1/10/20 Andy Worthington on Closing Guantanamo Bay

Scott talks to Andy Worthington about Guantanamo Bay, where dozens of prisoners are still detained without charges under suspicion of involvement in terrorism. Worthington reminds us that President Obama campaigned on closing the prison, but quickly gave up after resistance from republicans. Trump, meanwhile, has kept his campaign promise not to release any more prisoners. Worthington fears that the plight of these men being detained with no hope of justice is simply not a cause most Americans care about. He continues to do what he can to keep the issue in the public consciousness. Discussed...

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1/10/20 Grant Smith on the Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board

Grant Smith discusses his new book, The Israel Lobby Enters State Government, which tells the scandalous story of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board, a branch of the Virginia state legislature tasked with promoting Israeli business interests in the state. Unlike a chamber of commerce, says Smith, VIAB is quite literally a part of Virginia's government, so its members can use political power to obtain contracts for businesses that they choose, with special provisions that businesses in the free market would never get. This has led to failure after failure, with much of the taxpayer money that...

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1/10/20 Gareth Porter on Mike Pompeo’s Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Gareth Porter joins Scott once again to discuss what he calls Mike Pompeo's "Gulf of Tonkin incident." In the real Gulf of Tonkin incident, McNamara intentionally misled President Johnson in order to incite war between the U.S. and North Vietnam. Porter says that Pompeo pulled a similar maneuver in deceiving President Trump about the extent to which Soleimani and the Iranians were behind the recent embassy attacks in Iraq in order to persuade him to carry out Soleimani's assassination. For the time being, at least, it appears that Trump is satisfied to let the Iranians save face with their...

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1/10/20 Cliff Maloney on Waking Americans up to the Liberty Message

Cliff Maloney of Young Americans for Liberty talks about the disaster of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and how to bring more Americans around to the antiwar position. Luckily, he says, a great majority of people already oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when asked, the trouble is that they don't make it a priority—and neither, therefore, do most politicians. In an effort to change this, Maloney's organization vets liberty-focused, antiwar candidates and helps them get elected in local races all around the country. Discussed on the show: "Five lessons Afghanistan teaches us...

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Israel Helped Kill Soleimani

It's just one throwaway line in CIA asset Ken Dilanian’s new NBC piece on the whiz-bang, super-neato, space-age, Hollywood movie-like, special, high-technology that made the assassination possible. "Intelligence from Israel helped confirm the details." And dammit, I just love the "Oceania has always been at war with the Badr Brigade" line of Iraq War II-denial embedded in all these stories. Dilanian and his assistant demonstrate how it's done almost perfectly here: "At the Baghdad airport, Soleimani was greeted by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of an Iraqi anti-American militia and a...

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1/10/20 Robert Naiman on the new War Powers Resolutions

Scott talks to Robert Naiman about the efforts in congress and the senate to oppose the war in Yemen and stymie any escalation in a conflict with Iran. Naiman is optimistic that a concurrent resolution against the war in Yemen, which Trump cannot veto, will have enough support to make it through congress. Republicans and many in the media maintain that a concurrent resolution is merely symbolic, with no power to bind the president. But Naiman assures us that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 specifically cites a concurrent resolution as the means by which congress can end an unauthorized...

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