Excellent interview on Iran

My favorite radio host, Scott Horton, recently conducted an hour long interview with Flynt and Hilary Mann Leverett on Iran.  If you don't know the Leveretts, they are worth checking out.  A married couple, they worked in both the Clinton and Geore W. Bush administrations negotiating with Iran, quit to become academics, and have written two books on U.S.-Iranian relations, including the recently published Going to Tehran: Why the United States must come to terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The interview, from late February, can be found here
The Leveretts' website can be found here

Recent Publications and the new Imperial Ireland

A recent essay of mine was just published on the online edition of Counterpunch, and two longer articles will be forthcoming in the March and April edition of Z magazine.  Like many, I was very sad when Counterpunch founding editor Alexander Cockburn passed away last year, but his spirit lives on through the wonderful magazine and website.  And as Bruce Springsteen said, "everything dies, baby, thats a fact.  But maybe everything that dies someday comes back."

An Irish reader emailed me a startling fact.  By joining British troops in a training mission in Mali, the Irish military will be officially partnering with the British for the first time  since Irish independence over 90 years ago.  There is an odd historical synchronicity to this.  Ireland gained independence in the neocolonial moment following the first World War, when a global "mandate" system was set up with the League of Nations, putting the former German and Ottoman colonies--including parts of Africa--that still needed "tutelage" under the imperial thumb on London and Paris.  And now it has all come full circle, with Ireland and Britain back together again in a post-modern empire trying to reconquer Africa.  Half a thought, to be sure, but a fruitful lead nonetheless.  If only I had paid attention more in Irish history class.

Asia and Africa: Same world, Same War

Barack Obama loves basketball, and the media loves to analyze his maneuvering of U.S. Foreign Policy as if it were a basketball game.  The first term was the "Asia Pivot,"—Barack backing down China in the lane, clearing out space for U.S. influence in Vietnam and Thailand and Myanmar.  But the White House was actually another running a different play all along, or so the Washington Post now says, a shift to Africa.[1]  

While Asia got the U.S. rhetoric down low, it was in Africa where the Pentagon was getting its hands bloody, participating in “a string of messy wars,” as the Post’s excellent Pentagon reporter Craig Whitlock put it.  And while messy wars in Africa are sadly nothing new, the continent-spanning network of military installations that the U.S. has been building is.   

Since 2007, the Pentagon has constructed the beginnings of a massive framework of military and spy bases, as many as twelve airfields stretching from the Indian to Atlantic Oceans.[2]  Camp Lemonnier, in tiny Djibouti on the mouth of the Red Sea, is the biggest node in the network, a 500-acre compound housing 3,200 troops, civilians, contractors, as well a large fleet of aircraft and drones.[3]  Moving across Africa, other installations used by the U.S. military as of June 2012 are located in the Seychelles archipelago in the Indian Ocean, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania.[4]  From these locations, the U.S. operates a fleet of spy aircraft and drones, participates in small-scale military operations, and leads training exercises with numerous African states.

Credit: Washington Post 

The Pentagon bureaucracy in control of this network—the African Command, or AFRICOM—is itself a relative baby, announced by George W. Bush in February 2007 and officially formed in October 2008.[5]  But despite its youth, it is following the historical precedent set by other regional commands and immediately fighting a war in its new domain.  For a comparison, the Pentagon created its Pacific Command in 1947 and within three years U.S. troops were fighting on the ground in Korea.  Central Command was officially formed in 1983, and within seven years hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were invading Iraq.  In 1999, when Central Command expanded its scope to include the formerly Soviet Central Asian Republics, it took only two years for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan.  AFRICOM managed to keep the streak alive, providing the manpower, surveillance, and logistical backbone for the 2011 war in Libya.  According to NATO’s own numbers, the U.S. led militaries flew over 26,000 sorties during the eight-month campaign, averaging 120 flights a day from February through October, and deployed 8,000 troops in support (as well as an unknown number of special forces and intelligence operatives and trainers on the ground).[6]  It was no Korean War, but a start nonetheless for AFRICOM.    

Most recently, the Pentagon has also announced that it is planning to build a large drone base in Northwest Africa, most likely in the deserts of Niger.  While the Pentagon explains that the new base is related to the conflict in Mali that erupted earlier this year, military officials openly admit that the base will also serve to give Africa Command a more "enduring presence" on the continent.[7]  As no government other than the tiny Djibouti will agree to openly host a permanent U.S. base, the Pentagon has been forced to run its new African operations from a headquarters in Germany.  Although it is unlikely that a new drone base in the Niger desert will become a dystopian AFRICOM headquarters, the ever-increasing U.S. military footprint makes further efforts to increase control inevitable.        

Tellingly, a large expansion is being planned for Camp Lemonnier.  What started as a 1,500 person Special Forces base in 2002, operated by the “Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa,” has doubled in size since then, and is growing still.  In the eyes of the Pentagon, Lemonnier is “an essential regional power projection base,” as General Carter Ham, head of AFRICOM at the time, testified before the House Armed Services Committee in March 2012.[8]  Nick Turse, a researcher and editor for the website Tomdispatch, wrote in a July 2012 article that:

Military contracting documents reveal plans for an investment of up to $180 million or more in construction at Camp Lemonnier alone.  Chief among the projects will be the laying of 54,500 square meters of taxiways “to support medium-load aircraft” and the construction of a 185,000 square meter Combat Aircraft Loading Area.  In addition, plans are in the works to erect modular maintenance structures, hangers, and ammunition storage facilities, all needed for an expanding set of secret wars in Africa.[9]

To truly understand the neo-colonial nature of Djibouti, a French colony until 1977, it has to be compared to its neighbors.  The Republic of Djibouti covers just 9,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey.  Its neighbor, Eritrea, equally as remote in popular imagination, is five times as large.  Somalia and Yemen, the two nearby states being bombed from Camp Lemonnier, both cover over 200,000 square miles, and have coastlines nearly as long as the entire U.S. littoral along the Gulf of Mexico.  Ethiopia is twice as big as these, one quarter the size of the contiguous U.S.      

In population terms, the differences are even starker.  Ethiopia, with 86 million people, is the second most populated state in Africa.  Djibouti, with fewer than one million people, is 49^th.  The only states on mainland Africa with less people are Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara.  Such a low population means that roughly one out of every three hundred people in the country is an employee of the U.S. military, and not subject to local law. 

While Mr. Whitlock and the Washington Post have been doing an excellent job over the past years in tracking the new additions to the U.S. empire of bases in Africa, they have missed the bigger story.  The "Asia Pivot" and the "Africa Shift" are not separate but part of the same long-term strategy, an attempt to dominate Zbignew Bryzinski's great arc of crisis across the underbelly of Eurasia.  The routes running from Asia to Africa and Europe--both over land and sea--must be examined as one great exercise in power projection, with the energy deposits in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea regions located smack-dab in the middle.  From this perspective, one can see the orientations of todays, and tomorrows, world; flows of natural resources, manufactured goods, and people crossing the planets greatest potential marketplace.  Empires throughout history have always understood this, from Alexander the Great's Macedonian kingdom to the Mongol Empire, from the Ottomans to the British.  Since the 1970's, attempting to control this massive global corridor through war and military engagements has also been the principal aim of U.S. foreign policy.  

In a telling sign of the full circle nature that this policy has reached, the Indian Ocean Island of the Seychelles has now felt a double dipping of U.S. imperialism.  Between 1971 and 1973, when the U.S. and British colluded to establish a military base at Diego Garcia, another island in the Indian Ocean, they forcibly expelled the 1,500 Chagossians inhabitants of the island, as recounted by anthropologist David Vine in his book Island of Shame.  The Chagossians were sent 1,200 miles across the ocean in cramped boats to the Seychelles, only halfway to their eventual destination of Mauritius, where they were dumped at the dock on Port Louis.  Spread out over the islands between the Seychelles and Mauritius, the Chagossians have been campaigning for reparations over Diego Garcia ever since.  

Now, however, the U.S. military is back, and since 2009 a drone base has been operational on the Seychelles.  In a state department cable from September 2009 revealed by Wikileaks, State Department Charge d’Affaires Virginia Blaser reported that 77 American personnel would be stationed on the islands, and that U.S. drones would conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights over the Horn of Africa.[10]  And while these drones were not to be armed at that point, it was noted that “should the desire ever arise, the USG would seek discrete, specific discussions with appropriate GOS officials.”[11]    Besides the usual trouble that military bases bring along with them, there have been two drone crashes at the Seychelles, in December 2011 and April 2012.[12]  As such, the Chagossian population of the Seychelles has seen the full scope of modern imperialism, from a British colonial governor executing their dogs with car exhaust to the threat of American military robots crashing down on their heads.  They are poignant examples of the "unpeople," to steal a phrase from George Orwell, who are the passive victims of U.S. militarization, and there are thousands more like them, from Mauritania to Guam.

---

[1] Craig Whitlock, “At Pentagon ‘Pivot to Asia’ Becomes “Shift to Africa’,” Washington Post, Feb 15^th, 2013. 

[2] Craig Whitlock, “U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa,” Washington Post, June 13^th, 2012.

[3] Craig Whitlock, “Remote U.S. Base at Core of Secret Operations,” Washington Post, October 25^th, 2012.

[4] Whitlock, “U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa.”

[5] “The Pentagon’s New Africa Command raises suspicion over U.S. motive,” McClatchey, Sep. 29^th, 2008.

[6] http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_71652.htm

[7] Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Weighs Base for Spy Drones in West Africa,” New York Times, Jan. 28^th, 2013.

[8] “Statement of General Carter Ham before House Armed Services Committee,” March 1^st, 2012.

[9] Nick Turse, “Obama’s Scramble for Africa: Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s ‘New Spice Route’ in Africa,” Tomdipatch.com, July 12^th, 2012.

[10] “Seychelles: Open Look tops agenda during Presidential meeting,” Embassy Port Louis, September 22^nd, 2009. (released by wikileaks, accessed through cablegatesearch.net).

[11] Ibid.

[12] “Seychelles become site of another U.S. drone clash,” Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 14^th, 2011; “US suspends Seychelles drone flights after crash,” Reuters, April 10^th, 2012.

Forget about Beijing, Doha (and the rest of the Gulf) follows D.C.'s drumbeat

While my last post examined the growing economic relationship between China and Qatar, the reality is that the U.S. is still a dominant influence in the emirate, especially on matters of security.  Recent revelations about a proposed U.S. "missile shield" to be housed in Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait are the latest example of the Pentagon's total militarization of the Gulf littoral.  To quote the New York Times on the hellish blitzkrieg of missiles the U.S. and its allies can now "defensively" launch across one of the world's most vital and heavily trafficked waterways:

Three weeks ago the Pentagon announced the newest addition to Persian Gulf missile defense systems, informing Congress of a plan to sell Kuwait $4.2 billion in weaponry, including 60 Patriot Advanced Capability missiles, 20 launching platforms and 4 radars. This will be in addition to Kuwait’s arsenal of 350 Patriot missiles bought between 2007 and 2010.

 The United Arab Emirates acquired more than $12 billion in missile defense systems in the past four years, documents show. In December, the Pentagon announced a contract to provide the Emirates with two advanced missile defense launchers for a system called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, valued at about $2 billion, including radars and command systems. An accompanying contract to supply an arsenal of interceptor missiles for the system was valued at another $2 billion, according to Pentagon documents.Saudi Arabia also has bought a significant arsenal of Patriot systems, the latest being $1.7 billion in upgrades last year.

The United States’ own military forces provide a core capability for ballistic missile defenses in the Persian Gulf, in particular the American Navy vessels with advanced tracking radars and interceptor missiles. According to Navy officials, these Aegis missile defense systems, carried aboard both cruisers and destroyers, are in the region on continuous deployments.

And the United States has deployed a number of land-based missile defense systems to defend specific American military facilities located around the gulf.

Qatar's role in the new missile defense proposal is to host an X-band radar station, similar to U.S. controlled radars established at Mount Keren, in Israel's Negev Desert, and at Turkey's southeastern city of Malatya.

It is hard not to smirk when one hears the phrase "missile defense," as it has been a Pentagon buzzword for going on thirty years now.  The idea of shooting missiles down with other missiles is compelling--note the fantastical original nickname of "Star-Wars"--so much so that the United States has spent over $200 billion investing in the program over the last 30 years.  Does it work?  The official answer is who knows? (but probably not).  The U.S. system has never been tested under combat conditions.  And "combat conditions" have never occurred because the whole theory was based on defending an attack by the Soviet's that never came.

So why are the Gulf kingdoms now so gung-ho about buying their own missile shield?  The answer is hard to tease out.  A "an attack from Iran" is the official answer, the sheiks quaking in their sandals theory.  But both Iran and the Arab states have too much invested in the Gulf oil trade for this theory to hold much water.  One would think that any conflict that arose in the Gulf would not reach the point where hundreds of interceptor missiles are needed to prevent bombs raining on Dubai and Riyahd.  The Arab families ruling the Gulf care far to much about preserving their power and wealth for total war to break out in the area (war in other Arab states, however, is a different question).

A better answer may be the all-powerful military industrial complex.  Donald Rumsfeld chairing a blue-ribbon committee on a subject, as he did on Missile Defense in the 1990's, is about as close to President Eisenhower's definition of "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" as you can get.  That is how $200 billion gets spent on an experiment, and no one really calls bullshit.  Not mentioned in the New York Times quote above is that Lockheed-Martin produces the Patriot Missile System, and Raytheon the X-band radar.  The oil rich Gulf states have always been the best customer for these mega weapons manufacturers, and the latest purchases could just be a continuation down this path.  And I am sure Lockheed appreciates the continuing business, as the U.S. is currently broke and hoping to reduce its defense budget (either through a managed snipping, or "sequestration"-a top down haircut of many billions that will take effect if a congressional compromise can't be reached).  

China in the Arabian Gulf: Qatar

Introduction: China in the Persian Gulf, the past twenty years

The last decade has seen a major growth in China’s relationship with the oil rich Arab kingdoms west of the Persian Gulf.  On China’s part, this relationship is no doubt born out of their insatiable need for energy supplies.  Starting in 1993, when China became a net importer of energy, the Beijing government has adopted a “go out” strategy in its foreign policy, aiming to secure reliable energy and other resources abroad.  In an April 2011 study for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Christina Lin writes this has turned “historical routes into a modern grid of pipelines, roads, and railways for its energy supplies.” Lin continues:

This approach stems in part from Beijing’s fears of a U.S. blockade on maritime supplies in the event of hos­tilities over Taiwan. It also reflects the reality of rapidly growing Chinese energy demand.  An August 2010 report showed that China had become the world’s number-one energy consumer, surpassing the United States. In addition, the coun­try has enjoyed double-digit annual growth for most of the past decade, fueled not by consumer demand, but by energy-intensive heavy industry and infra­structure construction as well as growing demand in the transportation sector.[i]

In 1994, the Persian Gulf region supplied barely a quarter of China’s oil imports, all from Oman, with a majority of Chinese oil coming from Indonesia or from domestic productions.  However, by 2001 added oil from Saudi Arabia and Iran began to bring the gulf’s share of Chinese oil deliveries up to 50% of total imports, with Saudi Arabia being China’s largest supplier. [ii]  Since that time, China has become the Gulf’s largest energy customer, and a very important one as recessions slow the west and North America has begun to develop its own domestic shale gas production (replacing imports).  A report by Chris Zambellis lays out the stark new reality of China’s energy appetite in the Gulf:

In 2009, Saudi oil exports to the United States - for the first time in over 20 years - dropped below the 1 million barrels per day (bpd) mark. In contrast, Saudi oil exports to China during the same time frame surpassed 1 million bpd, almost twice the amount of oil exported by Saudi Arabia to China in 2008.  In June 2008, China surpassed Japan as Kuwait's top destination for oil exports. The UAE is another important source of oil for China, which has been the top importer of Omani oil for six years running. With around 10% of its LNG exports heading to China, Qatar has also emerged as an important source of Beijing's growing LNG needs amid stagnant demand in the United States.[iii]

One interesting facet of these energy relationships is that China now runs a trading deficit with the Gulf States, an unusual position for export-giant Beijing to be in.  Except for in the UAE, China is buying more Arab oil and gas than it is exporting goods and services to the Gulf, leaving a large surplus of Chinese payments in Dubai and Doha.    For Beijing, their most recent strategy, which will be explored below, is to make sure that those payments are made in the Chinese national currency, the Renminbi, also known as the Yuan.

Qatar

During this time, the state of Qatar has emerged as in important player in the Gulf across a multitude of matters. Ruled since independence in 1971 by the al-Thani monarchy, Qatar’s capital of Doha now has international heft on matters of Middle East diplomacy, the petrochemical trade, U.S. military posture, international media, and Western intellectual influence in the Arab world.  And in terms of energy reserves, ever important for determining pecking order in the region, Qatar has the world’s third largest supply of natural gas, sharing with Iran territorial rights to a giant offshore deposit, known as North Field in Qatar’s portion and South Pars in Iran’s.  The North Field has turned Qatar’s small population of 800,000 into the wealthiest citizens on earth per capita.

Historically, Qatar has always been under the domain and guidance of the West, whether that be the London Colonial Office or Washington D.C.  Since the 1991 Gulf War, the al-Thanis have eagerly worked with the Pentagon to establishing military bases on the Gulf peninsula. Starting in 1996 the al-Udied airbase was constructed for a Qatari airforce that did not exist, and upon completion was leased out to the Pentagon.  In 2001, the U.S. very quietly began building up al-Udied as a U.S. base, prepositioning materials and handing out construction contracts.  In a March 2001 Department of Defense report to Congress titled “Allied Contributions to the Common Defense,” it was written:

Since November 1995, Bahrain and Qatar have both hosted several Air Expeditionary Force deployments in support of Operation SOUTHERN WATCH, and the United States Air Force recently established a limited prepositioning facility at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Airbase and is investigating moving to the airfield. Qatar also hosts prepositioned U.S. Army assets at As-Saliyah.[iv]

It is important to note the date of this statement, as al-Udeid airbase is often described as being opened as a result of post 9/11 U.S. policy, with the first soldiers flying into a dusty desert airstrip in late September.  However, the above statement and a number of contracts handed out before the September terrorist attacks make clear that the Bush administration was planning a U.S. base at Al-Udeid (and regime change in Iraq) from the moment it took office.[v]  Al-Udeid remained a “secret” base until its buildup became too big to hide in the spring of 2002, when Vice President Cheney made a well-publicized visit to the base.  

Wikileaks: Syria and BrownLoydJames

A few months back, I wrote a post titled K Street and the Arab Spring, looking at a variety of western consulting firms that were helping to craft PR strategies for both entrenched dictators (Gadaffi, the al-Kalifah monarchy in Bahrain), as well as opposition governments (The Libyan NTC that replaced Gadaffi.  That post was far from definitive, as the overall thesis turned out to be that if there is a government in crisis somewhere on the globe, there is a good chance a snazzy D.C. suit is assisting them via blackberry.

The first batch of Syria emails leaked to Wikileaks, and disseminated through the internet and Wikileaks'  media publishing partners, has exposed another high-powered PR firm, BrownLoydJames (BLJ), as being in communication with the Syrian government as recently as May 19th, 2011.  In an email, BLJ provided a three and a half page media strategy to Assad, where they advocated for the Syrian First Lady, Asma Al Assad, to "get in the game" in order to show "strength and sympathy," as well as the creation of a 24 hour news monitoring office to combat "the daily torrent of criticism and lies" from Syrian opposition figures living abroad.

BrownLoydJames is a major international communicates firm, based in London and New York, that specializes in high-level public diplomacy.  Founded by former Beatles manager_______, their biggest star and current President is Mike Holtzman, whose work at BLJ include China's successful 2008 Olympic bid and Qatar's 2022 World Cup bid.  Before joining the firm, Holtzman worked as a special assistant to the State Department's Policy Planning Staff during the Bush Administration, and in the office of trade representative Charlene Barlefsky during the Clinton Administration.  He also served as FEMA's on the ground media liaison for both the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 2001 World Trade Center attack.

According to research done by Josh Rogin, a reporter for Foreign Policy magazine, BrownLoydJames:

was officially employed by the Office of the First Lady of the Syrian Arab Republic Asma al-Assad in Nov. 2010 for $5,000 per month to help arrange and execute the article, which appeared in the March 2011 edition of Vogue. The fawning piece, entitled, "Rose of the Desert," was actually scrubbed from the Vogue website out of embarrassment when Assad began a brutal crackdown on non-violent protests that month. But you can still read it here.

BLJ's contract with the Assad regime, signed by BLJ partner Mike Holtzman and Syrian government official Fares Kallas, expired in March of last year, according to documents posted on the Foreign Agents Registration Act website. The firm had claimed its work on behalf of the Assads ended in Dec. 2010.

The May 2011 media strategy is obviously past this date, and is the first sign that relations are closer than they appear between BLJ and the Syrian government.  In fact, the connections between BLJ and the Assad government go even deeper than contractual work, as a former employee of the firm Sheherazad Jaafari, who is mentioned as working for BLJ in a wikileaks emails from February 2011, was by December 2011 an employee of the Syrian government.  Moreover, another set of Syrian government emails leaked to the London Guardian earlier this year show that Jaafari remained in cordial contact with BLJ president Holtzman through January 2012.  

The Wikileaks email in question is from February 2nd 2011, sent by BLJ official Rachel Walsh to the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs.  Walsh describes the planning for the following weeks "Open Hands Initiative" event, part of a youth disability advocacy program in Damascus.  In the email, Walsh refers to Jaafari as her "colleauge," and one prominent enough to gain access to the event's VIP section along with Holtzman and Open Hands founder Jay Synder.

In fact, the "Open Hands Initiative" itself seems to be largely a product of BLJ's PR strategy, as it is a Washington D.C. creation, with Holtzman sitting on the advisory board, along with former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and media mogul Tina Brown.  The operation was founded in 2009 by Jay Snyder, a U.S. philanthropist who sits on the advisory board of the Brooking Institutions Saban Center for Middle East Policy, where Indyk is currently Vice President.  The "Open Hands Initiative" began operating in Syria in August 2010, hosting a major youth disability summit and a music exchange program.  The summit produced a collaborative, multi-cultural comic book The Silver Scorpion, which was honored by the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010.

The Syrian emails leaked by London's Guardian newspaper earlier this year shows that Jaafari soon left BLJ and went to work for the Syrian government's media office, headed by Hadeel al Ali.  But this did not mean that she stayed out of contact with her former firm, as a quite chummy email conversation between her and Holtzman took place on January 11th, 2012.  Holtzman congratulated Jaafari on organizing a speech by President Assad and his wife at a pro-government demonstration, stating "I'm proud of you, wish I were there to help."  Other emails concerning Jaafari's actions with the Syrian government are also contained in the Guardian's email set, including this, and this.

This is not the first time that BrownLoydJames has had their work with authoritarian governments exposed, although the first time was out of their own error.  When working on behalf of a Chinese lobbying group, the China-United States Exchange Foundation, BLJ mistakenly included their lobbying strategy when they filed their Foreign Agent Registration Act forms (h/t Janet Rubin, Washington Post).  BLJ's work (pdf here) included placing articles and op-eds in newspapers and arranging meetings in the U.S. for Chinese officials.  They also, more sinisterly, conducted a "textbook analysis" for four popular American high school text books, pertaining to coverage of the Tibet issue.

Samizdat deaths and births: Antiwar Radio has been cancelled, Wikileaks announces secret Syria cables

In a bad mark on the celebration of America's 246 years of Independence, Antiwar.com took the occasion of the fourth of July to cancel its daily radio program, Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton.  This hit me hard, as I have been a fan of the show for a number of years, and Horton has developed an incomparable roster of guests and sources.  I will deeply miss his interviews.

For those unfamiliar with the show, its archives are a treasure trove of Samizdat on current events and modern history, as well as economics, political science, and libertarian thought.  Horton has spent the past seven years interviewing top investigative journalists and historians, often speaking from foreign capitals and conflict zones.  Voices like Patrick Cockburn, Eric Margolis, Jim Lobe, Gareth Porter, Pepe Escobar, Greg Palast, Juan Cole, Gabriel Kolko, Robert Parry, and the late, great Chalmers Johnson are some of my favorites to have repeatedly graced Horton's show, as have hundreds of other minds of great worth.  If someone has penned a critical thought on American foreign policy in the past decade, there is a good chance Antiwar Radio has interviewed them.  In fact, it was Chalmers Johnson himself who turned me (and I'm sure many others) on to the radio show, when he mentioned in a lecture that it is not the New York Times that is his internet homepage, but Antiwar.com.

Random highlights that spring to mind from the show's history include an hour long conversation with investigative journalist Robert Parry about the history of U.S. support for Saddam Hussein, his many hours of interviews with National Security State whistle-blowers Sibel Edmonds and Karen Kwiatkowski, and his recent series of interviews on Egypt with Cairo-based IPS news reporter Adam Morrow.  But besides the distinguished guests, it was Horton's libertarian, everyman viewpoint that provided a refreshing coat of facts to the jargon and rhetoric-filled nature of modern political discussion.  Debunking the lies of the war party and advocating for peaceful freedom worldwide was Horton's m.o. As he put it in a farewell blog post, "Doesn't look like we stopped any wars, but at least we told people the truth about them."

But now, no more!  As Horton explained it the next day, his editor at Antiwar.com, Eric Garris, told him "I've got to cut 20% of the budget, and you are 20% of the budget."  Speaking on the phone to Hong Kong is an expensive business, especially when you hold 45 minute conversations that provide all the nuance that is absent from mainstream TV and Radio news.  And while Horton is hoping to keep up his work independently, he has little optimism that funding will emerge.  Horton's farewell blog post, and his further plans, are below:

Well, Antiwar.com is making budget cuts and so my gig doing Antiwar Radio and assorted assistant editor type jobs around the site is over.

My thanks to Eric Garris and the rest of the crew for having me these past 7 years. Doesn’t look like we’ve stopped any wars, but at least we told people the truth about them.

Also thanks very much to all the readers, listeners and volunteers who’ve helped me all this time.

I’ll be trying to keep the show going on the Liberty Radio Network and my own websites, but I’m going to need your help.

So, announcing the new Save the Scott Horton Show Donation/Sponsorship drive:

Have a company? Sponsor the show or advertise on the site.

You can PayPal scott@scotthorton.org, or stop by my blog Stress or email me scott@scotthorton.org for more information. I can also accept snail mail checks at 612 W. 34th St Austin, TX 78705.

I’m also open to suggestions.

And sign up for the show archive podcasts, interviews and the rest too at ScottHortonShow.com. My blog Stress, Facebook page, Twitter.

Thanks yall, very much

In other media related news, Wikileaks has announced that it will soon be releasing a batch of 2 million private emails from Syrian political figures, ministries, and associated companies.  According to Julian Assange, the embattled Wikileaks leaders, the material is damaging to both the Syrian government and opponents of the Syrian government.  Worth noting is the changing media partners of Wikileaks.  While Wikileaks initial high-profile releases, the collections of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and State Department Diplomatic Cables, were privately analyzed and published by major world news outlets like the Guardian, New York Times, and Der Speigel, Wikileaks new media partners are a bit less globally prominent.  According to the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, which is once again one of Wikileaks "co-publishing partners" (having worked on the "Global Intelligence Files" made up of leaked Stratfor emails), the full lineup of media outlets also includes Egypt's Al Masry Al Youm, Germany's ARD, Italy's L'Espresso, France's Owni, Spain's Publico.es, and the Associated Press.  


What is striking about this list is that it lacks any major Anglo-American press outlet besides the AP, which is a wire service.  While many papers heavily rely on the AP dispatches, they are able to selectively choose which articles to publish, and which to ignore.  My guess is that this will lead to little sustained interest in Wikileak's Syria emails in the U.S, even if they contain sensational information.  The Times and the Post do not have much incentive to continually splash AP scoops across their front pages, and only three of the "publishing partners" listed above have english language websites: al-Akhbar, Al Masry Al Youm, and Owni.  While the Syria emails will certainly be covered, one can be sure that the conversation will die off soon.   


As for the rest of the world, it is harder to say.  ARD, a German television station, is the second largest public television broadcaster in the world after the BBC, and L'Espresso is a leading weekly magazine in Italy.  However Publico, the left-leaning, Madrid based paper, was forced to cancel its print edition last year and now only maintains a website, France's Owni also operates only a website, and both the Arabic language papers sacrifice mass market popularity to maintain integrity and independence (a difficult task for Middle Eastern media).  Does this mean that the most recent Wikileaks files will be a preeminent talking point in Europe and the Middle East?  Probably not.  


Interestingly, RT, the English language, Russian owned news network formally known as Russia Today, is not a "publishing-partner" of Wikileaks, even though Julian Assange has his own interview show on the network.  RT's researchers are more than adept at uncovering malfeasance in governments, and considering that Russia has current and historical ties to Syria, it is odd that they are not grabbing hold of this major scoop.  Perhaps they are striving for DC "credibility" and as such are warming of the beltway opinion that Wikileaks and Assange are evil, criminal scum.  If this is true it would be a sad state of affairs, as RT has so far remained apart from the PR game of "respectable" and "unrespectable" American Media Opinion.  In the same vein, they may be staying away from the cables because of Russia's current support of the Asad government, knowing that the secret emails can only embarrass the Syrian ruler.  This would be an equally sorry state of affairs.