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Archive for November, 2007

Assassinations – four decades later…

Posted by themonitor on November 25, 2007

Who really did kill Kennedy?
2007-05-13, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco’s leading newspaper)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/13/RVG5FPLIMF1.DTL

David Talbot, founder of Salon.com … believes that new evidence, including his own research encompassing more than 150 interviews, further undermines the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report. [His new book] Brothers … stresses the extent to which the Kennedy administration faced political pressure from the extreme right, including elements of the CIA leadership, the national security apparatus [and] anti-Castro Cubans. JFK incurred the wrath of his enemies and incubated a desire for revenge in many of them. The author will convince many … that the likelihood of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK (and maybe RFK) is significant. Talbot’s highly readable, at times gripping book makes the case for releasing the classified documents pertaining to the JFK assassination. Declassified JFK files reveal that in 1963, [CIA agent George] Joannides was the agent in charge of one of the most powerful Cuban anti-Castro organizations in Miami, the Revolutionary Students Directorate, or DRE. A few months before JFK’s assassination, the DRE had significant contact with Lee Harvey Oswald. In the course of four intensive investigations of the JFK assassination, however, the CIA failed to divulge information about this connection, or even that Joannides was the CIA officer assigned to manage the DRE, and refused to release important parts of Joannides’ personnel file. In September, on grounds of national security, the CIA successfully thwarted a request for such information. Until it is released, many … will reasonably speculate that crucial information about the JFK assassination is being concealed.

Note: For more reliable information on the Kennedy assassination and more, click here. The History Channel also has an excellent documentary showing beyond doubt that there was more than one gunman. To order this highly revealing documentary, click here.




CIA role claim in Kennedy killing
2006-11-21, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6169006.stm

New video and photographic evidence…puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House. A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin. However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time. Witnesses placed Sirhan’s gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal shot came from one inch behind. Dr Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis at Columbia University, believes Sirhan may have been hypnotically programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin. Three of these men have been positively identified as senior officers who worked together in 1963 at JMWAVE, the CIA’s Miami base. David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends: “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.” George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated. Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations.

Note: There is ample evidence that Sirhan Sirhan was a programmed Manchurian Candidate. Declassified CIA documents show that U.S. intelligence services were creating programmed assassins back as early as the 1950s. For reliable, verifiable information on this key topic, click here.




The secrets and lies that a Cold-War warrior took to his grave
2007-04-15, London Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1642197.ece

When the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him. In the CIA, [Howard Hunt] had helped to mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But his first-born son [Saint] was by his side now. For years, he and Saint had hardly spoken. Then Saint came to him wanting to know if he had any information about JFK’s assassination. His father had sworn in two government investigations that he didn’t. But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sick bed, he began to write down the names of men who participated in a plot to kill the president. He scribbled the initials “LBJ”, standing for Kennedy’s vice-president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ”, connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that has never been solved. Next, his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, another CIA man and a well-known, vicious black-operations specialist. Then his father connected to Morales’s name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll”. So there it was: according to Hunt, LBJ had Kennedy killed. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican mafia assassin Lucien Sarti. A few weeks later, Saint received in the mail a tape recording from his dad. Hunt’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, but he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

Note: Though this article interesting refers to Saint as a “conspiracy nut,” if you take the time to read it, you will find it raises many serious questions about the Kennedy assassination. The History Channel has an excellent documentary series showing beyond doubt there was more than one gunman. To order, click here.




Blocked
2005-08-11, New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18193

It is disappointing to learn that the Central Intelligence Agency filed motions in federal court in May 2005 to block disclosure of records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy forty-one years ago. The spirit of the law is clear. The JFK Records Act of 1992, approved unanimously by Congress, mandated that all assassination-related records be reviewed and disclosed “immediately.” When Morley filed his lawsuit in December 2003, thirteen published JFK authors supported his request for the records in an open letter to The New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com/articles/16865). Eighteen months later, the CIA is still stonewalling. The agency now acknowledges that it possesses an undisclosed number of documents…which it will not release in any form. Thus records related to Kennedy’s assassination are still being hidden for reasons of “national security.”

Note: This letter to the editor was signed by Norman Mailer, Oliver Stone, and others. Why isn’t the media covering this important development? For two highly revealing videos on the JFK assassination, read here.




Was Robert Kennedy killed by a real ‘Manchurian candidate’-style assassin?
2005-01-18, The Independent (One of the UK’s leading newspapers)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article15539.ece

The circumstances surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy are being resurrected and re-examined in an attempt to establish the truth of what happened that night in the cramped pantry of a Los Angeles hotel. New evidence has emerged [in] the case of Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the assassination. Celebrities and journalists are joining the campaign for a federal investigation, which has been sparked in part by a new book, Nemesis, by the British author Peter Evans. Evans, who spent 10 years researching the book, has unearthed evidence to support Sirhan’s contention that he was hypnotised into being the “fall guy” for the murder. Evans identifies the hypnotist, who had worked on CIA mind control programmes and who was later found dead in mysterious circumstances. Bullet holes in the walls and ceiling demonstrate conclusively that more than one gunman fired shots at Senator Kennedy. Both Evans and Sirhan’s lawyer, Larry Teeter, are convinced that the Palestinian activist was chosen to be a Manchurian Candidate-style assassin. The assassination, they say, was carried out by a professional hitman who fled immediately, leaving Sirhan to take the blame. Teeter … said: “I know it was done. It was consistent with the US government’s programme developed by the CIA and Military Intelligence to enable handlers to get people to commit crimes with no knowledge of what they are doing.” Evans goes further and names the hypnotist as a Dr William Joseph Bryan Jnr. He had worked on a CIA mind-control programme called MKULTRA. Dr Bryan was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room in 1978. He had either shot himself or was murdered. The case remains unsolved.




Martin Luther King shooting tapes released online
2006-04-05, London Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2120209,00.html

Thirty-eight years after he was assassinated on a motel balcony, photographs, recordings and police files that describe the death of Martin Luther King Jr. have been placed on the internet. On yesterday’s anniversary of Dr King’s death, the Shelby County Register’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, made available hours of tapes, including hurried police calls from the scene of the crime, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pages of files and transcripts of the trial of James Earl Ray, the man found guilty of the shooting. Dr King was … in the city, and under police surveillance, trying to lead a peaceful protest of sanitation workers. The subsequent hour of calls, edited to 18 minutes on the website, show the rapid pace of events that later became the US Government’s case against Ray, who first admitted shooting Dr King before recanting and insisting for the rest of his life, with the support of the King family, that he was framed for the crime. Ray … died in jail in 1998 after four investigations, including a review by the Department of Justice, failed to find evidence to support a theory that Dr King was shot on the orders of a Memphis bar-owner.

Note: This article fails to mention a key fact. At a 1999 court trial held in Memphis, the family of Rev. King accused elements of the U.S. government of complicity in King’s death. After one month of hearings from 70 witnesses, a jury composed of six white and six black jurors took only one hour to find the U.S. government, the state of Tennessee, the city of Memphis, the Memphis police, and several individuals guilty of murdering King. Yet the mainstream media completely boycotted this trial. Thankfully, CBC (Canada’s PBS) gave it some coverage. To see a CBC clip of this highly revealing trial, go to minute 19 of the eye-opening video below (Free windows media player required). The entire video has some excellent information.
http://911busters.com/911_new_video_productions/WMV/9-11_Perspectives.wmv




The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis
1987-11-04, WantToKnow.info/PBS Documentary
http://www.WantToKnow.info/050423secretgovernment

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. The Russians had been our ally against the Nazis, an expedient alliance for the sake of war. Now they were our enemy. To fight them we turned to some of the very men who had inflicted on humanity the horrors of Hitler’s madness. We hired Nazis as American spies. Admiral Gene La Rocque: “That National Security Act of 1947 changed dramatically the direction of this great nation. It established the framework for a national security state. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nation’s security that we’re always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do. The National Security Act also gave us the Central Intelligence Agency.” In 1975 … Congress took its first public look at the Secret Government. Senator Frank Church chaired the Select Committee to study government operations. The hearings opened the books on a string of lethal activities, from the use of electric pistols and poison pellets, to Mafia connections and drug experiments. And they gave us a detailed account of assassination plots against foreign leaders and the overthrowing of sovereign governments. This is a system easily corrupted. While freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends.

Note: This highly revealing PBS documentary is available for free viewing on the Internet. For the link, written text, and much more on this amazingly revealing documentary, click here.




Brainwash victims win cash claims
2004-10-17, London Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-1313808,00.html

Hundreds of mentally ill patients who were subjected to barbaric CIA-funded brainwashing experiments … could be entitled to compensation following a landmark court ruling. Doctor Ewan Cameron, who became one of the world’s leading psychiatrists, developed techniques used by Nazi scientists to wipe out the existing personalities of people in his care. Cameron … was recruited by the CIA during the cold war while working at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He carried out mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD on hundreds of patients, but only 77 of them were awarded compensation. Now a landmark ruling by a Federal Court judge in Montreal will allow more than 250 former patients, whose claims were rejected, to seek compensation. Last week, Alan Stein, of Montreal law firm Stein and Stein … confirmed he was in the process of contacting former clients who could now renew their appeal. “There are about 200 people still due compensation,” he said. Using techniques similar to those portrayed in the celebrated novel The Manchurian Candidate, it was believed that people could be brainwashed and reprogrammed to carry out specific acts. Cameron developed a range of depatterning “treatments”. Patients were woken from drug-induced stupors two or three times a day for multiple electric shocks. In a specially designed “sleep room” made famous by Anne Collins’s book of the same name, Cameron placed a speaker under the patient’s pillow and relayed negative messages for 16 hours a day. Cameron … rose to become the first president of the World Psychiatric Association.

Note: If the above link does not work, click here. This article clearly shows that the Manchurian candidate (programmed assassin) is not just fiction. For a powerful two-page summary of 18,000 pages of declassified CIA documents on this disturbing mind control program, click here. Links to view the original top secret documents are included.




What Did the C.I.A. Do to His Father?
2001-04-01, New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D02E2DE113CF932A35…

For a quarter of a century, [Eric Olson] has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. On Nov. 28, 1953, around 2 a.m. [the] night manager at the Statler Hotel … in New York rushed out the front door … to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk. The man had fallen from the 10th floor — apparently after crashing through a closed window. [In late July, 1975] the C.I.A.’s director, William Colby [provided Olson's] family … declassified documents relating to Frank Olson’s death. Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a C.I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick. Olson’s specialty, it turned out, had been the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. The Colby documents were … full of unexplained terms like the ”Artichoke” and ”Bluebird” projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a C.I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassination. The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort Detrick scientists … on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD into Olson’s glass of Cointreau. Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, [Olson] faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. Slipping LSD into Olson’s Cointreau was … designed to get him to talk … to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary.

Note: For those interested in this vital, yet disturbing topic, the entire Times article is well worth reading. For further verifiable information on the CIA mind control programs mentioned in this article, click here.




Son probes strange death of WMD worker
2004-09-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco’s leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/09/12/MNG468MM8N1.DTL

Eric Olson now has a new verb for what happened to his father, Frank Olson, who worked for the Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, where he developed bioweapons and experimented with mind-control drugs. Eric Olson found the verb in a 1950s CIA manual. The verb is “dropped.” And the manual is a how-to guide for assassins. “The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface,” the manual says, adding helpfully: “It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.” Eric Olson believes his father — who developed misgivings about his work and tried to resign — was murdered by government agents to protect dark government secrets. “No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded,” says the CIA assassination manual. “Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons.” It adds: “For secret assassination the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.” William P. Walter, 78, who supervised anthrax production at Detrick, says Olson’s colleagues were divided about his death. “Some say he jumped. Some say he had help,” Walter says. “I’m one of the ‘had-help’ people.” So is James Starrs, a George Washington University forensic pathologist who … called the evidence “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” In a report to the CIA on the death, [Harold] Abramson, [a doctor who had experimented with LSD] wrote that the LSD experiment was designed “especially to trap (Olson).” This … raised a troubling possibility: that the LSD experiment was actually designed to see whether Olson could still be trusted to keep the agency’s dark secrets.

Note: Frank Olson was just one of many tragic casualties of the CIA’s mind-control programs. For revealing information on this secret history, click here.




True Tales Odd Enough to Stop a Farm Animal’s Heart
2005-04-07, New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EFDD163EF934A35757C0A9639C…

At the start of the twisted treasure hunt that is “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” the journalist Jon Ronson appears to be looking for furtive, paranoid quacks who play mind games. Take the goats of the title: Mr. Ronson cites a hundred of them. They have been used in top-secret experiments by psychic spies whose existence is not officially acknowledged by the United States Army. Military psychics are so well hidden that they aren’t covered by the Army’s coffee budget. It makes them cranky to have to bring their own coffee to work. “The damn psychic spies should be keeping their damn mouths shut, instead of chitchatting all over town about what they did.” So says retired Maj. Gen. Albert N. Stubblebine III, the first of the many characters redolent of “Dr. Strangelove” who are found in this jaw-dropper of a — hard to believe, but, yes — nonfiction story. Some of these experts contend that a goat’s heart can be stopped by the intense gaze of a certain kind of supersoldier. “Goat didn’t have a chance,” one of these tough guys [says]. Mr. Ronson … describes the effort to deploy a Moscow scientist who had previously sent subliminal messages to Red Army troops … in the Branch Davidian standoff. This scientist didn’t work out because he was unwilling to transmit … a bogus voice of God. He finds a prologue in MK-ULTRA, the real C.I.A. “Manchurian Candidate” research of the 1950’s, which involved the disastrous use of LSD as a potential truth serum. And somehow Mr. Ronson is able to keep his book both light and nightmarish. [He] remains terrifically adept at capturing the horror of these developments without losing track of their lunacy.

Note: For the above article and lots more reliable information on these mind control programs, click here. For another excellent book by Ronson titled “Them: Adventure with Extremists,” click here.

Posted in CIA, Primer, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Show Details for November 25th, 2007

Posted by themonitor on November 25, 2007

This week’s Guests:

 

— Filmmaker DAVID EARNHARDT discusses his new film on elections

Economist MARK WEISBROT on Social Security

================================================================================

– Filmmaker DAVID EARNHARDT discusses his new film on elections



Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson welcomes our guest, DAVID EARNHARDT. David’s work has been recognized with Emmy and other awards. His new film, UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections, is his first full-length documentary. It was just released a few weeks ago, and its premiere was to a sold-out audience in David’s hometown, Nashville. It is available to individuals for purchase (see website below).

The film includes footage of three whistleblowers, Clint Curtis, Steve Heller, and Bruce Funk, along with many other people who have been on the front lines in exposing the flaws and vulnerabilities of our vote-counting systems, such as Rep. John Conyers, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Brad Friedman, Bev Harris, Teresa Hommel, and more. Wasserman alone identified 36 different ways that legal voters in just one state, Ohio, were kept from voting or having their vote count. Both the 2004 and 2006 elections are examined.

Eyewitness accounts from the whistleblowers are supplemented by a smorgasbord of Jim Crow tactics, electronic voting machine security breaches, vote count manipulation, and illegal behavior by a major voting machine manufacturer.

Andrew Gumbel, author of “Steal This Vote” says in the film: “With all these [electronic] machines, you can alter the outcome of a national election in a way that is just unprecedented in terms of its reach and the power to really play around.”

Jonathan Simon, Co-founder, Election Defense Alliance, says: “UNCOUNTED will blow you out of your comfort zone and call forth your deepest patriotism.”

David Earnhardt is a producer/director of 31 years. His work has been recognized with numerous Emmy, Iris and Telly national awards. A national documentary on children’s rights, a biographical documentary about jazz legend Helen Humes, and a comedy special featuring an up-and-coming Jay Leno are among Earnhardt’s many credits. In 1993, he founded his Nashville production company, which specializes in high quality video presentations for a variety of nonprofits. Earnhardt Pirkle, Inc. has produced projects for more than 250 clients and has won more than 60 national awards in its 14-year history. David Earnhardt is a graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he majored in film studies. He was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina.

WEBSITE:
UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections
http://www.uncountedthemovie.com

TRAILER of UNCOUNTED, on YouTube — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJz09T0HME

– Economist MARK WEISBROT on Social Security

Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi welcomes tonight’s second guest, economist MARK WEISBROT, to discuss Social Security. Weisbrot works with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., which he co-directs with Dean Baker (Baker was a guest on The Monitor in August.) Weisbrot is co-author of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. Weisbrot received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

He writes a column on economic and policy issues that is distributed to over 550 newspapers by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. His opinion pieces have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and most major U.S. newspapers. He appears regularly on national and local television and radio programs. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

ARTICLES:
“Memo to Obama: No Rush to “Fix” Social Security”
Mark Weisbrot
AlterNet
November 14, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/67860/?page=entire


“Who’s Afraid of a Falling Dollar?”
Mark Weisbrot
November 8, 2007
AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/67307

MARK WEISBROT’S RECENT WORK:
http://www.cepr.net/content/view/189/166/


WEBSITE:
Center for Economic and Policy Research — http://www.cepr.net/

Posted in Elections, Radio Shows | Leave a Comment »

Show Details for November 18th, 2007

Posted by themonitor on November 18, 2007

This week’s Guests:

 

— Fired US Attorney JOHN McKAY [pre-recorded]

Journalist JONATHAN LANDAY on Iran, Pakistan

================================================================================

<> 6:00 pm CDT – Headlines

– Fired US Attorney JOHN McKAY re investigation [pre-recorded]

JOHN MCKAY was a US attorney for the Western Washington district, appointed by George W. Bush in 2001. He was fired in December 2006, one of nine US attorneys fired under suspicious circumstances. No one at the Justice Department has admitted who put the attorneys’ name on the list of those to be fired. Alberto Gonzales famously answered that he “did not recall” close to a hundred times in his testimony before Congress.

An Inspector General is investigating the circumstances of those firings, and the testimony of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and some of his staff before Congress.

McKay testified before the Inspector General for eight hours. He expects a report from them soon, which could lead to a criminal investigation of Gonzales et al.

We play McKay’s speech given on Thursday in Bremerton, Washington. The speech was reported on, and recorded, by Steven Gardner of the Kitsap Sun. Gardner’s story notes that McKay “said he kept quiet about his leaving until Gonzales said he wasn’t intending to bypass Senate approval for the new attorneys to be appointed.

‘When I heard those words I knew he was lying and I was as stunned as a person could be,’ McKay said. ‘I never expected the Attorney General of the United States to lie to the United States Senate.’

Jason Leopold reports that “in an upcoming issue of the Seattle University Law Review, McKay said the firing of at least two US attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico, and Carol Lam of San Diego, appears to demonstrate Gonzales and top DOJ officials may have obstructed justice by interfering with public corruption cases and ongoing criminal investigations Iglesias and Lam had been involved in at the time of their dismissals.”

LAW REVIEW ARTICLE:
“Train Wreck at the Justice Department: An Eyewitness Account” by John McKay
To appear in an upcoming January 2008 edition of Seattle University Law Review featuring the recent firings of eight U.S. Attorneys. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1028545

ARTICLES:

McKay: Former U.S. Attorney General Could Face Criminal Charges
By Steven Gardner
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Kitsap [WA] Sun
http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2007/nov/15/mckay-former-us-attorney-general-could-face/

Fired Attorneys Build Case Against Gonzales
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t
November 16, 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/111607A.shtml

– Journalist JONATHAN LANDAY on Iran, Pakistan

JONATHAN LANDAY is a veteran reporter for McClatchy. He and Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi will discuss Iran’s stopping of weapons shipments (that we could never prove they were doing in the first place), the continuing lack of proof of nuclear weapons, and events in Pakistan.

A national security and intelligence correspondent, Landay has written about foreign affairs and U.S. defense, intelligence and foreign policies for 15 years. From 1985-94, he covered South Asia and the Balkans for United Press International and then the Christian Science Monitor. He moved to Washington in December 1994 to cover defense and foreign affairs for the Christian Science Monitor and joined Knight Ridder in October 1999. He speaks frequently on national security matters, particularly the Balkans. In 2005, he was part of a team that won a National Headliners Award for “How the Bush Administration Went to War in Iraq.” He also won a 2005 Award of Distinction from the Medill School of Journalism for “Iraqi exiles fed exaggerated tips to news media.”

WEBSITE:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/151

Posted in GOP Corruption, Radio Shows | Leave a Comment »

Show Details for November 11th, 2007

Posted by themonitor on November 11, 2007

This week’s Guests:

Media critic NORMAN SOLOMON on War Made Easy

MARY FRANCIS and an update on the trial of Army Lt. Watada

– Media critic NORMAN SOLOMON on War Made Easy

Norman Solomon is a nationally syndicated columnist on media and politics. Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi will discuss his film and book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” The book was published in 2005, and a film based on the book released this year.


The Los Angeles Times called the book “brutally persuasive” and “a must-read for those who would like greater context with their bitter morning coffee, or to arm themselves for the debates about Iraq that are still to come.” The newspaper’s reviewer added: “Solomon is a formidable thinker and activist.” The Humanist magazine described the book as “a definitive historical text” and “an indispensable record of the real relationships among government authorities and media outlets.”


Solomon’s latest book is “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” (October 2007).
Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts.
His book “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You” (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) was published in 2003 by Context Books.
A collection of Solomon’s columns won the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. The award, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English, honored Solomon’s book “The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media.”
Solomon has appeared as a guest on many media outlets including the PBS “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, C-SPAN, public radio’s “Marketplace,” and NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition” and “Talk of the Nation.”
Solomon’s 1995 book “Through the Media Looking Glass” (co-authored with Jeff Cohen) drew praise from Booklist, which called it “a lively counterpoint to the dominant conservative critique of the ‘liberal’ media.” A review in the Los Angeles Times declared: “The bold, muckraking tone of these columns offers a welcome respite from the decerebrated discourse that too often passes for contemporary journalism.”
Norman Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).

BOOK AND FILM:

War Made Easy

The website has excerpts:
http://www.warmadeeasy.org/

The film maker’s website:
http://www.normansolomon.com/

— MARY FRANCIS on the trial of Army Lt. Watada


First Lt. Ehren Watada this week got a good decision from a federal judge, as the Army continues to attempt to court martial him for his conviction that the war in Iraq is illegal, and that it would be illegal for him to command soldiers to fight in the war.

Hear Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson’s recorded interview with Mary Francis, retired teacher from Oklahoma, after observing the trial in February, and what the federal judge said about the military trial this week.

Posted in Iraq, News And Analysis, Radio Shows | Leave a Comment »

Show Details for November 4th, 2007

Posted by themonitor on November 11, 2007


One of our headline stories today has been written and published online by our co-host.


–”It’s Getting Hard to Keep the Anti-Gay Republicans Straight: The Richard Curtis Story; Cross-Dressing Washington State Lawmaker Allegedly Blackmailed Following Late Night Tryst in Black Sequined Lingerie,” by Pokey Anderson, Nov. 3, 2007, Brad Blog, http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5241

–In another headline, it appears there are no longer ANY red states in the U.S., based on plummeting approval numbers for the current president.  (Utah was apparently the last holdout.)   See the work of a Daily Kos poster compiling dozens of polls.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/11/2/85347/0010

– Editor AMY SCHOLDER on the Democratic presidential candidates  

AMY SCHOLDER is editor-in-chief of Seven Stories Press.  The latest of the books Amy has edited is The Contenders, an examination of the Democratic candidates for president, just published this week.


Amy has been editing and publishing radical books for over twenty years, including stints at City Lights and Verson. Amy has edited or co-edited Dr. Rice in the House, Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz, High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings, Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, and many other books.


Among other books, Seven Stories publishes a book spotlighting the top most censored stories each year.  Amy lives in New York and Los Angeles. 

BOOK, edited by Scholder:
The Contenders: Hillary, John, Al, Dennis, Barack, et al.
by James Ridgeway, Laura Flanders, Richard Goldstein, Dean Kuipers, Eli Sanders, Dan Savage
(Seven Stories Press, November 2007)

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE MONEY TRAIL:
Millions in Campaign Donations — a detailed breakdown — 2008 Presidential Election
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/index.asp?cycle=2008

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