Before she died on April 16, 2005, Marla Ruzicka succeeded in documenting civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and persuading the U.S. Military and the U.S. Congress to assist victims and their families, as well as to create a fund to grant reparations for the harms done. It is believed to be the first time in history that this has been done.
This is an updated rebroadcast of a program originally aired on Easter Sunday, 2006. It was the first anniversary of her death at the age of 28. We spoke with her parents, Cliff and Nancy Ruzicka, and her twin brother, Mark, at their home on the shore of Clearlake, CA.
Equally at home with the military, the media, members of Congress of the people of the many countries she visited and came to know in her short life, she lived her belief that every life matters and deserves dignity, respect and justice.
Ray McGovern earned a Masters’ degree with honors in Russian Language, Literature and History from Fordham University. In the early 1960s, he served as a US Army Infantry Intelligence Officer in the analysis division on Soviet foreign policy, especially with respect to China and Indochina, which includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Thailand.
In the CIA, he served under seven presidents from 1963 to 1990, beginning with John F. Kennedy. In the 1980s he chaired the National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. In 2003, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) dedicated to analyzing and criticizing the mis-use of intelligence, specifically the false claims leading to the Iraq War. In 2006, he returned to CIA headquarters to protest the CIA’s involvement in torture, when he returned his Intelligence Commendation Medal.
We spoke with Ray McGovern on April 6, 2022. The next day, The United Nations General Assembly voted to expell Russia from The Human Rights Council.
Articles or videos referenced or pertinent to the interview:
Henry Giroux is McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest & The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy.
An internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, and been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets.
He is on the Board of Directors for Truthout, and he is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals, and he has served as the editor or co-editor of four scholarly book series. He co-edited a series on education and cultural studies with Paulo Freire for a decade. His books have been translated into many languages and his work has appeared in the New York Times and many other prominent news media
His latest book is PEDAGOGY OF RESISTANCE AGAINST MANUFACTURED IGNORANCE, which will be published on April 21, 2022 by Bloomsbury Academic.
We end this archived edition of Forthright Radio with a song by the Ukrainian group, Beton.
From the Guardian article of March 19, 2022 headlined:
Kyiv calling: famous Clash anthem reborn as call to arms Ukrainian punk band Beton win blessing of the Clash to record new version of song to raise funds for support network “The Clash have given their blessing to a new version of their song London Calling by a Ukrainian punk band called Beton. Kyiv Calling, recorded near the front line, has lyrics that call upon the rest of the world to support the defense of the country from Russian invaders. All proceeds of what is now billed as a “war anthem” will go to the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement (FURM) to help fund a shared communications system that will alert the population to threats and lobby for international support. Its mission is to restore territorial integrity and strengthen Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
With the latest addition to his Hidden History Series, veteran author, journalist, Thom Hartmann, returns to discuss THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF BIG BROTHER IN AMERICA: HOW THE DEATH OF PRIVACY AND THE RISE OF SURVEILLANCE THREATEN US AND OUR DEMOCRACY. It was just published by Barrett-Koehler on international women’s day, March 8, 2022.
He explores how the government and corporate America misuse our personal data and shows how we can reclaim our privacy. Thom Hartmann documents exactly how the government and corporations are tracking our every online move and using our data to buy elections, employ social control, and monetize our lives. Thom Hartmann traces the history of surveillance and social control, looking back to how Big Brother invented whiteness to keep order, and how surveillance began to be employed as a way to modify behavior. As he writes, “The goal of those who violate privacy and use surveillance is almost always social control and behavior modification.”
Along with covering the history, he shows how we got to where we are today, how China — with its new Social Credit System — serves as a warning, and how we can and must avoid a similarly dystopian future. By delving into the constitutional right to privacy, Hartmann reminds us of our civil right and shows how we can restore it.
And particularly now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, cyberwarfare is a factor, whether control of information or disruption of infrastructure. We spoke with Thom Hartmann on March 9, 2020 via Skype.
We end this edition of Forthright Radio, mindful of the suffering of the Ukrainian people enduring the crimes against humanity at the hands of Russian military forces at the behest of Vladimir Putin. First, Russians unplugged live – with Sting introducing his live performance. This is followed by Ukrainian poet/composer, Valentin Silvestrov’s, Prayer for Ukraine performed by the Kyiv Chamber Choir in 2014 as part of the Maidan Cycle. And finally, a little girl, Amelia, singing “Let It Go” in Ukrainian while sheltering in a crowded basement under Russian Bombardment.
Prayer for Ukraine
Links to articles/videos/films pertinent to this edition of Forthright Radio:
This interview was first broadcast as the sovereign nation of Ukraine was being invaded by the Russian Army. Terrible as this was, it was also an appropriate time to examine our own history, which Jonathan Katz has done in his most recent book, GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM: Smedley Butler, The Marines, and the Making and Breaking of the American Empire, published in January 2022 by St. Martin’s Press.
He is an award winning journalist, whose earlier book, The Big Truck That Went By, chronicles his time in Haiti, where he was the only full-time American correspondent in Haiti, when the devastating earthquake struck on January 12, 2010 and the ensuing disasters brought on by the multiple failures of international aid projects. More than 230,000 people were killed.
As he describes in our interview, Smedley Butler was there from the very beginning of the United States’ imperialism, first as a 16 year old lieutenant in the Spanish-American War, when we secured Guantanamo Bay, then on to Puerto Rico, The Philippines, China, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
After a long career in the Marines, in which he pioneered counter-insurgency methods and the militarization of police forces to enforce the prerogatives of capitalist oligarchs, who he eventually came to understand were calling the shots, he retired with the rank of General, the most decorated Marine in history, as well as the first of only 19 Marines to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice.
He became the Head of Public Safety for the City of Philadelphia, where he militarized that city’s police force. He eventually synthesized his experiences and understanding from his years subduing nationalist forces in those many countries – as well as battling gangsters in Prohibition era Philadelphia – to write his book, War Is a Racket, published in 1935.
He wrote, ”War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
He spent his final years promoting democracy here in the United States and fighting fascism here and abroad, as well as trying to prevent what became World War II. Smedley Butler died of cancer at the age of 59 on June 21, 1940.
This edition of Forthright Radio ends with a tribute to Dr. Paul Farmer, who died on on February 21, 2022 at the age of 62. It is followed by Paul Farmer’s own voice speaking of his work.
Kehinde Andrews is Professor of Black Studies in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. He is the director of the Center for Critical Social Research, founder of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity, and co-chair of the UK Black Studies Association. In fact, he was the first black studies professor in the UK and led the establishment of the first black studies program in Europe at Birmingham City University.
Among his books are Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality, and the Black Supplementary School Movement and Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century.
His most recent book is THE NEW AGE OF EMPIRE: HOW RACISM & COLONIALISM STILL RULE THE WORLD, published in the US by Bold Type Books.
Karen Greenberg is the Director of The Center on National Security at Fordham University. Her 2016 book, ROGUE JUSTICE :The Making of the Security State, explores the War on Terror’s impact on justice and law in America.
Her latest book, SUBTLE TOOLS: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, is published by Princeton University Press.
We spoke with Karen Greenberg on January 7, 2022, one year and a day after a momentarily united, bipartisan Congress fled in fear for their lives from a mob, who had violently invaded the capitol, preventing the fulfillment of their obligation under the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to meet on January 6 and count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. They were unable to do so until January 7, 2021, one year to the day that Karen Greenberg and I spoke.
In this interview with Kristen Iversen from June 27, 2012, we learn about the history and legacy of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Site, located 15 miles northwest of Denver, CO. Iversen grew up in nearby Arvada, and worked at the plant.
The recent catastrophic fires in Superior and Louisville, CO, brought it to mind, since Superior butts right up against and downwind from the Rocky Flats site, and Louisville butts right up against Superior. On the day of the fire, December 30, 2021, winds were clocked at Rocky Flats at 115 miles per hour. But beyond that, as Kristen Iversen tells us, those winds had been blowing east from the plutonium contaminated site for 6 decades.
Local residents protested the moral and physical dangers at Rocky Flats, as well as proposed real estate developments along its borders, which were nonetheless built, in spite of the scientific findings of plutonium contamination and strong, local resistance, and which have now been utterly destroyed by the fires.
An aerial view of one of the Boulder County neighborhoods that burned to the ground on Thursday. Photo: Hart Van Denburg/AP/Shutterstock
It has been widely reported that abundant spring rains allowed the grasses to grow profusely, only to dry completely in the ensuing drought and unseasonably hot and dry Fall and early Winter. In the growing, those plants absorbed plutonium, known to have been blown there from the Rocky Flats Weapon Lab site during those six decades. The fire vaporized whatever plutonium had been taken up by that tinder dry plant material, blowing it in unknown amounts and unknown distances to the east. I have not found any reports mentioning this aspect of the fires, much less considering the fallout from it, in the most literal sense.
Perhaps this post can be a beginning of that consideration.
Fifty years ago, the publication of his book, THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTH EAST ASIA, led to his testifying before the Senate Committee on Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee in June 1972. His research, including traveling to Hmong villages in Laos, revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency was knowingly involved in the transportation of heroin in the Golden Triangle of Burma, Thailand, and Laos. The CIA tried to block its publication, but it has been translated into 9 foreign languages with three English editions and is regarded as the “classic” work on global drug traffic.
His new book, also published by Haymarket Books, is titled TO GOVERN THE GLOBE: WORLD ORDERS & CATASTROPHIC CHANGE.
In it, he explores the interplay of three factors—sovereignty, human rights, and energy—in shaping the succession of empires and their global systems from the Black Death of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050.
It is packed with meticulously researched facts and analysis of world history of the last 600 years, examining the continuities and disruptions that create systems that rule international affairs.
He asserts that China will become the world hegemon by 2030, via initiatives such as the Belt & Road Initiative, which makes manifest Halford Mackinder’s thesis that who controls the World Island, controls the world.
Articles referenced or pertinent to this interview:
Spencer Ackerman had just graduated from Rutgers University, when the attacks on 9/11 occurred. He began his journalism career, focused on national security, with the New Republic in 2002, and then went on to write for Wired, The Guardian and The Daily Beast.
He won a 2012 National Magazine Award for his reporting on biased FBI training, and a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (with Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, and others at the Guardian) for reporting on revelations of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency based on the Edward Snowden revelations.
His recent book, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, was published by Viking in August, 2021. We spoke with him on December 3, 2021.
Articles referenced or pertinent to this interview:
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