Three minutes by way of update on what I'm up to, above all to say that I'll soon be setting up a new podcast, The Contradictions. And also to encourage people to get in touch by email.

John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski joined me for a conversation based on their book, The Watchdogs Didn't Bark, published by Skyhorse. It comes with advance praise from John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer imprisoned after acknowledging the agency's torture programme, and from the documentary film-maker Alex Gibney. In this discussion, which was rocorded on the anniversary of the Cole bombing, we talked about: the significance of that bombing in relation to the CIA's withholding of critical...

An account of a relatively recent experience of the Amazonian psychedelic/entheogen/ecodelic ayahuasca, also known in Colombia as yagé. In this podcast, I provide a basic introduction to what ayahuasca is, for those to whom it's new; I try my best to recount the visions it brought to me; to make sense of how to think of them; and to some small extent to make sense of it in its European and South American contexts. I come clean that I don't think one is experiencing a simple hallucination,...

This podcast recounts the protection by Alec Station, the CIA's bin Laden tracking unit, of two of the accused 9/11 hijackers, right up to the time of the attack. The crucial roles of Richard Blee, Alec Station's chief, Tom Wilshere, its deputy chief, and Dina Corsi, an FBI analyst who became associated with Wilshere, are highlighted. What distinguishes this podcast is its debunking of the consciously false legal justifications used to prevent FBI criminal agents investigating the USS Cole...

This is an in-depth interview about the October 22nd, 2014, Ottawa shootings with Graeme MacQueen, who has written a report giving considerable circumstantial evidence for the possibility that the attack was carried out under the ultimate direction of the Canadian security state, with likely American co-operation. We talk about the attack itself; its links with an attack in Quebec two days previously; the documented record of entrapment of Muslims by law enforcement in North America;...

I talk to Tom Secker about his book National Security Cinema, co-written with Matthew Alford. Using the US Freedom of Information Act, and journalistic and academic sources, as well as analysis of script changes, Tom and Matthew have greatly increased our knowledge of the US Department of Defense’s and the CIA’s use of hardware and expertise as an enticement to film producers and directors to remove elements of their scripts critical of or simply inconvenient for the Defence and intelligence...

In this episode, Tim Coles is my guest to discuss the latest events in the North Korean crisis and strategic interests of the countries immersed in the crisis, especially the United States, and the US’s broader involvement in east Asia. Topics discussed include: having a book title in common with Michael Wolff’s book about the Trump White House; the actual state of North Korean nuclear weapons and missile development; American strategic assessments of North Korean goals; the ambiguity in...

Emma Blake Corrigan is co-founder of Simple Physical Literacy, and she teaches children physical literacy, and especially trains adults in how to teach it. The website is simplephysicalliteracy.com. The course is intended especially for children aged 6 to 9. Her briefest definition of physical literacy is joy in movement, and we discuss its importance to children for making friends, being in a classroom, and for other types of learning.

This podcast interview with Guido Preparata is about two broad topics: first, how the United States maintains its central role in the global economy through the power of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Second, about a fresh, unfamiliar take on money as we know it today, how money might be reformed, and its effect on economic production. In between we take in: the bubble economy; the slump of the past ten years; why American prepotence is probably stable; why the high priests of...

This podcast is about the power struggles Putin faced in 1999, before he became President of Russia, and about the help he got from a Kremlin clique which smoothed his path. It’s also about that clique’s plans for a war in Chechnya, and about the mostly unknown War of Dagestan.