POLITICAL ANALYSTS / EXPERTS

• BAUD, JACQUES is Colonel Chief of Staff, former Swiss secret service agent and expert in chemical and nuclear weapons. He was, among other things, head of doctrine for United Nations peacekeeping operations in New York. He is the author of several books on intelligence, war and terrorism, including the best-sellers Governing by Fake News, Putin, Game Master?, Operation Z, Ukraine Between War and Peace and The Russian Art of War, all published by Max Milo.
• BLUMENTHAL, MAX & MATÉ, AARON – THE GRAYZONE – Max Blumenthal is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker. He was a writer for The Nation, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, Mondoweiss, and Media Matters for America, and has contributed to Al Jazeera English, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. – Aaron Maté is a Canadian writer and journalist. – The Grayzone is an independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire. It was founded and is edited by award-winning journalist and author Max Blumenthal. From January 2016 to January 2018, AlterNet.org sponsored the Grayzone Project. Since then, The Grayzone has been fully independent.
• CHOMSKY, NOAM (Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA, December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, media critic, political analyst and political activist. Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As the founder of generative linguistics, he is the most influential linguist of the 20th century Between 1980 and 1992, he was the most cited author in all but seven scientific journals: Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud. Videos
• CROOKE, ALASTAIR born 1949, a former British diplomat, founded the Conflicts Forum in 2004. He advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West. Crooke worked for nearly 30 years in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), assisting in peace processes and negotiating with Palestinian groups. He later founded Conflicts Forum, which opposes overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria. Crooke was educated at Aiglon College and the University of St. Andrews. He was involved in negotiations to end the Israeli army’s siege of Ramallah and Bethlehem.
• DAVIS, DANIEL L. is a retired United States Army officer and an analyst of United States foreign policy. He was one of the earliest military officers to publicly criticize the War in Afghanistan.
• DENNIS, KAREEM better known by his stage name Lowkey, is an English rapper, and political activist of Iraqi descent. He cooperates with the Double Down News team on YouTube.
• DIESEN, GLENN (Norway, 1979) is a Norwegian political scientist who is a professor at the Department of Economics, History and Social Sciences at the University of Southeast Norway (USN). He is a specialist in Russian foreign policy and geopolitics. From 2018 to 2020, he was employed at the Moscow School of Economics (“Высшая школа экономики”, ВШЭ), when he started as an associate professor at the University of Southeast Norway, where he became a professor in 2021. Glenn Diesen is known to the public as a commentator and expert on Russian affairs, including articles published on the state-controlled Russian media channel Russia Today (RT)[4] and the alternative website Steigan.no. Videos
• DILORENZO, THOMAS is president of the Mises Institute. He is a former professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a longtime member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute. Article: Economic Fascism
• ELLSBERG, DANIEL (Chicago, USA, April 7, 1931- Kensington, California, June 16, 2023) was a former defence analyst who worked through the RAND Corporation think tank for the United States military. In the 1960s he discovered that the American population had been lied to about the Vietnam War and in the early 1970s he passed secret documents to The New York Times, the so-called Pentagon Papers. Videos
• FANG, LEE (born October 31, 1986) is an American investigative journalist, was previously an investigative reporter at The Intercept, a contributing writer at The Nation, and a writer at the Republic Report. He began his career as an investigative blogger for ThinkProgress. Fang shared the 2018 Izzy Award of the Park Center for Independent Media with fellow Intercept reporter Sharon Lerner, investigative reporter Dahr Jamail, and author Todd Miller. He publishes articles on Substack. He is also known from the Tonje Hessen-Schei witness-documentary “Praying for Armageddon“.
• FREEMAN, CHAS is an American retired diplomat and writer. He served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years.
• HEDGES, CHRIS is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister. He writes a weekly column at Scheerpost and hosts the program The Chris Hedges Report on YouTube.
• HERSH, SEYMOUR (born April 8, 1937 in Chicago) is an American investigative journalist and publicist who regularly writes about military and security affairs. Seymour M. Hersh’s intrepid reporting has earned him fame, front-page authored articles, a dizzying collection of awards, and no small amount of controversy. His story is one of fierce independence. His work gained worldwide exposure and recognition in 1969 when he exposed the Mỹ Lai massacre and subsequent cover-up during the Vietnam War. For this he received the Pulitzer Prize for International Journalism. In 2004, his reports on the mistreatment of prisoners by the US military at Abu Ghraib prison received a lot of attention. Based on an anonymous source, Seymour revealed in February 2023 that the Nordstream pipeline explosion was a United States covert operation.
• HEVER, SHIR is an independent economics researcher, manager of the Alliance for Justice between Israelis and Palestinians, and military embargo campaign coordinator for the Boycott National Committee (BNC). He specializes in various subjects including the global arms trade.
• HOH, MATTHEW has been a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy since 2010. In 2009, Matthew resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department over the American escalation of the war. Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matthew took part in the American occupation of Iraq; first in 2004-5 in Salah ad Din Province with a State Department reconstruction and governance team and then in 2006-7 in Anbar Province as a Marine Corps company commander. When not deployed, Matthew worked on Afghanistan and Iraq war policy and operations issues at the Pentagon and State Department from 2002-8. YouTube playlist
• JAY, PAUL is a journalist and filmmaker. He is the editor-in-chief and host of theAnalysis.news, a video and audio current affairs interview and commentary program and website. His films have won numerous awards at major festivals around the world. He is a past president of the Documentary Organization of Canada and was the founding president of the Hot Docs! Canadian International Documentary Festival.
• JOHNSON, LARRY C.  is a former CIA Intelligence Analyst.
• KATCHANOVSKI, IVAN teaches at the School of Political Studies and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He was Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Kluge Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. His academic publications include four books, 12 book chapters, and 19 articles in refereed journals. He received his Ph.D. from the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University under the direction of Seymour Martin Lipset. YouTube playlist
• KLARENBERG, KIT is an investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of The Grayzone UK
• KUJAT, HARALD is a German retired General of the Luftwaffe. He served as Chief of Staff of the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, from 2000 to 2002, and as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 2002 to 2005.
• KUZNICK, PETER is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, USA
• LOTTAZ, PASCAL is an Associate Professor at Kyoto University where he investigates neutrality in international relations and directs the research network neutralitystudies.com. He received his MA and PhD from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) and previously worked at Waseda University and Temple University (Japan Campus). His recent books include Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War (Routledge, 2022), Neutral Beyond the Cold: Neutral States and the Post-Cold War International System (Lexington Books, 2022), and Notions of Neutralities (Lexington Books, 2019). He also wrote entries on ‘Neutrality Studies’ for Oxford Encyclopedia and ‘The Politics and Diplomacy of Neutrality’ for Oxford Bibliography. YouTube
• MACGREGOR, DOUGLAS is a decorated combat veteran, an author of five books, a PhD, and a defense and foreign policy consultant. Macgregor was commissioned in the Regular Army in 1976 after 1 year at VMI and 4 years at West Point. In 2004, Macgregor retired with the rank of Colonel. In 2020, the President appointed Macgregor to serve as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, a post he held until President Trump left office. He holds an MA in comparative politics and a PhD in international relations from the University of Virginia. YouTube playlist
• MARTYANOV, ANDREI is an expert on Russian military and naval issues. He was born in Baku, USSR, graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy. In mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he worked as Laboratory Director in a commercial aerospace group. He blogs on Reminiscence of the Future and Is author of Losing Military Supremacy, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs and Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse. Videos
• MCGOVERN, RAY (born August 25, 1939 in New York City, USA) is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer turned political activist. McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. He was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal upon his retirement and returned it in 2006 to protest the CIA’s involvement in torture. McGovern’s post-retirement work includes commentary for the Russian government-funded RT and Sputnik News, among others, on intelligence and foreign policy issues. In 2003, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Videos
• MEARSHEIMER, JOHN J. is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Videos
• NAPOLITANO, ANDREW, born on June 6, 1950 in Newark, New Jersey, USA, and retired Senior Judicial Analyst at Fox News, former Judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School. He is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey. Videos.
• NORTON, BEN is a journalist and analyst whose work focuses primarily on geopolitics, international political economy, and US foreign policy. He lived in and reported from Latin America for several years, and is now based in Beijing, China. Videos
• PARÉ, BENOÎT was born in Paris in 1961 and lives in Greece since 1986. He is a French army reserve officer and former defense ministry analyst. Most importantly, Mr. Paré worked for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), as part of the seize-fire monitoring mission in Eastern Ukraine. He also wrote a book about this experiences in the Donbas with the title “What I saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022, Diary of an international Observer”.
• PIJL, VAN DER, KEES, (born 15 June 1947) is a Dutch political scientist who was professor of international relations at the University of Sussex. He is known for his critical approach to global political economy and has published, amongst others, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War. Prism of Disaster (2018), a trilogy on Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy (2007, 2010, 2014); Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq (2006); Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998); and The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984, reprinted 2012). He resigned from his emeritus status at Sussex in 2019 after refusing to apologise for allegations that the Israelis were responsible for the September 11 attacks.
• RITTER, SCOTT is an external Contributor to Energy Intelligence. He is a former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer whose service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving on the staff of US Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and later as a Chief Weapons Inspector with the UN in Iraq from 1991-98. Videos.
• SACHS, JEFFREY (Oak Park, Michigan, USA, November 5, 1953) is a world-renowned economics professor, best-selling author, innovative educator and global leader in sustainable development. From 2001-2018, Sachs served as special adviser to UN Secretaries General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-2016) and António Guterres (2017-2018). He was also an adviser to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. Videos
• TER HAAR, MARIE-THÉRÈSE & TER HAAR, ROY – Documentary (in Dutch) : Een Verloren Vrede / Interview
• TÖGEL, JONAS is a German psychologist, an American studies scholar, propaganda researcher, and bestselling author, and works as a research associate at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Regensburg. His motivation is to help people recognize, understand, and neutralize manipulation in everyday life and propaganda. In doing so, he is committed to strengthening his audience’s resilience so that one can remain peaceful, positive, and able to act even in difficult times.
• VINE, DAVID is a professor of political anthropology at American University in Washington, DC.
• WILKERSON, LAWRENCE  is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Collection

PDF: playlists with independent political discussions, analysis, and documentaries