David Swanson on military budget, Aram Roston on Bloomberg

CounterSpin (2/18/11-2/24/11)
 

Listen: [mp3] [RealAudio not avalailable] Note: Please feel free to download the mp3 by right-clicking the mp3 link and choose the “Save Target As” function. This week on CounterSpin: The federal budget is big news this week, but while your hearing all the calls for cuts, cuts and more cuts, ask yourself, what isn’t considered an acceptable target for substantive reductions? Here’s a hint: it accounts for more than half of the country’s public spending. We’ll talk about the budget with activist and author David Swanson.

Also on CounterSpin today, public interest groups and media activists of all stripes lined up to oppose the Comcast-NBC merger. And among the coalition of anti-merger activists was… Bloomberg, the media company owned by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. So what did they want? And did they get it? Journalist Aram Roston took a read more

If Bradley Manning turns out to be the hero he appears to be, he will not be the first “detained” at Quantico.

In fact, Quantico once locked up the most decorated Marine in history, a Marine who would have been running the Marine Corps rather than getting locked up by it if he had known how to brown-nose the swivel-chair commanders as he called them, a Marine who had helped create Quantico years before, the first senior officer in the U.S. military to be arrested in the 65 years following read more

In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball’s videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball’s unreliability. The trouble is, they did.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, read more

As we approach the 8th anniversary of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, and having just passed the 20th anniversary of another, it’s worth reflecting on what’s been accomplished through two wars and the intervening sanctions that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright so famously approved of even at the cost of a half million children’s lives.

While a growing mob of at least six Americans has noticed this week’s videotaped confession by key WMD-liar “Curveball,” read more

From KGNU with Liz Lane:

LISTEN.

What makes the most fantastic and undocumented war-launching and war-prolonging lies credible are differences and prejudices, against others and in favor of our own. Without religious bigotry, racism, and patriotic jingoism, wars would be harder to sell.

Religion has long been a justification for wars, which were fought for gods before they were fought for pharaohs, kings, and emperors. If Barbara Ehrenreich has it right in her book “Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War,” read more

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David Swanson, author of WAR IS A LIE brings us up to date on Bradley Manning, the 23 yr old Am. soldier who is still being tortured and held in solitary by the Marines for revealing American killings of innocent civilians. Is Bush’s secret government still in place?

Bob Edgar, President of Common Cause read more

Donald Rumsfeld began his new book tour with some frank comments, including these:

“War lies? Does anybody really give a rat’s ass now? You know what? You know what? They do. They do because war lies are actually cool now. We began the invasion of Iraq in October 2001, but the invasion of Iraq paid off.”

Rumsfeld revealed the strategy behind the revelations made in his book about the illegal secret operations he helped set in motion shortly after the terrorist acts of September read more

Charlottesville–Right Now: David Swanson joins Coy Barefoot

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1.28.11 Best-selling non-fiction author David Swanson joins Coy to discuss the revolution taking place in Egypt. Cairo is literally burning, and today’s conversation discusses the political state which lead to this uprising and exactly what is going on. Swanson describes the protests as “inspiring,” but also is not convinced of the need for these heavy doses of violence.

read more

By David Swanson

The future will be here in April and Code Pink: Women for Peace has already won it (thus answering President Obama’s State of the Union call to “win the future”). The color coded threat warnings our government has been bombarding us with since shortly after September 11, 2001, will be gone. The fear-mongering tactic that Code Pink was named in mockery of will have been mocked right out of existence.

To listen to the corporate media, Code Pink cannot be taken read more

On Monday, two U.S. marines grabbed me and began pulling me away from a crowd of protesters. For a split second I was certain I would be locked up and charged with some made-up offense, such as failure to obey an unlawful order, or disrupting the war. But that was only for a split second, because without any hesitation the people I was with grabbed me and pulled me back.

These were people who have pull.

Here’s a video. http://warisacrime.org/node/56282

This happened at Quantico, Virginia, read more