Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the unscheduled trip to Ukraine by the leaders of Germany and France to confer with the Secretary of State and Ukraine’s president before going on to Moscow to offer a peace plan to Vladimir Putin. A leading international expert on contemporary Ukraine at the Center for Political and Regional Studies in the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, Taras Kuzio, joins us. He is the author of the new book “Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption, and the New Russian Imperialism” and we discuss his article at The Financial Times “Arm Ukraine and force Putin back to the negotiating table” as well as the apparent good cop-bad cop strategy underway to get Putin to the negotiating table, before the U.S. and NATO moves to arm Ukraine to defend itself in a war where Russia has already taken Crimea and a large area of Ukraine with the intervention of thousands of Russian troops with advanced military equipment in a blatant invasion that the ill-equipped and poorly trained Ukrainian military cannot match.

Part 2

Then we go to the U.K. to speak with Idrees Ahmad, a London-based writer and political sociologist who is a Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Sterling, Scotland and the author of the new book, just out, “The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War”. We will discuss the history of the war party of neoconservatives behind the Iraq debacle who manufactured an unnecessary and disastrously counterproductive war, the cost and consequences of which continues to this day. We examine why the architects of this endless tragedy have never been held to account and how they may come back as a part of a President Hillary Clinton foreign policy team or in another Bush Administration assuming there is sufficient amnesia in America to elect as their next president the brother of the “decider” who took America head-first into one of its greatest economic, military and diplomatic catastrophes in history.  

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the gruesome killing of a Jordanian pilot who was burned alive by the so-called Islamic State in a well-produced video that was apparently shot a month ago. An award-winning Palestinian journalist, Daoud Kuttab, joins us from Amman, Jordan for an update on the outrage that is felt in the Kingdom where a military spokesman has vowed on national television that “our punishment and revenge will be as huge as the loss of all Jordanians.” We will discuss what likely retaliation will take place and what might be the possible strategy behind the Islamic State’s brutal displays of barbarism that now include tossing a man tied to a chair from a seven story building for an alleged “homosexual affair”.

Part 2

Then we look further into the possible motives and consequences behind the brutal death of the Jordanian pilot in a video shot on January 3rd that has just been released by the Islamic State when Jordan’s king was in Washington, apparently intended to show how the king is not minding the store and how impotent the regime has been in winning the pilot’s release. Jillian Schwedler, a Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College joins us to discuss the importance of the Kasesbeh tribe, to which the pilot belonged, to the foundation and legitimacy of the Hashemite Kingdom’s rule.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with the grandson of the leader of the American Communist Party who became the biggest American capitalist in post-Soviet Russia until he fell afoul of the Vladimir Putin. Bill Browder, the author of the new book, just out, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice” joins us to discuss the gangster state that the boss of bosses Putin runs, and the inability of Western and European leaders to understand this grave new geopolitical phenomenon of criminal sovereignty, that in the Kremlin is a combination of national security and organized crime, the “mafiya” and nuclear weapons.