Crashing the War Party

This week Kelley & Dan talk to Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, which focuses on unconstitutional policies (think drone war, PATRIOT Act, torture) in U.S. policies, particularly in its Global War on Terror. Shamsi describes for us the evolution of Washington's targeted killing program through Obama and Trump, and up to the latest lethal drone strike that killed 10 civil...

In this episode of Crashing the War Party, Kelley and Dan talk to former Marine officer Jeffrey Groom, author of  American Cobra Pilot: A Marine Remembers a  Dog  and Pony Show . Groom left the service in 2018 disenchanted with what he saw as the institution's contradictions, waste, and hypocrisies, and worse the growing failure of the military to respond and adapt because of sclerotic thinking an...

On this special episode, Dan and Kelley discuss the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and the government's use and abuse of that horrifying event to advance its goals of military primacy, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but across the Middle East and at home here in the United States. They talk to Chris Coyne and Abigail Hall , authors of the recent books  Manufacturing Militarism , and Ty...

Living as a young writer during 9/11 and its aftermath in New York City, Spencer Ackerman's career as a news reporter soon followed the expanding national security state, with all of its attending domestic and foreign war policies and metastasizing law enforcement powers. Twenty years later, he is looking back and examining the real horror of it all and the impact on American society. Today, he ta...

The U.S. is ending its 20-year war in Afghanistan and conventional wisdom now holds that it was largely a failure and a waste of more than $2.5 trillion and countless lives. In 2010,  Wikileaks published a massive trove of classified documents  that exposed the American government's lies about the war. It was a colossal brief against the war state, but instead of thanking Assange for his service t...

Kelley and Dan talk to  Richard Hanania , president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and a Defense Priorities fellow, about the developing news in Afghanistan, the blame game in Washington, lying generals and government officials, and whether the Blob can succeed in making the defeat in Afghanistan an indictment against foreign policy restraint and the antiwar movement. We...

Kelley and Dan talk this week with  Emma Ashford,  an expert at the Atlantic Council's New American Engagement Initiative. Her experience spans the Middle East, Russia, and Europe, and she spends her time swatting down attacks from the Blob as she seeks to change minds about old liberal internationalist order and American primacy. In our first segment, we pay tribute to the loss of two greats in t...

Mary Dudziak, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University and co-editor of Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism , joins Dan and Kelley this week to talk about the late historian Marilyn Young and her decades-long research into the pathologies of American war-making. We zero in on the popular support for wars, the integration of...

Kelley and Dan talk to the Quincy Institute's Middle East expert  Annelle Sheline  about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's seeming efforts to "reform" the Kingdom's authoritarianism — and whether those efforts are real, or not. In the first segment, we reunite with our old  Empire Has No Clothes  comrade Matt Purple to discuss recent violence in our own hemisphere: the recent assassination...

Barbara, Dan, and Kelley talk to GWU professor Samuel Goldman, author of  After Nationalism :  Being American in an Age of Division ,  talking about what defines the country today, and how we might re-orient our exceptionalism towards being a model rather than a missionary. In the first segment, Kelley and Dan relive the Donald Rumsfeld of 2002 and 2003, and his Iraq War legacy. More from Goldman:...

Kelley, Dan, and Barbara pick former  Congressman Ron Paul' s brain on the Biden administration, the Trump effect, and what inspires him after all of these years to fight Washington and the intractable military-industrial complex. In the first segment, we talk about the June airstrikes and how the White House can bomb anyone, anywhere, whenever, without Congressional approval —and say it has the a...

On this week’s episode, we talk to Ben Freeman at the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative about how Washington think tanks — particularly foreign policy and national security institutions — are taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the government, foreign countries, and the defense industry. In many cases, they aren’t disclosing it. How is this affecting policy, more specifically, is i...

In this week's episode, Kelley, Dan & Barb talk to Marine Corps veteran and Project on Government Oversight defense analyst  Dan Grazier  about the boondoggle F-35 fighter, and how the anti-China threat inflation is driving procurement in the Pentagon. He gets into how the sausage is made in the Pentagon budget, and we got close to losing our appetite. In the intro segment, we talk about Biden's r...

Historian  Greg Brew  talks about his upcoming book, "Oil and the Cold War: the Iranian Crisis of 1951-1954," which fleshes out the CIA-backed 1953 coup which toppled the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh . He offers some new and provocative insights on the incident, which is a stain on U.S. foreign policy and in many respects the foundation of the fraught relationship between Washington a...

Barbara, Dan and Kelley talk to George Washington University lecturer and Defense Priorities fellow Ben Friedman about the stakes of provoking greater conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Recent Biden administration rhetoric via NATO suggests that Washington will continue to put it’s thumb on the scale without really planning to fight for Ukraine militarily. We also talk about Biden’s puzzling decisio...

On a very special Crashing the War Party, Barbara, Dan and Kelley 'want to believe' …that our government will finally come clean with what it knows about UFO sightings dating back to the 1940s. We interview Gideon Lewis-Kraus about his exhaustive piece in the New Yorker, “How the Government Started Taking UFOs Seriously,” which reveals that while believers and sightings by Americans were being moc...

After violence exploded in Israel and Gaza last month the Biden administration helped broker a ceasefire, but is it enough? Kelley, Barbara and Dan talk about the new and growing opposition to Washington's "blank check" to Tel Aviv with nothing in return. Also, we talk to Jason Paladino from the Project on Government Oversight about Pentagon secrecy, and how we still don't know how many troops we...

In this episode, we talk to Win Without War 's  Kate Kizer about President Biden's pledge to stop assisting Saudi Arabia in their devastating offensive operations against the Houthis in Yemen. But have we stopped? Is Washington using some loophole to continue arming Riyadh in this war, when will it end? We also give our thumbs up -- and thumbs down -- to Biden's foreign policy moves in his first f...

Investigative journalist Eli Clifton joins Barbara, Daniel, and Kelley to talk about the corruption and hypocrisy that makes this city go, starting with the dark money and blatant corporate, foreign, and government funding into think tanks and lobbying for a preferred interventionist agenda. Plus, crazy Beltway headlines that will make you cringe (and your pocketbook shrink)! Eli is a senior advis...

So what what does it feel like to be vindicated by history? We ask radio host Scott Horton, author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism about his 20-year fight against U.S. war policies, which are largely considered a colossal failure. Kelley, Barbara and Daniel also talk about anti-Russia hysteria carrying over into the Biden Ad...

This week, Kelley, Barbara, and Dan talk about Yemen: how it was so easy to get into this war six years ago but so difficult for Washington to get out. Then we talk to Trita Parsi , author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy and Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States , and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Respo...

It's been nearly 20 years and it looks like we will finally be leaving Afghanistan -- can we believe it? Barb, Dan, and Kelley talk about realistic expectations for ending the war. Then we interview FEE writer, author, and podcaster Brad Polumbo about the nation's militarized police, anti-war Republicans, confronting the military-industrial complex, and the Blob's fascination with the "China threa...

Barbara, Kelley, and Dan aren't invited but they are crashing the party anyway. In this first episode, they will get it off their chests: the Beltway Blob is corrosive and toxic, lacking in self-awareness and helping the U.S. bumble and stumble into back foreign policy decisions while marginalizing voices of reason and restraint. We'll talk, too, about the war hangover and how to start cleaning up...

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