CURRENT NEWS AND EVENTS

As part of our James Forman Series on Foreign and Domestic Issues, The SpiritHouse Project is pleased to invite you to another evening of conversation and reflections on the History of US Foreign Policy Toward Popular Struggles in Third World Countries and Expanding the American Empire under the cover of "the war on terrorism".

Friday, March 31, at 7pm
with William Blum, writer, journalist, and social critic
@SpiritHouse, 1615 Buchanan Street, NW
(202) 722-2691 for reservations.
Refreshments Served - Suggested Donation: $10.

Biographical Sketch: William Blum

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 went on to become an award-winning freelance journalist and author.

In January 2006, Blum's book, Rogue State, was propelled into international prominence when Osama bin Laden, in an audiotape, suggested that Americans should read the book for a better understanding of Muslim complaints about US foreign policy.

Blum’s other popular book on U.S. foreign policy, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, first published in 1995 and updated in 2004, 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 has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. He was one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first alternative newspaper in the capital. His stay in Chile in 1972-1973 - writing about the Allende government's "socialist experiment" and 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-1970's, Blum worked in London with former CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds.

In 2002, Blum's book 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. A book of Blum's essays, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire was published in 2004. His numerous essays can be found online at Znet and Counterpunch.