This is Hell

'This is Hell' is een buitengewoon boeiend radioprogramma van Chuck Mertz in Chicago. Elke zaterdagochtend interviewt hij meer dan drie uur en drie kwartier progressieve, linkse mensen uit de hele wereld, maar meestal Amerikanen. Hij laat zijn gasten rustig hun verhaal opbouwen, onderbreekt ze niet hinderlijk met wijsneuzige opmerkingen en laat zo een hier in Europa nagenoeg onbekende kant van de VS zien. Mertz heeft gevoel voor humor en is niet behept met die cynische betweterige ondertoon van veel Hilversumse en Haagse journalisten. Op 17 december sprak hij met Robert Dreyfuss, auteur van: 'Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. The first complete investigation of America's most dangerous foreign policy miscalculation: sixty years of support for Islamic fundamentalism. Devil's Game is the previously untold account of America's misguided efforts, stretching across six decades, to cultivate the Islamic right in an effort to dominate the economically and strategically vital Middle East. Drawing on archival research and interviews with policy makers and CIA, defense, and foreign-service officials, Robert Dreyfuss argues that America's historic alliance with the Islamic right is greatly to blame for the emergence of Islamist terrorism in the 1990s. Among the hidden stories of U.S. collusion with radical Islam that Dreyfuss reveals here are President Eisenhower's 1953 Oval Office meeting with a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the United States' later secret alliance with that group and their Saudi patrons against Egypt's President Nasser. Dreyfuss meticulously documents the CIA's funding of the Iranian ayatollahs in the coup d-etat that restored Iran's shah to power, the United States' support for Saudi Arabia's efforts to create a worldwide Islamic bloc as an antidote to Arab nationalism, and the longstanding ties between Islamic fundamentalists and the leading banks of the West. With clarity and rigor, Dreyfuss also chronicles how the United States looked the other way when Israel's secret service supported the creation of the radical Palestinian group Hamas and how a secretive clique of American strategists in the 1970s exploited political Islam to conduct a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- leading directly to the rise of the Taliban.
Wide-ranging and deeply informed, Devil's Game reveals a history of double-dealing and cynical exploitation that continues to this day -- as in Iraq, where the United States is backing radical Islamists, allied with Iran's clerics, who have surfaced as the dominant force in the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi government. What emerges is a pattern that, far from furthering either democracy or security, ensures a future of blunders and blowbacks.' Voor meer over het boek
http://www.americanempireproject.com/bookpage.asp?ISBN=0805076522 Het programma ´This is Hell´ kunt u ook via podcast beluisteren. http://www.thisishell.net/ Een absolute aanrader voor geinteresseerden.