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 civilians in Afghanistan. In the first segment, Kelley & Dan talk about Biden's plan to sell nuclear submarine technology to the Australians in another bid to build a security alliance against China.

More from Shamsi:

20 Years After 9/11, We Have a Roadmap Toward a More Just and Equitable Future -- September 10, 2021

Trump’s Secret Rules for Drone Strikes and Presidents’ Unchecked License to Kill -- May 5, 2021

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 and messed up priorities at the top. We talk about why we lost in Afghanistan, and whether men and women are still willing to join the service and sacrifice their lives to defend the nation. We also talk about the Aug. 29 U.S. drone strike that killed an aid worker and his family in Kabul, a parable for our failed war on terror.

Read more from Jeff Groom:

Will US military failures touch off a ‘revolution from below’?-- Sept. 15, 2021

Marines take fight to the sea, targeting China dollars -- April 2021.Increased Military Suicides Aren’t Necessarily About War -- February 2019

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 Tyranny Comes Home, about the use of propaganda after 9/11, the growth of the massive surveillance state, and the domestic war on terror.

More from Coyne and Hall:

9/11 militarized law enforcement and made every American a suspect -- September 2021

The Military-Big Tech-Complex -- January 2021

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 talks to Dan and Kelley about his new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump . In the opening segment, we discuss Israel's continuing meddling in U.S. attempts to get back into the Iran nuclear deal and whether it is finally having an effect.

Read Dan's review of Reign of Terror in Responsible Statecraft here

More by Spencer Ackerman:

McChrystal: ‘Impossible to Argue’ War on Terror Was Worth It -- The Daily Beast, 8/21/21

Donald Rumsfeld, Killer of 400,000 People, Dies Peacefully -- The Daily Beast, 6/30/21

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 to the truth, he remains imprisoned in London, fighting extradition and prosecution in the U.S. Kelley and Dan talk to journalist and Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola about the current state of the case against Julian and the press freedoms at stake as the government is determined to make him an example. We also talk about the role of whistleblowers during the post-9/11 wars, as well as the crisis surrounding the current withdrawal of Afghanistan. 

More from Kevin Gosztola:

The Afghanistan War and the dissenters we should've listened to -- 8/17/21

Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale receives 45-month sentence for releasing drone documents -- 7/27/21

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 think not. 

More from Richard Hanania:

Trump could gain from Biden's decision to delay withdrawing from Afghanistan -- NBCNews.com 

Richard's Substack newsletter

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 the defense reform community: Mark Perry and Pierre Sprey.

More from Emma Ashford:

Reality Check #4: Focus on interests, not on human rights with Russia -- The Atlantic Council, with Mat Burrows.

Remembering Mark Perry

Remembering Pierre Sprey

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 romantic mythology, and the country’s inability to learn the lessons from each previous conflict. In the first segment, Dan and Kelley talk about the growing national security bureaucracy under Biden, whistleblower Daniel Hale, Israeli nukes, and the troop shell game in Iraq.

Read More Mary Dudziak here.

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 in Haiti, protests in Cuba, and the U.S. role in both.

Read more from Annelle Sheline:

The Saudi blockade on Yemen is a war crime, and only civilians suffer from it

How the growing UAE-Saudi rivalry could pay off for the United States

Read more from Matt Purple: 

Not A Cold War But An Ideological Argument

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:

America Has a Ruling Class: Why do members of the political elite insist that they’re not? -- New York Times