Kevin Gosztola is back for another update on Julian Assange’s extradition hearing. A major focus of the last few days, he says, has been Assange’s mental health, including a brand new diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. The defense has argued that this, combined with serious depression, would make him unfit for high-security imprisonment and for certain kinds of questioning that he would likely have to undergo in the U.S. The defense has also continued to emphasize the insidious and illegal...

Scott inverviews Tom Secker about the immense influence that the police, the military, the intelligence agencies and, especially, the Department of Homeland Security wield in Hollywood. Secker describes the complicated process required for a writer or producer to include any material about the U.S. security state apparatus in a movie or TV show, detailing just how much creative control these agencies demand in exchange for information, shooting locations and special equipment—in other words,...

Peter Van Buren discusses yet another development in the “Russiagate” story, one that he says exposes the whole thing for what it really is. He describes the way “media watchdog” groups will discover small, insignificant websites, come up with an excuse for why they seem to be connected to Russia and then get large platforms like Facebook and Twitter to ban those sites in the name of truth and accuracy. Then mainstream publications like the New York Times will run stories about the bans, and...

Scott talks to Dave Smith about the upcoming election and the role of the Libertarian Party in presidential politics. Both agree that the right move for the Party, given that it has essentially no chance of winning the presidency in the near future, is simply to spread the message of liberty to as many people as possible, just as Ron Paul did during his campaigns. Instead, the LP seems more focused on saying the politically correct thing, not offending too many people and accepting a few...

Gareth Porter discusses the slow death of the “Russiagate” narrative, which has been allowed to live on mainly because of deliberate obfuscation by democrats and the mainstream media. Rarely do they lie outright about the facts, says Porter—instead they will cherry-pick statements from favorable experts and make vague references to incidents where some website or database was accessed by a computer somewhere in Russia. None of this is enough to prove actual Russian interference in the 2016...

Muhammad Sahimi discusses Mike Pompeo’s continual efforts to provoke a war between the U.S. and Iran, or to incite regime change from within. His “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign is part of the quest to attain one of these outcomes, a policy that Sahimi thinks is both doomed to fail and incredibly dangerous for America. The JCPOA, negotiated by the Obama administration, helped to take the excuse for war off the table, easing tensions between the U.S. and Iran. But President Trump withdrew...

Scott talks to Grant Smith about the role of evangelical Christians in the Zionist movement in America. Grant examines the premise that evangelicals are the most significant driving force behind American support for Israel, a popular notion ever since George Bush Sr. blamed his loss to Bill Clinton on his failure to appease evangelical voters on the issue of Israel. But Smith argues that their influence is overblown. He says that the power wielded by actual lobbying groups like AIPAC are still...

Scott interviews Tana Ganeva about her recent article detailing the death of a woman due to medical neglect in one of America’s worst private jails. Holly Barlow-Austin, an HIV patient, was detained for violating probation starting in April, and within a few short months of brutal neglect, had died. Ganeva hopes to bring attention to this story and others like it through her reporting on private prisons and corrupt police departments. Discussed on the show: “In April, She Was Jailed on a...

Nassar Arrabyee discusses the war in Yemen, where the Trump administration is now approaching four years of continued support for Saudi Arabia in their war of genocide against the Yemeni population. The UN estimates that close to a quarter of a million civilians have died there since Obama helped start this war, and Arrabyee says that with all the excess deaths from malnutrition and deprivation, there is good reason to believe that that number is much higher. Scott reminds us that the war in...

Joe Lauria comments on the last few days of Julian Assange’s extradition hearing. He notes a movement on the part of the prosecution away from their previous tack, which was to argue that Assange was not really a journalist, but actually engaging in hacking and intelligence himself. By establishing that, they may have been able to avoid the obvious problem that the prosecution of Assange could create a precedent for the prosecution of any news organization that published classified documents....

Ted Snider comes back for an update on the recent round of “peace deals” conducted by President Trump over the last few weeks. Now Bahrain has joined the normalization agreement between the U.S., Israel and the UAE, a move that Trump and his allies are hailing as unprecedented, but which Snider believes is a great deal of fanfare with very little substance. For one thing, he reminds us that these countries can’t declare peace, since they were not at war; they’ve already been at peace for...

Kevin Gosztola is back for an update on Julian Assange’s extradition hearing. He describes the great line-up of witnesses being summoned by Assange’s defense team and how easily, for the most part, they’ve been able to dismantle the arguments from the prosecution. It’s unclear, however, how effective any kind of reasoned argument about the facts will be, given that we know this whole hearing has been conducted on political grounds from the beginning. The case the U.S. government wants to bring...

Scott and Gareth Porter continue their ongoing conversation about President Trump’s foreign policy so far. Porter focuses first on Iran, which has become the ultimate excuse for just about every foreign policy decision over the last decade. In reality, of course, Iran is basically irrelevant to the security of the United States, and isn’t, says Porter, even much of a threat to America’s allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. But in the perception of the neocon establishment, Iran is the greatest...

Arthur Bloom talks about a recent piece from The American Conservative, which exposes the case of a prolific and well-known anti-Iran opinion columnist who turned out not to be a real person. “Amir Basiri,” who wrote dozens of pieces for mostly right-leaning publications advocating for war with Iran, turns out to have been nothing more than a pseudonymous figurehead for the Mujahideen-eKhalq (MEK), an Iranian dissident exile group. The MEK has been described as a communist terrorism cult, but...

Journalist Ford Fischer discusses his coverage of the various armed factions taking to the streets in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, and amid broader calls for police reform. The mainstream media typically paints a black-and-white narrative: on one side are left-leaning, antiracist, mostly peaceful protestors, and on the other are right-leaning, racist, armed militia groups whose presence only makes things more dangerous. But Fischer has made the rather surprising discovery that...