Chalmers Johnson on Eisenhower's famous warning against the "Military Industrial Complex" and history unfolding...
Here is an interesting article about the privatization of our military and intelligence. I find it interesting for the historical perspective. This development was warned of by Eisenhower almost 50 years ago. It is a trend that has been propelled forward by Republican and Democratic administrations ever since. The designation of outsourcing as actually being the use of mercernaries is an interesting historical comparison. Machiavelli saw the unreliability and destabilizing influence of mercernaries on a republic. Maybe we should too.
John McCain and George Bush have charged that Barack Obama, who states that he will talk with adversaries, such as Iran, is guilty of appeasement.
If their goal is to paint Obama at out-of-step with ordinary Americans, however, they are barking up the wrong tree. On this issue it is Bush and McCain, not Obama, who are on the political fringe. According to a Gallup Poll in May, a whopping 79 percent of Americans (including about half of all Republicans) think it is a “good idea” for the president to meet “with leaders of foreign countries considered enemies of the United States.”
Gordon Prather and Victor Navasky on Antiwar Radio
Gordon Prather, physicist, and Victor S. Navasky of the Nation magazine will be the featured guests on the Scott Horton Show at Antiwar Radio, 12:15PM Eastern, Friday, May 30th.
Topics include the recent IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program and the media's coverage in the lead-up to war. Scott Horton is one of the best interviewers in the business. The streaming link is here.
Here is an audio of Scott Horton's interview of actor, producer, and writer, John Kusack about his new film satire, War Inc. The film opened on May 23 in New York and Los Angeles and in the interview, according to this description, Cusack expresses "his outrage at the criminality of modern American war profiteers, the need for a grassroots bumrush of the first showings to guarantee national distribution, some critics’ complaints that the movie 'hits too close to home,' the great journalists whose work has inspired him, the socialization of the costs of all these private armies onto the American tax payer, the outsourcing of interrogation, the betrayals of the Democrats, the banality of evil, the short-changing of the troops while private mercenaries cash in and militarism in the movies."
Former CIA officer and Antiwar.com columnist Philip Giraldi has this ominous news:
There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants. The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action.
"I do not mean to single out England as something strange and different in the world. We, too, have our marines in China. We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideals of a country of their own....We also wrote that song about keeping a whole hemisphere under your wing. Now the Nipponese are singing our song all over Asia. They are full of stuff and need a good working out. The only hold-back to the thing is that they have copied our medicine chest. They are stocked up with the same steel pills and cannon plasters that Doctor Occident prescribes."
Zora Neale Hurston (1942), Hurston, Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 791-92.
