David Barsamian.
Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from The Progressive Magazine.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, May 2004.

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

These interviews provide concise introductions to the ideas and books of the people interviewed. The interviews were published in The Progressive between April 1997 and October 2003, and are organized in the book in reverse chronological order (which is preserved in the list below).

An archive of recent interviews in The Progressive is here.

David Barsamian, Wikipedia.

The interviewees and some of their books
(Note: I have not read most of these books; inclusion of books below is based upon mention in Barsamian's book or what seems interesting to me.):

• Edwidge Danticat
  (The Farming of Bones, 1998; Krik? Krak!, 1995; After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, 2002)
  Read the interview here.


• Kurt Vonnegut
  (Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969; Cat's Cradle, 1963; Breakfast of Champions, 1973)
  Read the interview here.


• Ahmed Rashid
  (Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, 2000; Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, 2002)
  Read the interview here.


• Danny Glover
  Read the interview here.


• John Pilger
  (Heroes, 1986, 2001; A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia, 1989; The New Rulers of the World, 2002; Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire, 2006)


• Tariq Ali
  (The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, 2002; Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq, 2003; Conversations with Edward Said, 2005; Speaking of Empire and Resistance: Conversations with Tariq Ali, 2005; Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, 2006)
  Read the interview here.


• Edward Said
  (Orientalism, 1978; Culture and Imperialism, 1993; Culture and Resistance: Conversations With Edward W. Said, 2003)
  One of the two interviews with Said in the book is here.


• Amartya Sen
  (Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation; Development as Freedom)


• Arundhati Roy
  (The Cost of Living; The God of Small Things; Power Politics; War Talk; The Algebra of Infinite Justice, this collection probably contains some/many? of the essays in the books listed previously; The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy)


• Angela Davis
  (Women, Race, & Class; Women, Culture & Politics; Are Prisons Obsolete?; Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture)


• Haunani-Kay Trask
  (From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii; Light in the Crevice Never Seen; Center for Hawaiian Studies)


• Juan Gonzalez
  (Roll Down Your Window: Stories of a Forgotten America; Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America)


• Ralph Nader
  (The Ralph Nader Reader)


• Noam Chomsky
  (American Power and the New Mandarins (his first political book); The Political Economy of Human Rights and Edward Herman, coauthor; Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media and Edward Herman, coauthor; Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies)


• Eduardo Galeano
  (Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent ; Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World; Memory of Fire trilogy)


• Taylor Branch
  (Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65; At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68)


• Eqbal Ahmad
  (The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad; Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire; Terrorism: Theirs and Ours)


• Vandana Shiva
  (Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development; Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace; Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit)


• Howard Zinn
  (People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present; You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times; A Power Governments Cannot Suppress)


• Ben Bagdikian
  (The New Media Monopoly; Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession)

Scott Horton, Rumblings of a Trade War, No Comment, Harper's Magazine, 08 August 2007.

Horton refers to this article:
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, China threatens to trigger US dollar crash, The Daily Telegraph, 08 August 2007.

Finally, the fundamental weakness of the U.S. economy and the consequences of the historically unprecedented U.S. government debt are exposed for all to see, at least for those willing to look.

Videos by Max Blumenthal:

• CPAC 2007: The Unauthorized Documentary- March 04, 2007


• The Film Take Back America Took Back - June 21, 2007


• Generation Chickenhawk: The Unauthorized College Republican National Convention Tour - July 19, 2007
  (here also)


• Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour - July 26, 2007

UPDATE (08 Aug 2007):
Max Blumenthal at YearlyKos via TalkingPointsMemo:
video link

Some recent articles etc. on Vice President Cheney:

• Barton Gellman & Jo Becker, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, The Washington Post, 24-27 June 2007.
  Series of 4 articles. A must read.
  
  Webchat with Barton Gellman, WashingtonPost.com, 25 June 2007.


• Hendrik Hertzberg, The Darksider, The New Yorker, 09 July 2007.
  Comments on the Gellman & Becker series.


• Jane Mayer, The Hidden Power, The New Yorker, 03 July 2006.
  Discusses the roles of Cheney and his assistant David Addington in the Bush White House (they are Bush's puppetmasters).


• Joan Didion, Cheney: The Fatal Touch, The New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 15, 05 October 2006.


• Jack Beatty, Cheney Lives!, Atlantic Unbound, The Atlantic Online, 21 February 2007.
  "Cheney's star may have faded at the White House, but his doctrine of preventive war remains Bush policy. Does this mean Iran is next?"


• Juan Cole, Dick Cheney's least favorite TV show? Why the worldview of "Heroes" clashes with the vice president's "1 percent doctrine" on terrorism, Salon.com, 30 May 2007.


• Tim Dickinson, The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming, Rolling Stone, 29 June 2007 (web post 20 June 2007).
  
  Comments:
  Cheney Bypassed Environmentally ‘Clueless’ Bush To Craft Administration’s Climate Change Agenda, ThinkProgress.org, 23 June 2007.


• Bruce Fein, Impeach Cheney: The vice president has run utterly amok and must be stopped, Slate.com, 27 June 2007.
  
  Bob Fertik, Bruce Fein's DEVASTATING Indictment of Dick Cheney, DailyKos.com, 27 June 2007.


• Aziz Huq, Cheney and the Constitution, The Nation (web only), 26 June 2007.


• Sean Wilentz, Mr. Cheney’s Minority Report, The New York Times, 09 July 2007.


• Steven Clemons, Guantanamo and Colin Powell, The Guardian, 14 June 2007.
  "Powell's commentary matters, and it’s an indicator of the fact that the vast majority of those in the public and those in power are rejecting Cheney and the warped national security impulses he embraced."
  I posted a link to the Wilkerson speech discussed in the article here.


• Muriel Kane, Old-line Republican warns 'something's in the works' to trigger a police state, The Raw Story, 19 July 2007.
  
  Paul Craig Roberts links:
  
  • Wikipedia
  
  
  • AntiWar.com
  
  
  • CounterPunch
  
  
  • LewRockwell.com


• Tough Talk on Impeachment, Bill Moyers Journal, 13 July 2007.
  


• Lou Dubose & Jake Bernstein. Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. New York: Random House, October 2006.
  

Moyers on Impeachment, Bill Moyers Journal, 13 July 2007.

Tough Talk on Impeachment, Bill Moyers Journal, 13 July 2007. (See also links at bottom of webpage.)
Moyers' discussion with Bruce Fein (Impeach Cheney, Slate.com, 27 June 2007; Executive Nonsense, Slate.com, 11 July 2007)
and John Nichols (writer at The Nation, author of The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism).

Michael Scheuer.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.
Washington, D.C. & Dulles, Virginia: Potomic Books, Inc., 2004; paperback edition with new afterword, March 2005.

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.
Note: The publisher provides a downloadable copy of the book's complete bibliography at the book's webpage. However that bibliography contains many fewer links / URLs to Internet articles etc. than I expected from such a document.

I found this book very useful for understanding the motivations of Islamic militants and the failures of Bush administration policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Muslim world generally. The author finished writing this book in early- to mid-2004, before Paul Bremer left Iraq (June 2004), so the book doesn't reflect events such as the London bombing of 7 July 2005 and the intensified insurgency and civil war in Iraq of the 3 years since 2004; all such events merely support and confirm Scheuer's assertions. I may post some excerpts from Scheuer's book later.

Miscellaneous Links:

• Michael Scheuer, Wikipedia.


• Michael Scheuer, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, Revised Edition, Potomac Books, January 2006.


• Imperial Hubris, Wikipedia.
  Book summary and links to selected book reviews. A very good source for book reviews.


• Mary Jacoby, A matter of survival, Salon.com, 13 July 2004.
  Book review.


• Mark Follman, A spook speaks out, Salon.com, 13 July 2004.
  Book review.


• Jonathan Raban, The Truth About Terrorism, The New York Review of Books, Volume 52, Number 1, 13 January 2005.
  Reviews several books in addition to Scheuer's.


• L. Carl Brown, Book Review, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005.


• Mark Mazzetti, U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05, The New York Times, 08 July 2007.
  Confirms Scheuer's insights into why the U.S. often fails to even attempt to kill or capture al-Qaeda leaders.


• Rachel Alexander, Book Review, IntellectualConservative.com, 13 January 2005.
  I include a link this review only as an example of right-wing obtuseness. Not very intellectual either.


• Andrea Mitchell, CIA insider says U.S. fighting wrong war, MSNBC, 24 June 2004.
  My Name Is Andrea Mitchell, And I Can't Hear A Word You're Saying, A Tiny Revolution, 24 June 2004.
  Comments on obtuse interviewer.


• Osama bin Laden, Wikipedia.


• Al-Qaeda, Wikipedia.

Glenn Greenwald, Tucker, Jonah, Elizabeth and Jillian, Salon.com, 29 June 2007.

Greenwald observes additional instances of Authoritarian Follower behaviour in the American media. In order to understand how the Bush administration has been allowed to continue its series of reckless constitution breaking activities over the last 6 years you must learn more about the psychology of Authoritarianism. Read:

Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, 2007.

Bob Woodward.
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

Whereas Thomas Ricks' Fiasco gives a picture of the Iraq quagmire via the failures of the military leadership and their interactions with the civilian leadership, Woodward focuses on the senior political and civilian leadership in Washington. Together these two books give insightful views on the multifaceted Iraq quagmire from different angles. In addition to Woodward's main focus on Iraq-related decision making, his book documents the more general problem of Execute Branch dysfunction. That is, neither the individuals involved (i.e., Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc.) nor the organizational structures (i.e., Departments of Defense and State, National Security Council, etc., "the interagency") of the Executive Branch are capable of managing the challenges of the Iraq undertaking. Danner's review explains this well:

Woodward tends to blame "the broken policy process" on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary "bureaucratic infighter"; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind [ The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 ] , more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason." (Danner, NYRB.)

Some book reviews:

• Michiko Kakutani, A Portrait of the President as the Victim of His Own Certitude, The New York Times, 30 September 2006.


• Mark Danner, Iraq: The War of the Imagination, The New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 20, 21 December 2006.


• Angelo M. Codevilla, Strategically Challenged, Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2006. (The reviewer, a professor of International Relations, has some insightful comments.)


• Jonathan Karl, So This Is Journalism? Bob Woodward takes a novel approach in his new book on the Bush administration, The Wall Street Journal, 11 October 2006. (This reviewer is suprisingly idiotic.)


• David Corn, Woodward, Revised, The Nation, 23 October 2006 (web post date 09 October 2006).

Other Links:

• Bob Woodward, Wikipedia.


• Bob Woodward, his official website.


• National Security Act of 1947, Wikipedia.
  This Act established the current national security bureaucracy (National Security Council, etc.) which Rumsfeld subverted.


• "Prospects for Iraq's Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead" - Unclassified Key Judgments, Iraq National Intelligence Estimate, National Intelligence Council, 02 February 2007.


• "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - Declassified Key Judgments, National Intelligence Estimate, April 2006.


• Jonathan Chait, Rummyache; The SecDef cult; A tour through the hilarious bygone world of Rumsfeld worship, The New Republic, 23 October 2006 (web post date 17 October 2006).


• Jack Beatty, Cheney Lives!, Atlantic Unbound, The Atlantic Online, 21 February 2007.


• Peter Baker, Mission Ongoing; The Image Bush Just Can't Escape, The Washington Post, 04 May 2007. (Article refers to Woodward, State of Denial, pages 186-187.)


• For a military critique of the Bush administration I strongly recommend the comments of John Batiste interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! 25 May 2007 (MP3 file here).
  A transcript of the entire interview is here.


• A Timeline of the Iraq War, ThinkProgress.org.
  Covers the period from 2003 through the present.

"Verschärfte Vernehmung"

"Enhanced Interrogation" was recognized as a war crime when practiced by Germans in the 1930s and 1940s; now it's official U.S. government policy.

Andrew Sullivan, "Verschärfte Vernehmung", The Daily Dish, The Atlantic Online, 29 May 2007.

Glenn Greenwald, Al-Qaida does it, too, Unclaimed Territory, Salon.com, 01 June 2007.

Robert Hormats was the "guest-bloger" this week at Table for One, TPMCafe:

• The power of the purse and the future of America's security, 21 May 2007.


• The cost of the Iraq war, 22 May 2007.


• Responding to your feedback, 24 May 2007.

Hormats is the author of The Price of Liberty: Paying for America's Wars, Times Books, 2007.