an award-winning actor and activist best known for his eight years on television's M*A*S*H and five seasons on "Providence," Mike Farrell's activism has been deep and long-lasting. He served on human rights and peace delegations to many countries around the world. As President of Death Penalty Focus, he speaks, writes, and coordinates efforts to stop Capitol Punishment. In 1996 Mike was presented the Valentine Davies Award by the Writers Guild of America, given to members: "whose contribution to the entertainment industry and the community-at-large have brought dignity and honor to writers everywhere." In February 1998 Farrell was appointed to a three-year term on the Commission on Judicial Performance, an 11 member California State Commission that adjudicates complaints against judges in the state. In 2002 Mike was elected First Vice President of the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles and served three years in that capacity. In 2004 he received the Donald Wright Award from California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, only the third time in its 28 year history that the award has been presented to a recipient who was neither a lawyer nor a judge. Mike Farrell's new book: "Just Call me Mike: from Actor to Activist" is the auto-biography of a man for whom life is an ongoing odyssey of self-discovery, personal commitment, and uncompromising social engagement. From his first-hand accounts of the ravages of war and oppression in Cambodia, El Salvador, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Gaza Strip, to his tireless advocacy against capital punishment, to his deep commitment to environmental causes, Farrell portrays each of these experiences with passion, outrage, and stubborn optimism. At the heart of his story, Farrell narrates his public struggle to be not only an artist, but a responsible citizen of the world.
Scott Ritter on the neocon plan to attack Iran. Mr. Ritter was a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, who has become a journalist, commentator and author, and is a leading critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, Ritter repeatedly stated that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Because of the prevailing political climate in the United States at the time, Ritter was widely condemned for this position. In retrospect, much of Ritter's pre-invasion critique of US policy has been vindicated. He is the author of a number of books, including "Iraq Confidential: the Untold Story to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein," and the latest, "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change." He has recently been appearing with Seymour Hersh, who has said of him, "the thing you need to know about Scott Ritter is that he was right."
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Note: no Live From the Left Coast for February 18th, 2007
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February 11th, 2007
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Bill Fletcher on the presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Obama. Bill Fletcher is a visiting professor at Brooklyn College in News York. He is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of TransAfrica Forum, and was formerly the Vice President for International Trade Union Development Programs for the George Meany Center/National Labor College of the AFL-CIO. Prior to his service at the Meany Center, Bill served as Education Director, and later, Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. Bill's union staff experience began in Boston as an organizer for the United Auto Workers, followed later as the Organizational Secretary/Administrative Director for the National Postal Mail Handlers Union in Washington, DC. Bill has also worked for the Service Employees International Union where he held various positions, the last one being Assistant to the President for the East and South. Bill Fletcher is a graduate of Harvard University and has authored numerous articles published in a variety of books, newspapers and magazines. He is also the co-author of the pictorial booklet: The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941.
Kristina Borjesson on the media's coverage (or lack thereof) of the gathering storm of an attack on Iran. Ms. Borjesson is an award-winning investigative reporter who has worked at the highest levels of American broadcast journalism and who has become a media-critic. She is the author of the highly acclaimed Into the Buzzsaw (winner of the National Press Club s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism and the 2005 Independent Publisher Book Award "IPPY" in Current Events). Her most recent book is "Feet to the Fire: the media after 9/11--top journalists speak out." Her books have been described as "...a warning signal about the evisceration of mainstream news media in this country" and an inside look at "how the America's free press isn't all that free...trenchant look at the current state of the media." Her awards for investigative reporting include and Emmy and an Edward R. Murrow award. She has worked for CBS and CNN, among a number of others.
Gina Waldman on her film "The Forgotten Refugee." Ms Waldman was born in Libya in 1948, Bublil and her family were forced to flee their home country in 1967 with only the clothes on their back and $20. The persecution and hatred she experienced as a Jew in the Middle East nearly became deadly. As her family fled on a bus to the airport, the driver attempted to set the bus aflame and murder all the passengers. After settling in America, Bublil became a leading activist in the Soviet Jewry movement and worked with Muslim refugees from Bosnia, for which she received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award. She is a co-founder of JIMENA.
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February 4th, 2007
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Dr. Chalmers Johnson on his thesis that a combination of factors, now spearheaded by Bush and Cheney, are bringing about the end of the American Republic, as per his new book "Nemesis." Dr. Johnson is an author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He is also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute, an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He has written numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American empire, Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire and the latest, to be released this Tuesday, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. From 1967 until 1973, Johnson was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates within the CIA. He largely dealt with issues involving communist China and Maoism. From 1967 until 1972, he also served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. His book Blowback won an American Book Award in 2001 from the Before Columbus Foundation, and was re-issued in an updated version in 2004. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment. Johnson was featured in the Eugene Jarecki-directed film Why We Fight, which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
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January 28th, 2007
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Elizabeth de la Vega analyzes the on-going trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby in its multiple legal and political ramifications. Ms. De la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She is author of the new book "U.S. v. George W. Bush et. al."
Dr. Sara Rosenbaum looks at President Bush's health care initiatives as presented in his 2007 State of the Union address. Dr. Rosenbaum is Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Harold and Jane Hirsh Professor of Health Law and Policy. She also holds an appointment as Professor of Health Care Sciences at GW's School of Medicine and Law. In addition, Professor Rosenbaum is Director of the Center for Health Services Research and Policy, the institutional home for many of the Department's research activities, and Director of the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program. Professor Rosenbaum has been named one of the nation's 500 most influential health policy makers by McGraw Hill. Among other honors, she has received the Investigator Award in Health Policy from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and has been recognized by the Department of Health and Human Services for distinguished national service on behalf of Medicaid beneficiaries. As a member of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Clinton, she directed the drafting of the Health Security Act and oversaw the development of the Vaccines for Children program.
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January 21st, 2007
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Dr. John Briggs and Dr. John Briggs II on the psychology of George W. Bush. John P. Briggs, MD, is retired from over 40 years of private practice in psychotherapy in Westchester County, New York. He was on the faculty in psychiatry at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City for 23 years and was a long-time member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. He trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. J.P. Briggs II, PhD, is a Distinguished CSU professor at Western Connecticut State University and is the senior editor of the intellectual journal The Connecticut Review. He is author and co-author of books on creativity and chaos, including Fire in the Crucible; Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos; and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos, among others. He is currently at work with Philadelphia psychologist John Amoroso on a book about the power of ambivalence in the creative process. Read their Truthout article at:http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011807J.shtml
Gary Kamiya is one of the original founders of Salon.com and has been the editor and writer-at-large for them since their inception eleven years ago. He now writes a weekly column at Salon, the most recent of which is entitled "Where's the Outrage?," which concerns the fact that it is primarily the lower and working class of American society who are bearing the real cost of life and limb in Bush's Iraq misadventure. The poetry of Brian Turner, author of "Here, Bullet," is featured. http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/01/16/antiwar/index.html
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January 14th, 2007
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