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...

Scott interviews Josiah Lippincott about the conventional narrative surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The common argument, says Lippincott, is that the U.S. had no real choice but to drop the bombs, since the alternative would have been a ground invasion that ultimately would have cost many more lives. In reality, he explains, the Japanese had been willing to negotiate for months, but the American government, insisting on an unconditional surrender,...

Aaron Maté revisits the many lies on which the ‘Russiagate’ probe into Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency was founded. Maté calls the whole story what it is: a conspiracy theory. The only way someone could find all the far-fetched and flimsy pieces of evidence credible is if they were already convinced beforehand and had to make every new development fit their narrative. In particular, Maté focuses on the way figures like Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos, though initially the entire...

Trita Parsi discusses President Trump’s recent announcement of a troop withdrawal from Iraq. Parsi is hesitant to fully endorse this move, explaining that while troop reductions are obviously good, such individual tactical moves, in order to be truly effective, must be part of a larger strategy of peace. Trump, instead, has repeatedly escalated tensions in other regions, even as he withdraws troops elsewhere, with the result that his foreign policy often results in, at best, a net wash for...

Scott talks to Paul Robinson about yet another round of claims that President Trump colluded with Russia to disingenuously win the 2016 election. This time, what’s at issue is a trove of emails from Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort from his time working as a consultant in Ukraine. Manafort’s ties to Ukraine have long been labeled suspect by the Democrats and the corporate media because they supposedly connect him, by extension, to the Russian government. But Robinson explains that while...

Scott interviews Danny Sjursen about his new book, which chronicles his own story of disillusionment with America’s endless wars, in addition to outlining what he believes should be the new attitude of true American patriotism. He calls this type of patriotism “patriotic dissent,” explaining that when one’s country has become an empire of military adventurism founded on lies, the truly patriotic thing to do is to oppose these trends. Part of the way he does so is by offering historical...