Empire needs a language to sustain it. "Collateral Damage", "Soft Targets", Pre-emptive Strikes", "Drone Attacks" all sound like creative descriptions for something that might happen during a night on the town. What they really hide, in the context of US imperial expansionism, is the violence, destruction and motives of war. Yet the terms roll off the typewriters and tongues of journalists without a second thought. The language of the Empire has come to rule and in doing so changes the ways resistance has to be mustered.

David Barsamian has been described as "one of the most forceful and insightful speakers we have around these days". He is winner of the Media Education Award, the ACLU's Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Award and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named him one of its Top Ten Media Heroes. The author of numerous books Barsamian's titles include Targeting Iran, The Pen and the Sword with the late Edward Said, What We Say Goes with Noam Chomsky and Original Zinn a collection of interviews he did with the late Howard Zinn.