By William BlumInterview with historian and author William Blum about US foreign policy, democracy, and freedom of the press, and their world-wide implications.
Length: 38 min., 20 sec.
Date produced: Oct 28, 2007
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William Blum left the U.S. State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first "alternative" newspaper in the capital.
Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. His stay in Chile in 1972-3, writing about the Allende government\'s "socialist experiment," and then its tragic overthrow in a CIA-designed coup, instilled in him a personal involvement and an even more heightened interest in what his government was doing in various parts of the world.
In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.
His book on U.S. foreign policy, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, first published in 1995 and updated since, has received international acclaim. Noam Chomsky called it "Far and away the best book on the topic."
In 1999, Blum was one of the recipients of Project Censored\'s awards for "exemplary journalism" for writing one of the top ten censored stories of 1998, an article on how, in the 1980s, the United States gave Iraq the material to develop a chemical and biological warfare capability.
Blum\'s book Rogue State: A Guide to the World\'s Only Superpower, was published in 2000, and updated in 2005. It was written in reaction to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which, we were told, was done for humanitarian purposes. The book is in effect a mini-encyclopedia of all the un-humanitarian actions of the US government during the past half century. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
In 2002, Blum\'s West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir appeared. During 2002-2003, Blum was a regular columnist for the magazine The Ecologist, which is published in London and distributed globally.
In 2004, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire was published. Blum\'s numerous essays can be found online at Znet, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and many other sites.
Blum writes a monthly newsletter, The Anti-Empire Report, which is sent free to anyone requesting it by email.
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