<html><body><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div><br></div><div style="color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt;">FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt;">On Monday, March 30, from 1-2 p.m., Pacific Time, KMEC Radio will host two 30--minute shows.</span></div><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Our first show will air from 1:00-1::30 p.m., Pacific Time, and is called, "Afghanistan: The Fiction of Sovereign Government and the U.S. Funding of an Endless War of Attrition”.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Our guest is Sonali Kolhatkar.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">BACKGROUND</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported: “President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan is expected to urge President Obama in a White House meeting on Tuesday not to pull American military forces out of his country as quickly as planned, requesting an extension of assistance in combating a tenacious Taliban insurgency.”</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Now the New York Times reports," President Obama’s on Tuesday announced he has decided to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan through 2015. The plan is partly designed to bolster American counterterrorism efforts in that country, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to conduct secret drone strikes and other paramilitary operations from United States military bases.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">"Specifically, Obama will leave 9,800 American troops in Afghanistan until at least the end of the year. The announcement came after a daylong White House meeting with President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan. Obama and Ghani said the decision was a necessary response to the expected springtime resurgence of Taliban aggression and the need to give more training to the struggling Afghan security forces.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">"But American officials are saying that a significant part of the deliberations on the pace of the withdrawal had been focused on the need for the C.I.A. and military special operations forces to operate out of two large military bases: Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan and a base in Jalalabad, the biggest city in the country’s east. Reducing the military force by half from its current level, as planned, would have meant closing the bases and relocating many of the C.I.A.’s personnel and its contractors."</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">SONALI KOLHATKAR</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Kolhatkar is co-author of "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence"and is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a US-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the social, political, and humanitarian projects of the Revoluutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. (RAWA). </p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">See: http://www.rawa.org/rawa.html</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">See alsoo: http://www.rawa.org/index.php</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Sonali Kolhatkar is also the host and producer of KPFK Pacifica’s popular morning drive time program. "Uprising", based in Los Angeles, California.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">*****</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Our second show will air from 1:30-2:00 p.m.. Pacific Time. </p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">We're calling the show, "Conservatives and Progressives Team Up for Surveillance State Repeal Act". Our guest is Shahid Buttar.<br></p><div><br></div><p></p><p style="margin: 0px;">BACKGROUND</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">The Daily Caller reports in “House Revives Bill To Completely Repeal The Patriot Act, Dismantle NSA Spying,” that: “Some of the strongest reforms to the U.S. national security apparatus ever introduced in Congress were revived Tuesday by a pair of congressmen in the House of Representatives.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">“Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan and Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie announced in a press release their intention to reintroduce the Surveillance State Repeal Act — a bill first introduced following the Snowden leaks in 2013 that would completely repeal the Patriot Act and the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, as well as introduce reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">“The bill would legally dismantle the National Security Agency’s most aggressive surveillance programs, including the bulk collection and retention of virtually all Americans’ landline phone records justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The repeal of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act would also prevent the agency from tapping the physical infrastructure of the Internet, such as undersea fiber cables, to intercept ‘upstream’ data in bulk, which critics including the ACLU claim the NSA uses to collect data on Americans.”</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">SHAHID BUTTAR</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) , Buttar spoke at a briefing last week at the Capitol on this subject. He said: “The Surveillance State Repeal Act, HR 1466, represents a profound challenge by members of Congress from across the political spectrum fed up with the national security establishment and its continuing assault on our Constitution.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Buttar continued, “Most policymakers forget the 9/11 commission’s most crucial finding: the intelligence community’s failures that enabled the 9/11 attacks were not failures of limited data collection, but rather failures of data sharing and analysis. Over the last 15 years, Congress has allowed the agencies to expand their collection capacities, solving an imaginary problem while creating a host of real threats to U.S. national security far worse than any act of rogue violence: the specter of state omniscience, immune from oversight and accountability, and thus vulnerable to politicization.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">“This was among the fears of which President Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address.”</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Shahid Buttar is a constitutional lawyer, grassroots organizer, electronic musician, and executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. He leads BORDC's efforts to restore civil liberties, constitutional rights, and rule of law principles undermined by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">Shahid graduated from Stanford Law School in 2003, where he served as executive editor of the Stanford Environmental Law Journal and a teaching assistant for Constitutional Law. Since then, his comments have been featured by news outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, The Intercept, CNN, al-Jazeera, FOX News, and Agence-France Presse.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">ABOUT KMEC RADIO</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">KMEC Radio airs at 105.1 FM in Ukiah, California. We broadcast from the Mendocino Environmental Center. </p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">We also stream live from the web at: <a href="http://www.kmecradio.org" target="_blank">www.kmecradio.org</a></p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">KMEC Radio archives its shows. Many shows are also available at Youtube or as podcasts.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;">We are an all-volunteer station and Mendocino County's community radio.</p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p><p style="margin: 0px;"><br></p></div></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>