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March 21 - Obama's Appeal for a Palestinian State and Justice for Palestinians; A CIA Analyst who was Pressured by Cheney; Obama's Contradictory Statements on Social Security and Medicare
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We begin with President Obama’s visit today to the West Bank and his call for a Palestinian state and justice for the Palestinians. A former member of the Palestinian negotiating team Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of “Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East’ joins us to discuss Obama’s meeting with the Palestinian president and his appeal for peace in an address to Israeli students. |
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Then, in a follow-up to recent interviews on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, we speak with a member of the CIA team that was pressured by Vice President Cheney to provide bogus intelligence in support of the build-up to the Iraq war about Saddam’s non-existent WMD and his non-relationship with Al Qaeda. Former CIA analyst Nada Bakos, joins us. She has an article at Wired “I Tried to Make the Intelligence Behind the Iraq War Less Bogus”. |
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Then finally we speak with Max Richtman, the President and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, about the letter he sent to President Obama today asking him about contradictions between his pledges on Social Security and recent contradictory statements on both the chained CPI and Medicare means testing that are apparently part of the White House’s deficit reduction proposal. |
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March 20 - Were Chemical Weapons Used in Syria?; Assessing Obama's First Day in Israel; Student Loan Debt Passes a Trillion Dollars
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We begin with conflicting accounts of whether or not chemical weapons have been used in Syria, crossing a red line that the Obama Administration has declared would invite a response. We speak with an expert on chemical weapons and a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, Raymond Zilinskas, who directs the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterrey Institute for International Studies.
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Then we speak about Obama’s state visit in Israel today with Dan Raviv, a national correspondent for CBS News and a veteran CBS Middle East correspondent who has written a number of books on Israel’s intelligence community and blogs about it at israelspy.com. His latest, co-authored with Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, is “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” and we discuss why Israelis are mounting protests during the President’s visit demanding that Obama free the American who spied for Israel, Jonathan Pollard. |
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Then finally we look into the second largest debt in the U.S. after mortgage debt, and that is student debt, that has tripled since 2004 and last week passed the trillion dollar mark. David Halperin, who was the founding director of Campus Progress joins us to discuss the role of the for-profit college racket in indenturing students with worthless diplomas, and the impact of this growing burden on the millennial generation’s future as their prospects of saving for retirement or owning a house or car, grow increasingly dim. |
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March 19 - Insight into Our Imperial Hubris; One of 33 Who Presciently Warned Against the Iraq War; Repeating the Iraq Folly with Iran
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Today, on this tenth anniversary of the “shock and awe” beginning of the war with Iraq, we look into a number of stories and issues in the news. We begin with one of the most insightful chroniclers of the Bush/Cheney regime, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ron Suskind, the author of “The One Percent Doctrine”, and discuss the selling of the Iraq war, the utter failure of our political opposition to stand up to the campaign of lies and propaganda, and the dismal performance of the Press who became the cheer squad of the Bush Administration. |
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Then we speak with John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and author of “Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics”. He was one of 33 American scholars of international relations who signed a letter published in the New York Times six month before the Iraq war began, warning that a U.S. invasion of Iraq with no exit strategy will lead to occupation, urban combat, a victory for Al Qaeda and increased anti-Americanism around the globe. |
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Then finally, we examine a contemporary parallel of the rush to war with Iraq in the face of conflicting intelligence, a situation that is currently being repeated as the Press parrots lies and distortions about Iran, while failing to look at the actual intelligence data on Iran that the Director of National Intelligence presented to the Senate last Tuesday. Dr Trita Parsi, the co-founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and author of “A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran” joins us. We discuss his article at The Huffington Post “3 Facts to Note in 2013 Worldwide Threat Assessment Report”. |
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March 18 - How Dick Cheney Captured Bush's Presidency; The Banking Crisis in Cyprus and the Targeting of Russian Deposits; Republican Soul-Searching in Their "Autopsy" Report
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With Tuesday marking the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war, we begin with an examination of the principal proponent and architect of that war, Dick Cheney, who is the subject of a new Showtime documentary “The World According to Dick Cheney”. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff in the first George W. Bush term, joins us to discuss how Bush’s presidency was staffed then captured from within by Cheney, who deceived and manipulated Bush, leading to today’s bitter estrangement between the two. |
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Then we examine the banking meltdown in Cyprus that has revived concerns about the viability of the Eurozone. Dimitri Papadimitriou, the president of the Levy Economics Institute joins us to discuss how a tax imposed on bank deposits in Cyprus, in return for a E.U. bailout, has backfired with furious depositors threatening a run on the banks that have been closed until Thursday. We also look into the exposure Russian companies and individuals have in troubled banks in Cyprus where banking assets are eight times the size of the country’s economy. |
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Then finally we speak with Edward Frantz, a presidential historian at the University of Indianapolis and author of “The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy”. We discuss the “autopsy” report issued Monday by the Republican National Committee that described the Republicans as “scary”, “narrow minded”, “out of touch” and the Party of “stuffy old men |
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March 17 - The New Pope and the "Dirty War"; Our Mentally Unstable Afghan Partner; An Impending Humiliation of South Korea by the North?
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We begin with an investigation into the role of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, when he was the head of the Jesuit order in Argentina and look into his dealings with the Argentine junta who kidnapped and murdered priests during the “dirty war”. Sam Ferguson, a visiting fellow at the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, who is writing a book “Remnants of a Dirty War”, joins us. He has an article at The New Republic “When Pope Francis Testified about the Dirty War”. |
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Then we assess the impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, America’s longest war, and what kind of functioning state will be left behind in the hands of kleptocrats and warlords, whose current leader Hamid Karzai, is not just corrupt, but is mentally unstable. Christine Fair, a former United Nations political officer in Afghanistan, who is also a senior fellow with the Counter Terrorism Center at West Point, joins us to discuss Karzai’s latest outburst that has endangered the lives of American and NATO service members who he has accused of working with the Taliban. |
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Then finally, we look into the growing possibility that there will be a military confrontation between North and South Korea, following a warning by the North that the South should evacuate a group of islands on the border that the North shelled in 2010. Sung Yoon Lee, a Professor of International Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University joins us to discuss where bellicose rhetoric ends and military action begins. |
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