Category: Georgia

Eric Margolis

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/12_06_08_margolis.mp3]

Eric Margolis, internationally syndicated columnist and author of American Raj, discusses the fundamentally flawed Middle East countries created after the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution; the US’s first attempt at regime change in Syria in 1948, as told in The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics; a history of the Baath Party; the chance for regional autonomy in Syria instead of a bloody civil war; why the US insists on picking fights with Russia in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Syria; and why Georgia’s inclusion in NATO would be as ridiculous as Puerto Rico joining the Warsaw pact.

MP3 here. (38:12)

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times and Dawn. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. He appears as an expert on foreign affairs on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and CBC.

As a war correspondent Margolis has covered conflicts in Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique, Sinai, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India, Pakistan, El Salvador and Nicaragua. He was among the first journalists to ever interview Libya’s Muammar Khadaffi and was among the first to be allowed access to KGB headquarters in Moscow. A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq.

Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet and American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.

Ken Silverstein

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/11_10_05_silverstein.mp3]

Ken Silverstein, Washington Editor for Harper’s Magazine, discusses his article “Neoconservatives hype a new Cold War;” the public relations firms used as lobbies for foreign governments, like Randy Scheunemann’s Orion Strategies; the close-knit world of Washington D.C. where everyone knows everyone else and investigative journalists self-sensor for fear of alienating friends and colleagues; and the incestuous relationship between Georgia’s government, Scheunemann’s PR firm and reporters who collaborate to produce an anti-Russian propaganda echo chamber, not journalism.

I was wrong about Scheunemann talking with Saakashvili in the days before the Georgia war of 2008. I regret the error. -Scott

MP3 here. (18:29)

Ken Silverstein is the Washington Editor for Harper’s Magazine and writes Washington Babylon for Harper’s online.

A former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Silverstein has covered such topics as intelligence collaboration between the CIA and controversial foreign governments in Sudan and Libya, political corruption in Washington, and links between American oil companies and repressive foreign governments. His 2004 series “The Politics of Petroleum,” co-written with T. Christian Miller, won an Overseas Press Club Award. His stories on ties between the government of Equatorial Guinea and major U.S. companies—including Riggs Bank, ExxonMobil and Marathon Oil—led to the convening of a federal grand jury, and to investigations by the Senate and the Securities and Exchange Commission. His report, co-written with Chuck Neubauer, on a lobbying business opened by Karen Weldon, daughter of Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, led to the opening of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

Silverstein has been an outspoken gadfly in the newspaper business. In December of 2005, a memo he wrote to his editors at the Los Angeles Times expressing his dismay over their insistence on false “balance” was discussed in an article by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books. While reporting on potential voter fraud in St. Louis in 2004, Silverstein was angered to learn that his findings were to be woven into a larger “balanced” piece on accusations being made nationwide, when it was clear that Republican charges of irregularities in St. Louis were insubstantial. “I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news,” Silverstein wrote. “The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn off our brains and repeat the spin from both sides.”

Silverstein had been a contributing editor to Harper’s before joining the Times. One of his pieces for the magazine, The Radioactive Boy Scout, became a highly acclaimed book of the same title published by Random House in 2004. He has also written for Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Slate, and Salon. From 1989 to 1993 he was a correspondent for the Associated Press in Brazil.

Pat Buchanan

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/11_08_31_buchanan.mp3]

Pat Buchanan, conservative commentator and author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? discusses his article “Why Are We Baiting the Bear?” about the Senate resolution declaring Abkhazia and South Ossetia the property of Georgia and demanding a Russian withdrawal; the region’s history since the Soviet breakup, including the 2008 war (in which Georgia was the aggressor, despite what John McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann said); looking for the Senate resolution’s true authors and backers, who are probably from the Georgia lobby; and the heartening cooperation of US oil companies and the Russian government.

MP3 here. (19:44)

Pat Buchanan is an American politician, author, syndicated columnist and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and was an original host on CNN’s Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election. He co-founded The American Conservative magazine and launched a foundation named The American Cause. He has been published in Human Events, National Review, The Nation and Rolling Stone. He is the author of many books, including Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.

Melvin Goodman

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/10_12_03_goodman.mp3]

Melvin Goodman, former senior Soviet analyst at the CIA, discusses why WikiLeaks’ Cablegate is a big data-dump and not the work of foreign intelligence services; documents that show inaccurate information flowing from the US embassy in Georgia back to Washington during the S. Ossetia conflict; disagreements about the quality and honesty of journalism in the NYT and Washington Post; and the question why – if these cables are so ordinary and unremarkable – are so many of them classified?

MP3 here. (18:17)

Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. From 1966 to 1990, he was senior Soviet analyst at the CIA and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Tim Cavanaugh

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/10_08_11_cavanaugh_donate.mp3]

Reason columnist Tim Cavanaugh discusses the Georgia/Russia/South Ossetia conflict of 2008 and the Georgia-biased misinformation spewed by the Obama and McCain campaigns, former McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann‘s conflict of interest, how the U.S. media continued to get the South Ossetia story wrong for months, evidence that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s attack was a spontaneous “loose canon” event and not the result of an April Glaspie-style wink and nod and how Georgia’s military was funded and trained by U.S. advisors (who may have seen combat action against Russian forces).

MP3 here. (29:09)

Tim Cavanaugh is a Reason columnist and Hit & Run contributor.

Cavanaugh has worked as the online editor of the Los Angeles Times and, for much of the 2000s, he served as Reason.com’s Web editor. Prior to coming to work for Reason, Cavanaugh edited the late, lamented Suck, which was arguably the first, and was indisputably the most hated, daily content site on the web. He has also worked at a variety of daily and weekly newspapers, trade magazines, and websites.

Cavanaugh’s articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Beirut Daily Star, San Francisco Magazine, Mother Jones, Agence France-Presse, Wired, Newsday, Salon, Orange County Register, The Rake magazine, and countless alternative and community papers too embarrassing to mention. His own site, The Simpleton, gets updated once every blue moon.

Mark Ames

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/10_01_26_ames.mp3]

Mark Ames, regular writer for The eXiled, discusses Russia’s transition from neoliberal Yeltsin to nationalist Putin, the US “economic hit men” advisers to Yeltsin who facilitated the rise of the oligarchs, the huge decline in Russian life-expectancy rates in the 1990s, the trail of economic disasters left in Larry Summers‘ wake, how the “cakewalk” victory of Gulf War I increased American bravado and militarism, the end of US meritocracy and why a more vigorous opposition is needed to stop the War Party.

MP3 here. (54:57)

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia. He is a regular contributor to eXiled Online and The Nation magazine.

Mark Ames

Georgia’s collapse and PR blitz

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/09_05_13_ames.mp3]

Mark Ames, journalist for The Nation and eXiled Online, discusses recent history leading up to the current mess in former Soviet Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s downward spiral, the broken Georgian economy, rumors that U.S. advisers participated to some extent in Georgia’s invastion of S. Ossetia last summer, Georgia’s relationship with Israel and America’s relationship with Russia.

MP3 here. (22:50)

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull) and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove). He is a regular contributor to eXiled Online and The Nation magazine.

Doug Bandow

Bush Jr.’s Foreign Policy Legacy

[audio:http://awr.dissentradio.com/09_02_03_bandow.mp3]

Doug Bandow, author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire, discusses the Bush administration’s foreign policy legacy, why maintaining a U.S. military presence in S. Korea makes less sense than ever, the difficulty of negotiating alternative U.S. supply routes to Afghanistan while taking a hard line on Russia and Iran, the high cost in Iraqi lives for their “liberation” from one authoritarian government to another and the demise of Bush’s two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

MP3 here. (21:45)

Doug Bandow is a recent addition to the Cato Institute. His new and archived articles can be found at Antiwar.com/bandow.

Justin Raimondo

Putin’s Warning to America

[audio:http://awr.dissentradio.com/09_02_02_raimondo.mp3]

Justin Raimondo, editorial director for Antiwar.com, discusses Vladimir Putin’s red-baiting of Soviet America, the U.S. military’s use of old Soviet supply lines into Afghanistan, how the incredible U.S./Russia role reversal confirms the existence of Bizarro World, why the crumbling U.S. economy won’t stop an Afghanistan surge or prevent new interventions in Africa and how the use of logical deduction in figuring out U.S. foreign policy goals only leads to wild speculation.

MP3 here. (37:24)

Justin Raimondo is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement and editorial director for Antiwar.com. His articles are archived at Antiwar.com/justin.

Glenn Greenwald

Manufacturing Dissent

[audio:http://awr.dissentradio.com/08_12_17_greenwald.mp3]

Glenn Greenwald, former constitutional law and civil rights litigator, discusses Noam Chomsky’s theory of “concision” in the context of the limited parameters of discussion on television, the ease of spouting platitudes and the difficulty of challenging conventional wisdom on cable news shows, how the Georgian conflict highlighted the unwillingness of the mainstream media to challenge a false premise that has bipartisan support and how Obama’s cabinet appointments were foreshadowed by his support for Joe Lieberman’s Senate candidacy.

MP3 here. (39:43)

Glenn Greenwald is a regular blogger at Salon.com and the author of Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok.

Tim Cavanaugh

Death and Deception in South Ossetia

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_11_18_cavanaugh.mp3]

Tim Cavanaugh, columnist for Reason magazine, discusses the efforts of activist Lira Tskhovrebova to tell the South Ossetian side of the Georgian invasion, the numerous accounts of Georgian soldiers deliberately killing civilians, the U.S. media failure to accurately portray the conflict and the mixed signals Saakashvili received from U.S. neocon agitators and the State Department.

MP3 here. (34:08)

Tim Cavanaugh represents Lira Tskhoverbova, chairwoman of the Association of South Ossetian Women for Democracy and Human Rights. He is a columnist for Reason magazine and former web editor for the Los Angeles Times.

Eric Margolis

American Raj

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_11_13_margolis.mp3]

Eric Margolis, author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World, discusses the repeating of history in Afghanistan, India’s under-the-radar regional influence and sweetheart nuclear deal, ramifications of a future “Pashtunistan”, the precarious economic and political conditions in Pakistan, the possibility of Obama using Bill Clinton as Kashmir peacemaker, the need for a waxing Department of State and waning Pentagon in the foreign policy realm, the Caspian oil pipeline as “Great Game” prize, new accusations about Syria’s nuclear program and the supreme importance of U.S./Russia relations.

MP3 here. (53:49)

Eric Margolis is a foreign correspondent and columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.

Justin Raimondo

War Party Democrats

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_11_03_raimondo.mp3]

Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com, discusses the 2008 presidential election, how transitions in government tend toward continuity instead of radical change, the competing policy influences in an Obama administration where Dennis Ross and Anthony Zinni are possible National Security Advisor appointments, how the only difference in foreign intervention between Democratic and Republican administrations is rhetorical, how the neocon parasite feeding on the Republican party will soon leave its shriveled host behind and search for greener pastures, the continuing danger of war with Iran, realist/neocon policy toward Russia, why a vote for Nader is the best medicine in the current corporate-socialist economy, and why the Constitution and Libertarian parties may be one party too many.

MP3 here. (40:30)

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

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

Mark Ames

US vs. Russia, Reason

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_10_28_ames.mp3]

Mark Ames, author of “The Cold War that Wasn’t” in The Nation, discusses the dominant narrative and ideological underpinnings in the U.S. press regarding the recent Georgian attack on South Ossetia and subsequent Russian counterattack on Georgia, the attempt to portray Russia as the aggressor by floating the idea of a first-strike cyber war despite the lack of any evidence, the alleged poisoning of Ukraine’s Victor Yushchenko and the current dispute between Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko over her reaction to the Georgia war, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, the precedent set by U.S. intervention in Kosovo, the danger of putting “defensive” missiles in Eastern Europe while the U.S. foreign policy establishment contemplates first strike capability, U.S. NED support for the Russian National Bolsheviks, the “shock therapy” robbery of Russian resources under Yeltsin’s autocracy in the 1990s and the consequences.

MP3 here. (64:25)

Mark Ames is a journalist who has written for several publications including the New York Press, The Nation and GQ Russia and is the founding editor and regular contributor of the Moscow-based newspaper The eXile. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond and The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia.

Philip Giraldi

The Terror Wars

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_09_22_giraldi.mp3]

Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism officer and columnist for Antiwar.com, discusses the grossly overstated number of “terrorists” by the War Party, the centuries of the failures of those trying to conquer Afghanistan, the current crises in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Georgia, the exaggeration by the Bush regime of world conflicts to help the McCain campaign and how best to protect Americans from actual terrorists.

MP3 here. (36:27)

Philip Giraldi is a recognized authority on international security and counterterrorism issues. He is a regular contributor to Antiwar.com in a column titled “Smoke and Mirrors” and is a Contributing Editor who writes a column called “Deep Background” on terrorism, intelligence, and security issues for The American Conservative magazine.

Chris Floyd

The Victory of War Party Slogans

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_09_12_floyd.mp3]

Chris Floyd, author of the book and the blog, Empire Burlesque, discusses the lack of – and need for – honest reporting in this country, how the state and media manipulate language to change or hide reality, the “success” of the surge only in prolonging the war, the phony facades of both presidential campaigns, the insanity of antagonizing Russia, Obama’s unfortunate choice of Joe Biden as VP, the complete silence surrounding our proxy war in Somalia and the spreading disaster that is “The War On Terror.”

MP3 here. (41:02)

Chris Floyd is an award-winning American journalist, and author of the book, Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Regime. For more than 11 years he wrote the featured political column, Global Eye, for The Moscow Times and the St. Petersburg Times in Russia. He also served as UK correspondent for Truthout.org, and was an editorial writer for three years for The Bergen Record. His work appears regularly CounterPunch, The Baltimore Chronicle and in translation in the Italian paper, Il Manifesto, and has also been published in such venues as The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review, The Ecologist and many others. His articles are also featured regularly on such websites as Information Clearing House, Buzzflash, Bushwatch, LewRockwell.com, Antiwar.com, and many others. His work has been cited in The New York Times, USA Today, the Guardian, the Independent and other major newspapers.

Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque with webmaster Richard Kastelein, who created the site using open-source software. Floyd is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press, which was founded and designed by Kastelein. Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University.

Chris Deliso

Background on Georgia

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_09_07_deliso.mp3]

Chris Deliso, author of The Coming Balkan Caliphate and director of Balkanalysis.com, discusses the recent attack on South Ossetia by Georgia, the historic relationships between Georgians, Ossetians, Abkhazians, and Russians, the Rose revolution, the role of control over oil pipelines plays in the crisis, the potential conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the danger in our war guarantees of countries surrounding Russia and the American war party’s ever increasing belligerence.

MP3 here. (42:47)

Balkanalysis.com director Christopher Deliso has lived and traveled widely in SE Europe and has a master’s degree with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University (1999). His two new books, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West and Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa will appeal to readers interested in, respectively, the major security issues involving the region today, and travel in one of Europe’s most fascinating but least visited areas.

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

Lew Rockwell

Smash the Warfare State!

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_26_rockwell.mp3]

Lew Rockwell, founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, discusses his new podcast interview program, Joe Biden’s long term and central role in promoting the warfare state, demagoguery and omission at the Democratic convention, the reality of America’s empire and the elective emperor who rules it, the important new book We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now, why murder is still murder even if a government employee does it, the big lie of government provided safety and myth of a peace loving American population, why its fun to oppose evil, the growing militarism of the domestic police state, the terrible danger in “privatizing” the state’s police powers such as tax collections and prisons, the possibility that the Georgian crisis was deliberately precipitated in order to boost the Republicans’ fortunes in the November election, the bogus nature of the first Cold War and now the second, the sanity of the old imperial establishment only as compared to the new, Democracy as subservience to the U.S. government, how the state can always use its own failures as the excuse to increase its power as it is doing now in the financial markets and the need for a realignment toward peace and freedom.

MP3 here. (52:18)

Lew Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California, and publisher of the political Web site LewRockwell.com. He served as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff between 1978 and 1982. Check out his new podcast show here.

Gareth Porter

War is the Health of the State

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_25_porter.mp3]

Gareth Porter, independent historian and investigative journalist for IPS News and Antiwar.com, discusses the themes in his article “Georgia War Rooted in US Self-Deceit on NATO,” how the national security bureaucracy dominates American policy to the detriment of the rest of Americans’ interests, the rise of the empire after World War II, how American Cold War policy pushed China toward Russia until the 1970s, the imperial bureaucrats desire to expand NATO up to the Russian border to weaken them, the often conflicting views between the American military and corporate policy ambitions and the multitude of excuses given to retain our many hundreds of military bases around the world.

MP3 here. (34:06)

Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Greg Palast

War: Why Your Gas is So Expensive

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_19_palast.mp3]

Greg Palast, reporter for Harper’s magazine and Rolling Stone, explains how the primary goal of oil companies is to use the war power of the national governments to restrict supplies in order to artificially increase the price of oil, the consequences of the war in Iraq on the price we pay, the fight over control of Caspian oil in the Georgian conflict, the chicken-egg argument about the role of the oil companies and the Pentagon itself in pushing all this imperial expansion, the hidden government taxation in your price of gas per gallon, the truth that the taxpayer bailouts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are ultimately bailouts for foreign holders of U.S. debt rather than home owners, and his new project “Steal Back Your Vote.”

MP3 here. (24:18)

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse (Penguin 2006). His first reports appeared on BBC television and in the Guardian newspapers. Author of another New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of election 2004, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields have won him a record six “Project Censored” for reporting the news American media doesn’t want you to hear. He returned to America to report for Harper’s magazine.

Scott Horton

A Unique View on Georgia Conflict

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_18_horton.mp3]

The Other Scott Horton (no relation), international human rights lawyer and journalist and blogger for Harper‘s magazine, discusses his relationship with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, the Rose Revolution of 2003, Saakashvili’s problems with Rupert Murdoch and ties with the neocons, George Washington’s policy against entangling alliances and its undoing since World War II, the value of American education and diplomacy over high explosives, Cheney and the War Party’s need for a steady supply of enemies, his view that the three day war earlier this month represents a power-grab by the Russians as revenge for Western recognition of the independence of Kosovo, some history behind various ethnic conflicts in the region, the need for peaceful resolutions to these conflicts, his view that the crisis was a consequence of the various promises made to Georgia by the neocons pretending to override State Department policy which boosted Saakashvili, combined with the criminal negligence and inattention of George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, amounted to a “yellow light” to Russia to go ahead, and the disgusting politics behind the Guantanamo show trials.

MP3 here. (41:42)

The Other Scott Horton is a contributor to Harper’s magazine and writes the blog No Comment. A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, among other activists in the former Soviet Union. He is a co-founder of the American University in Central Asia, and has been involved in some of the most significant foreign investment projects in the Central Eurasian region. Scott recently led a number of studies of abuse issues associated with the conduct of the war on terror for the New York City Bar Association, where he has chaired several committees, including, most recently, the Committee on International Law. He is also a member of the board of the National Institute of Military Justice, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.

Pat Buchanan

US Out of the Caucasus!

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_15_buchanan.mp3]

Pat Buchanan, conservative commentator and author, most recently of Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, discusses the crisis in Georgia, why he thinks the Russian action on behalf of South Ossetia was justified, comparisons between Russian moves in the Caucasus to interwar Germany and Britain, the stupidity of the war guarantees and new missile defense systems going into Eastern Europe, the limits of American imperial power and the question of whether the administration gave Saakashvili the green light to attack South Ossetia.

MP3 here. (25:30)

Pat Buchanan is an American politician, author, syndicated columnist and broadcaster. Buchanan was a senior adviser to American presidents, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and was an original host on CNN’s Crossfire. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996. He ran on the Reform Party ticket in the 2000 presidential election. He co-founded The American Conservative magazine and launched a foundation named The American Cause. He has been published in Human Events, National Review, The Nation and Rolling Stone. His new book is called Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.

Eric Margolis

America’s Destructive Asian Empire

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_14_margolis.mp3]

Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for Canada’s Sun National Media and author of War at the Top of the World, discusses the complicated politics of the Caucasus region, U.S. and Israeli arming and training of Georgian troops, the Ossetia fiasco, McCain’s foreign policy handler Randy Scheunemann and his relationship with the Saakashvili regime, the fight within the military industrial pentagon complex over whether to focus on imperial occupations or preparing for war with great powers, the dangerous foolishness of NATO expansion, the self-serving hypocrisy of America and Russia’s leaders, the ignored U.S. sponsored regime change in Somalia, McCain’s 3AM moment and emulation of the Kaiser, the rift between Pakistan and India over religion, Kashmir and Afghanistan, Dick Armitage’s threat to totally destroy Pakistan after 9/11 and the new great game in Central Asia.

MP3 here. (38:08)

Award winning author, columnist, and broadcaster Eric S. Margolis has covered 14 wars and is a leading authority on military affairs, the Middle East, South Asia, and Islamic movements.

Brendan ONeill

Empire, Russia Clash in Caucasus

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_08_12_oneill.mp3]

Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked Online, discusses the conflict between Georgia and Russia over Ossetia, including the blame due the U.S. for supporting and arming Georgia, the hypocrisy of western leaders and media for condemning Russia while they sow catastrophe in the Balkans and Iraq, Russia’s motivation, U.S. infiltration of the region under the guise of the “War on Terror,” and the bankruptcy of the American-Anglo empire’s claim of moral authority.

MP3 here. (35:02)

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked, the ’sassy, irreverent, UK-based online magazine of news and opinion’, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle. (Read the Press Gazette’s coverage of his becoming editor here.) He started his career in journalism at spiked’s predecessor, Living Marxism, until it was forced to close in 2000 following a notorious libel action brought by ITN. His personal website is here.